Politics and Friendship: A discussion with Jacques Derrida (i...

Second question, or line of questioning, equally straightforward: 'Why friendship?'  The book is called Politics of Friendship, and it might seem strange to approach political arguments through the apparently marginal concept of friendship rather than through more obvious concepts such as sovereignty, power, legitimacy, representation, and so on.  In other words, what has friendship got to do with politics, and what has politics got to do with friendship?

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concept of hospitality

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as soon as you read the canonical texts in political theory starting with Plato or Aristotle you discover that friendship plays an organising role in the definition of justice, of democracy even.

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Aristotle, who says that there are three types of friendship.

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Firstly, the higher friendship is based on virtue and it has nothing to do with politics.  It is a friendship between two virtuous men.  Secondly, the friendship grounded on utility and usefulness, and this is political friendship.  Third, and on the lower level, friendship grounded on pleasure - looking for pleasure among young people, Aristotle says. 

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there are a number of problems in which you see love - not love, but philia or friendship playing an organising role in the definition of the political experience.

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first of all the model of this friendship is a friendship between two young men, mortals, who have a contract according to which one will survive the other, one will be the heir of the other, and they will agree politically

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Then the figure of the brother, of fraternity, is also at the centre of this canonical model.

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Brotherhood, fraternity, is the figure of this canonical friendship.

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It comes from Greece, but it also comes from the Christian model in which brotherhood or fraternity is essential.  Men are all brothers because they are sons of God, and you can find the ethics of this concept in even an apparently secular concept of friendship and politics.  In the French Revolution this is the foundation of the Declaration of the Rights of Man.

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you have to deal here with what I would call a phallocentric or phallogocentric concept of friendship.  Which doesn't of course mean to me that the hegemony of this concept was so powerful that what it excluded was effectively totally excluded.  It doesn't mean that a woman couldn't have the experience of friendship with a man or with another woman.  It means simply that within this culture, this society, by which this prevalent canon was considered legitimate, accredited, then there was no voice, no discourse, no possibility of acknowledging these excluded possibilities.

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all the concepts which are fundamental in politics - I just mentioned those which Geoff selected: sovereignty, power, representation - were directly or indirectly marked by this canonical concept. 

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the idea of democracy, the way it was defined in the beginning, had to agree with the presuppositions of this concept, with the privilege granted to man, to brotherhood.  What does brotherhood mean?  It means of course the family, the familial schema, filiation, it means brother instead of sister and there are a number of texts in which sister is simply a case of brother, no different, and it makes no difference. 

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Democracy means, minimally, equality - and here you see why friendship is an important key, because in friendship, even in classical friendship, what is involved is reciprocity, equality, symmetry, and so on and so forth.  There is no democracy except as equality among everyone

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an equality which can be calculated, countable: you count the number of units, of voters, of voices, of citizens.

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On the other hand, you have to reconcile this demand for equality with the demand for singularity, with respect for the Other as singular, and that is an aporia.  How can we, at the same time, take into account the equality of everyone, justice and equity, and nevertheless take into account and respect the heterogeneous singularity of everyone?

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why are we interested in questioning, deconstructing if you want, the canonical concept of friendship?  It is in the name of democracy.  I think that there is inequality and repression in the traditional concept of friendship such as we inherit it.  It is in the name of more democracy that I think we have to unlock, to open, to displace this prevalent concept, and this is not my initiative, not the initiative of someone operating in a deconstructive manner; it is what is happening today. Today this model of brotherhood, man, friendship is being deconstructed in the world. What I say about the nation-state is what is happening today in the world.  This so-called deconstruction is simply what is happening in a more or less visible way, in an unequal way with what is called the 'inequality of development'; because today if you're interested in this you can see how powerful the concept of fraternity still is: in the rhetoric of politicians, fraternity comes back again and again, and sometimes it is very respectable, but if you look for the implications of this concept of fraternity you may have questions.

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We have today, for many reasons that we all know, to think of a democratic relationship not only with other citizens but also with non-citizens.  That's a modern experience; you know that between the wars, after the first World War, already there were in Europe - Hannah Arendt paid special attention to this - huge crowds of people not even in exile, not even deported but displaced persons who were not considered citizens, and, according to Hannah Arendt, that is one of the origins of what happened in the second World War. This non-citizenship of people we have to care for, to welcome, urges us, compels us, to think of a democratic relationship beyond the borders of the nation-state. 

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