Nina Lois Turtledove

Politics of Friendship

I have read and pretty much enjoyed Derrida’s work on democracy- Politics of Friendship (1997). His style is not at all straightforward, but his point is good as highlights oppositions and shows possibilities. The fun has been in the analysis.

We should continue to strive to have more friendship in our democratic community… it is a work in progress.

I find interesting the classifications Aristotle describes in friendships, including what struck me as a foundation for the concept of “best friends” (the sacred kind of childhood) and for the other various relationships there are such as the more mundane kind of friendship among people living together in a community. These Aristotelian distinctions have come to life in my experience, and so I thought I’d share the eloquent discussion on the topic.

The following is a synopsis of Aristotle’s commentary in Derrida’s words on friendship and the relationship among the three kinds of friendship. Derrida’s purpose is not to privilege the great discourses on friendship or to submit to their authority, but to question the process and logic of canonization… he wants to analyze forces and procedures that have created hegemonic concepts and marginalized others. He questions Aristotle’s axiomatic and hierarchy creating power. I will leave out his peppering of Greek terms, and embark from the observation that there are three kinds of friendship- friendship of virtue, of pleasure, and usefulness. Friendship of usefulness is political friendship, as in democracy, the goal is to yield as much friendship in the polis as possible.

Political friendship is attentive to equality as well as to the thing (the affair), to the former as much as the latter…(my italics) This is what political friendship ‘looks to’ and what concerns it. As in a market, in commerce between buyers and sellers. Equality and the thing, the equality of things, therefore the third party and the common measure: an account and a fixed wage [gage] are necessary: a salary, a fee. a counter -value. Aristotle quotes Hesoid: “A fixed wage for a friend”, which has sometimes been translated: “Short reckonings make long friends”. When it is grounded on consent, consensus, convention, this friendship is at once political and legal. It is then, a matter of homology or reciprocity, as in the case of a contract, an agreement between two subscribing parties. When, on the other hand, the parties leave the matter to each other’s discretion, in a sort of trust without contract, credit becoming an act of faith, then friendship ‘wants to be’ moral, ethical, and of the order of comradeship. Why is it that in this latter case recriminations and grievances abound? Because this ethical friendship is against nature. Indeed, those who associate themselves in this way wish to have both friendships at once, one in the service of interest (based on usefulness) and one appealing to virtue (the reliability of the other)…Aristotle thus describes a tragedy as much as a comedy, major and minor calculations: this irrepressible desire to overinvest in a friendship or a love, to count on a profit in renouncing profit, to expect a recompense, if only a narcissistic or symbolic one, from the most disinterested virtue or generosity. With the help of a distinction which should not be judged a summary one, Aristotle never gives up analysing the ruses that enable one friendship to be smuggled into another, the law of the useful into that of pleasure, one or the other into virtue’s mask. Those who prefer ‘ethical’ friendship believe it possible to dispense with the legal, nomic form of political friendship; they disregard the contract or mutual agreement, thus opening themselves up to disappointment. Moreover, it is in ‘useful’ friendship, and within it, then, political friendship, that the greatest number of grievances and recriminations are encountered. Friendship based on virtue is, by definition, impeccable. As for friendship based on pleasure, friends part and bonds unravel once the enjoyment has run its course: the friends have had their delight, they have given, received, offered; they have had, and do not request anything more. Of course, all the forms of ‘aporia’ then spring up — aporia is Aristotle’s word [logical impasse]– as to the criteria of the just, and when we must determine what is just from the vantage point of quantity or quality; the vantage point of the enjoyment of what is given or of the rendered service. On this count, how are we to get the person giving and the person receiving to agree? Who gives and who receives? It goes without saying that if political friendship considers the ‘homology’ (the contractual agreement) and the thing, it is less just, its justice is less ‘friendly’ than ethical frienship, which counts on intention, will, and choice. The fundamental conflict lies in the opposition of the beautiful and the useful: the ethical friendship is certainly ‘more beautiful’, but useful friendship is more necessary.

A big theme question in the book was “How many friends?”

When virtue is at stake:

At stake is virtue, which is no longer in nature, this virtue whose name will remain suspended, without an assured concept, as long as these two laws of friendship will not have been thought. For the reliability of the stable that on which the virtue depends — therefore liberty, decision, and reflection — can no longer be only natural. No more so than time, which does not belong to nature when it puts primary friendship to the test. In the history of the concept of nature — and already in its Greek history — the virtue of friendship will have dug the trench of an opposition. For it obliges Aristotle himself to restrain the concept of nature: he must oppose it to its other — here to virtue — when he classes friendship among stable things, in the same way as happiness belongs to self-sufficient and autarkic things. It is the same immanence that provides shelter from external or random causalities… Since friendship does not — and above all must not — have the reliability of a natural thing or a machine; since its stability is not given by nature but is won, like constancy and ‘fidence’, through the endurance of a virtue, primary friendship… There may well be other forms of friendship (for example, says Aristotle, with children, animals, and the wicked), but they never imply virtue, nor equality in virtue. For if all the species of frienship (the three principal ones, according to virute, to usefulness, to pleasure) imply equality or equity, only primary friendship demands an equality of virtue between friends, in what assigns them reciprocally to one another.

“One soul in two bodies twain.” Indivisible. Can be found once in every three hundred years.

The Human Condition | 15.07.2008 13:50 | 1 Comment