David Wills

English Department and Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures
University at Albany, State University of New York
DWills@uamail.albany.edu

 

. . . and after the telephone call, I will turn my back on you to sleep, as usual, and you will curl up against me, giving me your hand, you will envelop me.

 

Jacques Derrida, The Post Card

 

The first version of this essay was written for a conference on Derrida’s Politics of Friendship sponsored by SUNY-Stony Brook in New York in November 2002. As fate would have it, that was the last occasion I saw Jacques Derrida before he fell ill, watching him back away down 6th Avenue, slightly bowing as he stretched out his arm to wave in his very personal and personable manner, as if he never wanted to be the first to turn and walk away. I could not have known then what sort of definitive “back” he would have turned towards us by the time my words found their way into print, even though the fact of mortality is readable in everything he wrote, and especially in Politics of Friendship. What I did know, and what enlivens the memory of him in the wake of his death, was the experience of a friendship in practice, upright and supportive from start to finish. This is dedicated to that memory.

 

What sense could one give to the idea of a friendship against nature? We can imagine friendships that might be deemed unworthy of the name because something in them betrays the very positivity we ascribe to amity: the friendship of rogues, an unholy alliance, or a friendship of convenience. We could also imagine a friendship that demeans for one reason or another, or a friendship that is excessive according to this or that norm or expectation, and so is considered reprehensible. We could even imagine what some might consider an unhealthy relation between human and animal (he spends all his time with his dog), or human and machine (she spends all her time with her car), and although in the latter case we might be getting closer to what I am trying to have us imagine, it would still be a matter of the various moral rights of inspection by which what is supposed proper to friendship is controlled and determined. What I am asking us to imagine is instead a friendship that would be unnatural in its very conception, a concept of friendship that did not suppose it to issue from a beating heart, or some seat of emotion. In short a friendship artificially conceived or produced, what we might call a prosthetic friendship.

 

Supposedly no such thing exists. Its possibility is certainly not entertained by the various philosophical discourses on friendship that are the objects of Derrida’s analysis in Politics of Friendship. Friendship, it seems, is systematically an affair of the natural and of the living. An unnatural friendship could only be conceived of as an immoral friendship, an uneconomical or wasteful one, but which in no way impugns the vital originary force of its pathos, its pneumaticity. However, as soon as friendship becomes a matter of politics, something it appears always already to be in its philosophical conception and therefore something that the conceit and title, not to mention the analyses, of Derrida’s book point to, then everything is otherwise. Indeed, it could be argued that it is precisely an unnatural friendship that Derrida promotes once he evokes “a deconstruction of the genealogical schema . . . . to think and live a politics, a friendship, a justice which begin by breaking with their naturalness or their homogeneity, with their alleged place of origin” (Politics 105).¹ The deconstruction and originary rupture he has in mind in that context have to do with the thinking and implementation of another politics or democracy, and not with my idea of deconstituting a concept of friendship that is limited to the living, but clearly a friendship that is also a politics has in some way been impersonalized if not depersonalized. It has gone public or become something like a business relationship in a way that exceeds or acts in competition with what we naïvely understand friendship to be. Perhaps, in fact, the very question of friendship is a problematics of the relation between public and private space, that whereas amorous and familial relations are conceived of as private, and economic and political as public, friendship functions across the border separating private from public. What I am suggesting in any case is that a friendship that is always already “corrupted” by, say, a politics that is presumed to function outside of it, also raises the question of its supposed originary naturality. If friendship partakes of politics, would not the naturality that founds it also be seen to enter into a relation with some form of unnaturality?

 

Let me add another set of questions. What would such an unnatural friendship look like? What does any friendship look like? What is its phenomenological representativity, or appresentativity? How do we know that such a thing exists, and what would the sense of it be, outside of its performance: outside of a frequentation (seeing two people, say, corresponding or keeping company), or outside of an exchange (of embraces, of gestures, of tokens, and so on)? Not that a secret friendship isn’t possible, but we would have to presume its very secrecy to be a function of its performativity. That is to say, the very effects of its secrecy would have to be negotiated in view of the fact that most friends show signs of affection; one could keep a friendship private only by scrupulously avoiding the public, one could keep it secret only by scrupulously declining to show the signs of it, by performing the non-performance of the signs of friendship, which is not the same as not performing the signs of friendship in the way that non-friends do. Furthermore, how would a phenomenology of friendship be distinguished from or opposed to that of something called love or passion? Is there a figure for friendship analogous to, but distinguishable from, what exists in a relation of passion, analogous to but distinguishable from the act of love, lovemaking, the carnal embrace? Or is it rather that friendship acts like a “preliminary” subset of the carnal, with looks, smiles, touching, embraces, and so on, but stopping before it gets to certain types of kiss and all the rest? If the carnal includes all the signs of friendship (and much more), then does friendship–at least to look at, the way we see it–have any specificity other than that of a domesticated or controlled carnality?

 

If Politics of Friendship inscribes an originary heterogeneity in friendship in order to argue for a different genealogizing of it, and so of politics; if, in terms of its argument, friendship needs to be otherwise politicized, and politics otherwise structured in terms of amity, then Derrida’s book similarly raises questions concerning the rigorous purity of the distinction between friendship and love or friendship and the madness of passion. While raising those questions, Derrida to a great extent respects the tradition of the distinction; to do otherwise, he writes, would involve an impossible analytical project (“it would take another book” [221]). But his whole analysis comes and goes between the two, via an extraordinarily complex configuration, as I hope to show. One is left, in a sense, twisting and turning between love and friendship, as between philía and eros, and it is difficult to know, in the final analysis, what it all adds up to beyond the turning itself, beyond the torsion of a tropic catastrophe through which one continues to hear the disembodied voices of Diogenes, Laertius, Aristotle, Cicero, Montaigne, Nietzsche, Blanchot, and others, repeating something while no longer knowing where they first heard it.

 

So if I were to go quickly towards the vantage point I want to work from, I would contend that friendship presumes the figure of an inter-view, a reciprocal perception, a face to face symmetry whose inimical converse would be the back to back that initiates a duel; and that within the same figural terms, a repoliticized friendship, perhaps distinguishable from love but only problematically so, would look like a dissymmetrical something, back to front, dorsal rather than frontal. And yet it would only be from the perspective of such a dorsality that a politics of and for the technological age as we experience it could begin to develop.² Such a politics, a posthumanist politics as it were, would seem, after all, to be the very wager of Politics of Friendship.

 

It is thus a certain figurality–a word I will distinguish from “positionality”–of love and friendship, sex and politics, that I want to entertain in what follows. Roland Barthes described his fragments of a lover’s discourse as choreographic figures, “to be understood, not in [their] rhetorical sense, but rather in [their] gymnastic or choreographic acceptation . . . . the body’s gesture caught in action” (1-2). I will argue that, short of a thesis, there is a type of choreography to be drawn out of the relations between politics and friendship in Derrida’s discussion, a series of turns that articulate a complicated figural or figurative set of gestures. It is as if, in looking at friendship as it articulates with politics, we see certain corporeal gestures or movements; as if there were complicated turns of amicable discourse deriving as much from friendship’s relation to the political as from its relation to the carnal, turns that imply and implicate, therefore, both a rhetoric and an erotics. What follows will play across the love/friendship distinction in pointing towards a figure, or set of figures common to both and yet without being in any way inimical to the lines of argument that are developed and the distinctions that are drawn in Politics of Friendship. This will involve a torsion of those arguments, a turning or détournement, something of a diverting of them, yet still within the context of a re-con-figuration, a particular rearrangement and perspectival shift.

 

Turning is explicit from the beginning of Politics of Friendship; one of its major chapters is entitled “Recoils,”³ and by the end, with Blanchot’s formulation of a friendship of abandon(ment) through death (301-2), the choreographic sense of it has been developed far enough to suggest that friendship involves turning one’s back. Thus if there is to be a figure for distinguishing friend from enemy, beyond or this side of Schmitt’s reliance for that on the constant possibility of war (cf. Politics 130), it will be the gesture of turning one’s back, a politics of friendship as dorsality. It would be a choreographic instance that looks neither like a breaking-off of negotiations–walking away from talking, the end of diplomacy that for Schmitt doesn’t exist since it gets continued by means of war–nor like turning the other cheek, which can occur only after friendship has foundered on an initial act of violence. And if I am still insisting on a visual version or phenomenality of that gesture, it would be because it takes place only once friendship has broken out of the circuit of the sentimental, out of the self-enclosure of its privacy, become political and–this is my insistence–become technological. Such a turning of the back would be the figure for a particular fiduciary relation in the world, the trust that it implies, its presumption of non-enmity, something functioning beyond an economics of appropriation, within the aneconomics and analogic of the “perhaps” that is the opening to a hospitality of radical otherness promoted by Derrida throughout his discussion.

 

In order to configure the question of friendship as a hypothesis about turning one’s back, about “facing” back to front, where “hypothesis” is itself understood in the similarly choreographic sense of a turning towards a positionality, we will need to work through the complicated rhetorico-philosophico-political formulations, and compounding abyssal enfoldings and reversals of Politics of Friendship. For, as Derrida makes explicit in the first of the many parenthetical insertions within his text that will ultimately become the focus of my reading, in “striving to speak . . . in the logic of [Aristotle] . . . doing everything that seems possible to respect the conceptual veins of his argumentation,” one finds oneself changing the tone and embarking upon “some slow, discreet or secret drift” that is undecidably “conceptual, logical or properly philosophical” rather than “psychological, rhetorical or poetic” (13).

 

A first set of rhetorico-conceptual junctures in Politics of Friendship may be identified simply as turns, beginning with the pivotal role given to that epigraph of doubtful origin–“O my friends, there is no friend”–and with the epigraph itself. The reader is led through versions the motto borrows in context after context and from the pen of writer after writer. As Derrida emphasizes, this maxim by means of which friendship is analyzed is a trope (a rhetorical “detour”) that is itself a turning. “O my friends” constitutes an example of the figure called “apostrophe,” that singular form of address that involves, as explained in the preface to The Post Card, “a live interpellation (the man of discourse or writing interrupts the continuous development of the sequence, abruptly turns toward someone, that is, something, addresses himself to you)” (4); or, as repeated here: “this impulse by means of which I turn towards the singularity of the other, towards you, the irreplaceable one” (5, emphases added).⁴

 

However, “O my friends, there is no friend” in turn turns within itself. It has the form of a chiasmus, whose two parts intersect by means of a reverse impulse. The end of the saying comes around and back to meet its middle, creating an imperfect symmetry, such that it could be rewritten “O my friends, friend there is none.” But this chiasmic structure, that of a folding back, gets compounded once Derrida draws attention to the alternative version of the expression, where the initial omega of the Greek “original” is accented to shift from the simple vocative interjection of an address to “my friends,” to a dative. “O my friends” thus becomes something like “he for whom there are (many) friends,” and the full sentence shifts to mean “he who has (many) friends can have no true friend.” Derrida nicknames the latter version the repli (209), translated as “recoil,” which is one of its senses, but which loses the nuance that matters to me here, that of a folding back or turning in upon itself. “Recoil” does, however, suggest the somewhat vertiginous series of twists (Derrida will later call it a “zigzag” [221]) along which the motto is deployed throughout the 200-odd pages of analysis.

 

To summarize: a trope (rhetorical turn) that is an apostrophe (turn to a single addressee) borrows the form of a chiasmus (a syntagm that turns back on itself) whose exact version (L. vertere, “to turn“) is uncertain, potentially diverting or turning its sense, or at least creating a further turn or chiasmus (Derrida’s word, 213) between its two forms. But what is all the more telling about the attention given to the alternate rendition and reading of the “O my friends” maxim is, it seems to me, the reflective and almost cautious manner in which Derrida introduces it, the explicit reference he makes to the rhetorical ploy or gesture that he is thereby advancing. I am referring simply, for the moment, to the fact of that reflection and caution–I will later return to examine their substance–and to the gestures of rhetorical, exegetical, and scriptural intervention that they represent as yet another turn in the abyssal layerings that striate through the book. I mean that above and beyond his “discovering” another version of the maxim, or his reading of that version, Derrida pays particular metadiscursive attention to the means by which his reading is being deployed. More on that shortly.

 

A second set of gestures in or movements of Derrida’s text may be characterized as reversals. However difficult it may be to conceive of a pure linear movement, we nevertheless understand a turn to be by definition disjunctive, a shift away from the straightforward, and the chiasmus of “O my friends, there is no friend” reinforces that. Derrida begins chapter one of Politics of Friendship by emphasizing the contretemps of the “two disjoined members of the same unique sentence” (1). Such a contretemps works against any reciprocality that the figure of the chiasmus seems to imply. In spite of producing a type of symmetry, necessarily imperfect except in the case of a palindrome, and in any case given the two opposing directional movements, the chiasmus involves a disjunctive force that allows, potentially at least, for substitution and reversal. The folded back second half of the syntagm sets itself up in competition with the first half, overlaying what precedes and effectively having the last word. Indeed, substitute and reverse is precisely what the maxim does, the “no friend” of the second part substituting for and reversing the “my friends” of the beginning.

 

More such reversals are to come. Aristotle, we read, breaks with the reciprocality of friendship, its two-way traffic (“the reciprocalist or mutualist schema of requited friendship” [10]) to argue for a preference of loving over being loved (or liked). Since one can be loved without knowing it, and since in general terms it is better to be the active party, preference is given to the one doing the loving, and this makes for what Derrida calls “the necessary unilaterality of a dissymmetrical phileîn” (23-24). Now while that perhaps says more about Aristotle’s conceptions of activity and passivity than about friendship (“Being-loved certainly speaks to something of philía, but . . . . It says nothing of friendship itself” [8]), it nevertheless describes a friendship, “friendship itself,” true friendship, that would have to contend with two equally perplexing alternatives: the seeming impossibility of two active parties without any object for that activity, two parties loving each other without being loved one by the other; or a friendship that remains one-sided or lopsided, where only the active party is defined as a friend. Indeed, still following Aristotle, a true friendship would be one that was lopsided to the extent of preferring love for the dead or departed. The activity of friendship that makes true friendship, dependent as it is on the breath of a living, active soul, is, at the outside (an outside that becomes its innermost possibility), dependent upon death and mourning: “Friendship for the deceased thus carries this philía to the limit of its possibility. But at the same time, it uncovers the ultimate motive of this possibility. . . . I could not love friendship without engaging myself, without feeling myself in advance engaged to love the other beyond death. Therefore, beyond life” (12). It therefore looks as though the Aristotelian logic has reversed the supposed reciprocality of friendship to make it unilateral or unidirectional, and substituted a dead object for its living one.

 

Nietzsche, in typical fashion, gives his own series of twists to the question. The first is that of volume one of Human All Too Human, where, as a riposte to the dying sage’s “Friends, there are no friends!” the living fool retorts “Foes, there are no foes!” (148-49, 274). For Derrida, the reversal constituted by this inversion or conversion, a simple substitution of the foe for the friend, “would perhaps leave things unaltered” (175). Another version, that of the “good friendship” described in the Assorted Opinions and Maxims, involves instead a more complicated “rupture in reciprocity or equality, as well as the interruption of all fusion or confusion between you and me” (62). But when Nietzsche writes in honor of friendship in The Gay Science, it is by means of a fable of a Macedonian king and an Athenian philosopher and is articulated through the logic of the gift, with all the disproportion or impossibility of any equilibrium of giving and receiving that that implies (72). Derrida refers to such a rupture as “a new twist, at once both gentle and violent,” one that “calls friendship back to non-reciprocity, to dissymmetry or to disproportion” (63) and whose stakes are high, for it leads him directly into the heart of the aporetic “madness” of the chance of friendship, as of decision, justice and democracy.

 

Once again, as it were beyond the reversals uncovered in the maxim, or in Aristotle or Nietzsche, Derrida enacts something of a reversal of his own with respect to the disjunctions or dissymmetries at work in the elaborations of friendship he is analyzing. And this takes place precisely with respect to the distinction between friendship and love, along the faultline separating philía from eros (to the extent that one can presume that to be the distinction between friendship and love, to the extent that love can be conceived of as non-erotic) in any case, in the trembling of those differences. As we have just seen, he underlines what, in certain cases at least, appears undeniably as the disjunctivity and dissymmetricality of friendship. But then, in the context of his analysis of the other possible version of Aristotle’s or Diogenes’s maxim, he calls upon that very disproportionality to distinguish love from friendship:

 

The request or offer, the promise or the prayer of an 'I love you', must remain unilateral and dissymmetrical. Whether or not the other answers, in one way or another, no mutuality, no harmony, no agreement can or must reduce the infinite disproportion. . . . Here, perhaps, only here, could a principle of difference be found--indeed an incompatibility between love and friendship . . . supposing such a difference could ever manifest itself in its rigorous purity. . . . Simply put, friendship would suppose . . . the phenomenon of an appeased symmetry, equality, reciprocity between two infinite disproportions as well as between two absolute singularities; love, on the other hand, would raise or rend the veil of this phenomenon . . . to uncover the disproportion and dissymmetry as such. . . . when one names the friend or enemy, a reciprocity is supposed, even if it does not efface the infinite distance and dissymmetry. As soon as one speaks of love, the situation is no longer the same. (220-21, translation modified; Politiques 248-49)

 

The logic here is complicated, and sets up a reverberating reversal between two sides of an opposition that functions as if in permanent imbalance, like some spinning machine that causes the whole apparatus to wobble. Love is unilateral whereas friendship is less radically dissymmetrical. Friendship presents a reciprocity where two infinite disproportions have made peace (une réciprocité apaisée), whereas, for its part, love rends the very veil of dissymmetry. But this difference, or indeed incompatibility between love and friendship, is itself “appeased” inasmuch as the rigorous purity of the difference between the two cannot be presumed. It is as if between love and friendship there were either a relation of love (disproportion or incompatibility) or of friendship (appeased reciprocity), and so on into the abyss, for each of the terms subdivides within itself ad infinitum.

 

But Derrida’s reversal here is radical in another way. If love is to be distinguished from friendship, he maintains that it will be in terms of the question of reciprocity. As a result, “I love you” is spoken into a type of void, performed as a promise or prayer to which one cannot expect an answer. We might therefore imagine it turned around to the extent of being uttered from behind, so that even were one to proffer a response, even a symmetrical “I love you (too),” it would also be spoken into a type of emptiness in front of one. Derrida seems to suggest that it is only by means of the disproportionality of love that friendship can be taken out of a Schmittian schema of amity and enmity and liberated from that version of the political; only by that means can one gesture toward a different politics, one of promise. But, if my analysis of his logic is correct, this will mean preserving and at the same time breaking down the distinction between friendship and love, dragging friendship, as it were kicking and screaming, across an abyssal incompatibility that is perhaps not rigorously pure, and into the dissymetricality of love. I doubt one could successfully choreograph such a rhetorical pirouette without having it teeter like an imbalanced spinning top, and fall. But any attempt to do so, and any movement toward a new politics informed by either love or friendship or both, would necessarily involve, like a fleeting glimpse or a languid caress, a relation of front to back. There at least one could begin to see friendship and wait for love in terms of a dissymmetry that did not for all that fall into an impossible contortion.

 

A twist or turn, even a torsion, without for all that being an impossible contortion. That would be the risk and wager of a politics of friendship that reckons with the dorsal. So it is also with the practice of deconstruction. We will have spent our professional lives trying to account for the difficult protocols of intervention within textual form and substance undertaken by such a reading practice, trying to determine what particular twists Derrida gives to the texts he is examining, how and to what extent he either identifies or “causes” the effects of stress on the basis of which the text says, is heard, let, or made to say more than it wants to. Since the exorbitance of the methodological question raised with respect to the analysis of Rousseau in Of Grammatology we have had those questions before us. This essay has, up to this point, operated on the basis of certain presumptive answers to those questions, purporting to distinguish between turns or reversals that can be identified as relying on the rhetorical gestures of here an Aristotle, there a Nietzsche, there a Derrida.

 

However, there appears to be a surplus of methodologically reflective moments in Politics of Friendship, and a multiplication of forms borrowed by such moments in the text. Most obvious, even if only typographically–no small thing, however–are the multiple parentheses, emblematic of a variety of interruptions, glosses and diversions, interventions that can only be described, in the context of this discussion, and of the book, as “apostrophic.” I am referring here only to those parentheses that are set apart in the text as separate paragraphs, there where the normal flow of the text is interrupted by a smaller or larger section that appears within parentheses. There are also any number of parentheses doing what one might suppose to be normal duty within the text, adding short clarifications with minimal disruption to the reader. At one point, following a slew of those putatively minor or everyday parenthetical insertions, Derrida writes, “And let’s not talk about the parentheses, their violence as much as their untranslatability” (221, translation modified). Given that reference to violence and untranslatability, and since, in the final analysis, the everyday parentheses differ only in size and not in kind from the larger inserted paragraphs or sets of paragraphs, we would have to remark the structural violence of any parenthetical insertion as a preface to what I am about to develop.

 

The larger, “apostrophic” parentheses begin in the Foreword with a polylogue of four discursive units (x), and continue throughout the text, ranging in length from a single line (70) to twelve pages (in the French) (Politiques 178-88) or more (I’ll come back to that “or more” in a moment). I counted twenty-six of them. Two of them use (square) brackets rather than (round) parentheses, and one of those says as much, although it imputes them, syntactically at least, to Montaigne, something that gets lost in translation.⁵ Their content varies enormously and it is difficult to determine the precise logic that justifies them. Sometimes they constitute digressions that are perhaps too long for a footnote, but that has never been an objection for Derrida in the past. Sometimes they are reminders of previous points in the discussion, sometimes openings to other questions. Some of them, uncannily, deal with the question of the female friend or the sister to whose exclusion or marginalization from philosophical discussions of friendship the book explicitly wants to draw attention.

 

Still others, and these are the ones that interest me most, fall into the category of “questions of method” à la Grammatology. Thus there is the reference to the “respect” for Aristotle that nevertheless involves “some slow, discreet or secret drift” (13) that I quoted earlier. In the following chapter there appears a similar admission of a complicated logic of fidelity to Nietzsche: “(Of course, we must quickly inform the reader that we will not follow Nietzsche here. Not in any simple manner. We will not follow him in order to follow him come what may” (33). At a particularly apostrophic moment in Chapter 3, Derrida declares “that is all I wanted to tell you, my friend the reader” (70). And, much later, he inserts a perhaps unnecessary reminder that “we have not privileged the great discourses on friendship so as to submit to their authority . . . but, on the contrary, as it were, to question the process and the logic of a canonization . . . . paying attention to what they say and what they do. This is what we wish to do and say” (229, emphasis added). Such meta-discursive glosses, however, do not always appear within parentheses, that is to say as interventions circumscribed by a pair of conventional, round diacritical marks. Indeed, not only is there extensive explanation of the methodological protocols in play throughout the analysis of the repli version of “O my friends,” but one needs to ask whether, following Derrida, one could ever hope to distinguish rigorously between the constative and performative elements of any commentary–indeed any text–distinguishing what it says in general, and what it says about what it is doing in particular, from what it does. As we just read, Derrida does or says both (what he says and what he does) in the same breath.

 

Or in a slightly different breath. The matter of the two versions of the “O my friends” maxim turns precisely on the question of breathing, of aspiration, and of the diacritical textual intervention–a subscript iota–that would mark the same in the Greek: “it all comes down to less than a letter, to the difference of breathing” (209). On the basis of the way a single omega is written, with or without the subscript iota denoting an aspirate, a whole philosophical tradition can be reassessed, including, one has to presume, its distinction between constativity and performativity. On the basis of what Derrida earlier calls “a philological sidetracking” (177)–in French un mauvais aiguillage philologique (Politiques 201), bad directions, bad shunting, bad philological flight control, an inattentive switch from one track or corridor to another–there is potential accident and catastrophe. But we have to understand that almost imperceptible difference as also a formidable chance, the chance of a whole other text, a whole other reading, and a whole other tradition for the questions, for friendship and politics. By the time Politics of Friendship gets to it, therefore, it is difficult to tell who is taking credit for it, and that can perhaps no longer be the question:

 

The time has perhaps come to decide the issue [trancher]. . . . a tiny philological coup de théâtre cannot prevail in the venerable tradition which, from Montaigne to Nietzsche and beyond, from Kant to Blanchot and beyond, will have bestowed so many guarantees on the bias of a copyist or a rushed reader by, without knowing it, staking a bet on a tempting, so very tempting, reading, but an erroneous one, and probably a mistaken one. Luckily for us, no orthographic restoration or archival orthodoxy will ever damage this other, henceforth sedimented archive, this treasure trove of enticed and enticing texts which will always give us more food for thought than the guard-rails to whose policing one would wish to submit them. No philological fundamentalism will ever efface the incredible fortune of a brilliant invention. For there is here, without doubt, a staggering artifact, the casualness of an exegetical move as hazardous as it is generous--indeed, abyssal--in its very generativity. Of how many great texts would we have been deprived had someone (but who, in fact?) not one day taken, and perhaps, like a great card player, deliberately feigned to take, one omega for another? Not even one accent for another, barely one letter for another, only a soft spirit [esprit, breath, aspirate] for a hard one--and the omission of the subscript iota. (207-208; Politiques 234)

 

If I have quoted this paragraph almost in its entirety, it is because, if space permitted, I would dearly love, passionately, in and beyond friendship, to compare it with those famous pages on Rousseau from Of Grammatology (157-60), to see how far deconstructive reading practice had or had not evolved over the preceding thirty years of its history, and to assess the current rapport de forces between “philological fundamentalism” and “invention.” But that will have to keep. Suffice to emphasize here that the glosses that punctuate or apostrophize the analysis of the version de repli–“where are we heading?” (214), “does one have the right to read like this?” (216), “it is . . . [the temptation] of the book you are reading” (218), “our objective was not to start down this path” (220)–have to be considered to be as much a part of the analysis as the rest. Perhaps they are the very constative part of it, to the extent that they deal with the question of analysis as analysis, and perhaps an analysis that does not deal with its own status, that simply presumes to be able to (con)state, reduces to a pure performative. In any case, those glosses, along with the abyssal twists, torsions and openings, that go all the way from an almost inaudible “_i” to lengthy parenthetical excursus, inhabit finally the same structural space of possibility, the same rhetorico-political space as the “risk,” chance or wager of the “perhaps” and more properly philosophical questions–event, aimance–around which Derrida’s text turns. All such questions derive from minute but uncontrollable textual ruptures, intersecting apostrophically with the secrets or silences of philological chance or accident, with the brilliant inventions of an insignificant stroke of the pen, the slight torsion or curvature of a line that produces or introduces the beginning of a parenthesis of untold promise.

 

The “perhaps,” for example, emerges from Nietzsche’s Human All Too Human and is first developed in the second chapter, whose title (“Loving in Friendship: Perhaps–the Noun and the Adverb” [26]) suggests that it again opens a faultline between love and friendship. It is presented from the beginning as something to which we must be particularly sensorially attentive: “Let us prick up our ears [Tendons l’oreille] . . . towards this perhaps, even if it prevents us from hearing the rest” (28; Politiques 45). The “perhaps” is then described as an “unheard-of [inouïe], totally new experience” (29; Politiques 46), where the adjective inouïe refers, in its literal sense, even more directly than does the English “unheard-of” to the impossibility of being perceived by the organ of hearing. Finally its operation is said to depend on its “hold[ing] its breath” in order to “allow what is to come to appear or come” (29), making the perhaps perhaps comparable to a quasi-inaudible aspirate. At the least we could say that it relates to what is on the edge or outside of earshot and of vision (“prick up our ears . . . allow what is to come to appear”). Now if we were to try to figure or configure that according to our choreographic principle, we would have to imagine its occurring by means of a friendship or love relation that was other than the simple face to face, yet not so fractured as not to constitute a relation. It would be a function of friendship or love that operated in or across a type of sensorial peripherality, something that could occur once ears and eyes were required to deal with what was taking place outside of their normal frontal hemispheric field, once they had to deal with what comes from behind, required to see, listen to, indeed feel–like uneven breathing on the nape of the neck–what is dorsal.

 

It would be quite a turnabout. For not only does the perhaps interrupt and disjoin “a certain necessity of order,” but “this suspension, the imminence of an interruption, can be called the other, the revolution, or chaos; it is, in any case, the risk of an instability” (29). The perhaps, to say the least, turns things around, and perhaps changes everything. It is said here to occur to Nietzsche “in the upheaval of a reversing catastrophe” (30), and is later referred to as a “catastrophic inversion” and “reversing apostrophe” (50). The word translated as “reversing” in both cases just mentioned is renversante (Politiques 48, 69), suggesting in the first place a radical overturning, but including overtones of disorientation, change in direction, backwards movement (for example, in the expression tête renversée, head bent back as in ecstasy, or écriture renversé, writing that slopes backward). For Derrida also says explicitly that he is talking about “something other than a reversal [renversement]” (31; Politiques 49).

 

Perhaps then, a catastrophe that is also a chance, an apostrophe that overturns without for all that simply reversing. Both “catastrophe” and “apostrophe” should be heard in more than one sense: a climax or cataclysm but also a change in poetic rhythm or stress, an interruption in favor of a single addressee but also an ellipsis. Some minimal thing that changes everything in the context of a philosophical discussion of love and friendship marked by persistent parenthetical attention to its methodological principles, that would seem to be what we are looking for as we read Politics of Friendship. On the basis of that, let me try, if not to draw a conclusion, to draw something in conclusion.

 

As I previously made clear, apostrophe as discursive interruption and readdress is a conceit of “Envois” in The Post Card, playing as that text does across the face-off between a singular private loved one [toi] and just any reader [vous]. But apostrophe as punctuation that represents a textual omission also functions in “Envois” by means of the blank spaces in the text whereby, one might suppose, the most intimate pieces of the correspondence, the most apostrophic apostrophes remain undisclosed, excised, censored. As a result of that, perhaps, there is a parenthesis in “Envois,” about which I have written at length elsewhere, that opens but never closes.⁶ But the possibility of the text’s being irremediably or irredeemably opened already exists as soon as there is apostrophe, or any punctuation whatsoever. Indeed, any mark whatsoever, any barely inaudible breathing effect whatsoever. The principles of iterability, detachability, and substitution which determine that fact are explicitly repeated, in formulations echoing very closely those of “Signature Event Context,” within the analysis of the version de repli discussed above: “every mark has a force of detachment which not only can free it from such and such a determined context, but ensures even its principle of intelligibility and its mark structure–that is, its iterability (repetition and alteration)” (216). And, as develops a couple of pages further along (219), iterability also means undecidability, the motor and fulcrum of Derrida’s ethics and politics.⁷ So this is no ordinary or simple nexus. Everything hinges on it.

 

One reason I have kept on reading Jacques Derrida’s writing since 1980 is in the hope of finding an end to the parenthesis he opens in The Post Card. And I would like to think that the reason he has kept on writing has been because he has been looking for just the right place to bring it to a close. So I was heartened to see the multiplication of parentheses in Politics of Friendship and I searched carefully for an amicable end to the violence of that moment from The Post Card. I searched for a westward-facing arc to match the easterly one of the text from fifteen-odd years before, for the closure of two parenthetical faces, face to face and smiling like an e-mail abbreviation, to resolve the unilateral challenge or ultimatum of that opened parenthesis. Instead, sadly, I am faced with a serious case of recidivism. On page 58 of Politiques de l’amitié, Derrida opens a parenthesis and writes “Let’s leave this question suspended” (Politics 38). He never closes it. The English translation follows the French to the letter, or at least to the absence of a “).” Suddenly the “(” of 1980 is inexorably drawn in to the context of the “(” of 1994. Two massive bodies of text slide into some sort of compromising position. There they are, henceforth, for me at least, side by side, or rather front to back, “( . . . (.”

 

I’m tempted to say that they come to exist in aimance. Aimance, which is somewhat unfortunately translated as “lovence,” is a term Derrida borrows from Abdelkebir Khatibi (7) to deconstruct the opposition between love and friendship, between passive and active, to mean something like “lovingness.” Unable to “take place figurelessly” (69), it is said to “cut across . . . figures” (70), to be “love in friendship, aimance beyond love and friendship following their determined figures, beyond all this book’s trajectories of reading, beyond all ages, cultures and traditions of loving” (69). The gesture of two unclosed parentheses is thus made, in the first place, towards a figure of that sort of lovingness. But it is also, obviously, a figure of catastrophic inversion, a disruption of the symmetry and closure of a love or friendship that is presumed to function only in the face-to-face, and which therefore remains open to the politics of enmity presumed by a Schmitt. For that figure to be fully drawn, there would have to be more specific reference to an erotics of corporality such as I have just been suggesting, a problematization that extended not just to the distinction between friendship and love, but, presuming it is not already implied, to that between philía and eros. In contrast to the face to face, the back to front relation, or embrace, is more difficult to conceive of outside of an erotics; the rhetoric of its figural pose cannot but refer, at least in part–both because of the version of intimacy it represents, and because of its trangressive turn–to a carnal embrace.

 

I would argue that Derrida allows for that in the very metadiscursive parenthesis without parentheses within his analysis of the version de repli where he speaks of the violence and untranslatability of parentheses (221). The parentheses he is referring to might as well be the two I have just brought into proximity across the texts of The Post Card and Politics of Friendship; their proximity might be said to draw a figure of them, of their very violence and untranslatability. For, as I have already pointed out, the same paragraph in which he refers to them comes back to the unilaterality and dissymmetry of the “I love you” that was said to perhaps be the only difference between love and friendship, the interruption of reciprocity that must imply some turning, some détournement of a presumed face to face of the same.

 

That would be the force of an “I love you” spoken from behind. It would involve a catastrophic turning “towards” the other that means turning one’s back, something like the passive decision that Derrida describes at length (68), a patience in no way reducible to passivity, an act of trust that lets the other come in the figure of surprise that one might contrast with the economics of an appropriative pre-emption that, we are reminded only too well these days, is increasingly the single permissible version of political discourse and practice. This love, friendship, and politics of dorsality would also involve the principle of substitutability; it comes to function immediately anything like an “I love you” is proffered, immediately a singularity of address is determined, immediately the supposed general discursivity of the text is interrupted, a parenthesis opened, immediately there is any apostrophic turning whatsoever: “would the apostrophe ever take place, and the pledge it offers, without the possibility of a substitution?” (5). Turning one’s back allows the other to come as other to the other, as other other, as another other.

 

And so this love, friendship, and politics of dorsality is finally what I’ll dare to call a love, friendship, and politics of prosthesis in order to allow for the scandal or chance of a love, friendship, and politics of the inanimate. A prosthetic politics that would perhaps be more productive a concept than a posthumanist politics. From the beginning of Derrida’s book, friendship has had to be understood within the structure of revenance and survivance, of spectrality and inanimation. Derrida refers to a “convertibility of life and death” (3), to the fact that, after Aristotle, “one can still love the deceased or the inanimate,” and that it is through the possibility of such loving–whose directionality I am letting turn here so as not to limit it–that “the decision in favour of a certain aimance comes into being” (10). And again, in the same passage where the incompatibility of love and friendship is described in terms of the dissymmetry I have been insisting on, Derrida writes of the “non-assurance and . . . risk of misunderstanding. . . . in not knowing who, in not knowing the substantial identity of who is, prior to the declaration of love” (220), which I read also as not knowing the substance that distinguishes the identity of a who from that of a what. And finally, at the end, we are asked “to think and to live the gentle rigour of friendship, the law of friendship qua the experience of a certain ahumanity” (294).

 

A prosthetic love and friendship, erotics and politics should be understood as something different from a raising of the stakes of non-identity or de-subjectivation, different from taking things beyond the human, even beyond the animal, to the inanimate. Prosthesis refers for me not to the replacement of the human by the inanimate but to the articulation of one and the other. So such a love and friendship, erotics and politics would, as we saw to begin, break with the naturalness of the supposed homogeneity of those concepts; it would, from the perspective of an always already prosthetic, allow us to begin to think the subject of love and friendship, erotics and politics in its biotechnological becoming, to think the radically inconceivable otherness of the other as coming upon and coming to bear upon, a being let come upon and let come to bear upon the sameness of a presumed reciprocal relation; and it would be the trust required to let that come, behind one’s back, unable to be known, in the confidence of an unrestricted hospitality, in a fiduciary relation reaching toward or arching back upon the possibility of a friendship and a politics at once unheimlich and aneconomic. Such a love and friendship, erotics and politics would encourage us to think detachment, substitution, dissymmetry, disjunction, letting come the interruption of an apostrophic or parenthetic reversing catastrophe, the figure of a double retrait in torsion, ((, a coupling, if that is what it is, whose only ending would be another opening, to another.

 

Notes

 

1. Further references to the English translation will be included in parenthesis in the text, preceded where necessary by the mention “Politics,” and in some cases followed by reference to the French original (Politiques).

 

2. Earlier in the project from which this work is extracted, I analyze the “dorsality” of Lévinas’s ethical relation, and before that Heidegger’s work on technology. The latter appears as “Thinking Back: Towards Technology, via Dorsality.”

 

3. In French, “Replis.” See my discussion below.

 

4. Comparisons can be made between the figure of apostrophe favored by Derrida and the Althusserian “interpellation,” that moment or structure of the constitution of the subject as ideological and political, something I develop in the final chapter of the forthcoming Thinking Back.

 

5.”[Convenance, inconvenance. Digression. Soit dit entre crochets, Montaigne tire la plus audacieuse et la plus incontestable consequence . . .” (Politiques 203, emphasis added). Inelegantly preserving the French syntax, this would transliterate as: “[Suitability, unsuitability. Digression. Said/speaking, as it were, within brackets, Montaigne draws the most audacious and the most uncontestable consequence” Cf. Politics 178: “[A digression here, remaining between square brackets, on suitability, unsuitability. Montaigne draws the most audacious and the most uncontestable consequence.”

 

6. See my Prosthesis 286-318.

 

7. Cf. “Signature Event Context.” For discussion of iterability/undecidability as aesthetics/ethics nexus, see “Lemming,” in my Matchbook: Essays in Deconstruction.

 

Works Cited

 

• Barthes, Roland. A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 1978.
• Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri C. Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1974.
• —. The Politics of Friendship. Trans. George Collins. London: Verso, 1997.
• —. Politiques de l’amitié. Paris: Galilée, 1994.
• —. The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987.
• —. “Signature Event Context.” Margins of Philosophy. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1982. 307-30.
• Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Gay Science. Trans. Josephine Nauckhoff. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001.
• —. Human All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits. Trans. R.J. Hollingdale. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2004.
• Wills, David. Matchbook: Essays in Deconstruction. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2005.
• —. Prosthesis. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1995.
• —. “Thinking Back: Towards Technology, via Dorsality.” Parallax 10.3 (July-September 2004): 36-52.