Abstract
Our concept of politics – especially democracy – presupposes a principle of friendship, but our principle of friendship comes out of an understanding of the friend. However, from the Greeks to Derrida, such relations have been dominated by a philosophy of presence and/or absence, limiting our very idea of politics and friendship. A radical break with this tradition is only possible through an other way of speaking to, thinking about, acting toward, and being a friend, and the politics thereof. The Aristotelian saying, “O friends, [there is] no friend,” provides a clue – for “being” is not there, not present in the Greek, nor absent therefrom, but just implied. Then the being of the friend, and of politics (and of being), is an implication. So, if we hope to be friends, and to be political, we must think and act and speak by implication: O friends no friend, and O democrats no democracy.
Our concept of politics presupposes a principle of friendship, but our principle of friendship comes out of an understanding of the friend. If we are to reconsider our politics, therefore, we must think about our friends. And if we have a problem with politics, it can only be addressed by how we think about, speak to, act towards, and are a friend.
The Forest by Nataliia Kutykhina.
But the task of raising the question of the meaning of the friend is itself problematic – for it has already been asked and answered. Since the Greeks, a friend is “another Heracles, another self,” and friendship is “one soul dwelling in two bodies”; which is how friendship can serve as the archē of the state, and why the state is the work of friends.Footnote1 And this is, as Derrida recalls, the dominant discourse of the friend (and the politics thereof) from Aristotle through Cicero, Montaigne, Nietzsche, Schmitt, to us: “throughout all the mutations of European history (of which, of course, the most rigorous account must be taken), no concept of the political and of democracy has ever broken with the heritage of this troubling” answer.Footnote2
But if no thinker has made a “radical, thematic break” with the traditional way of thinking about friendship – and with the concept of politics determined thereby – is it not about time to take up the task?Footnote3
If so, we must begin with a return to the Greek understanding of friendship, and to the most radical attempt at a thematic break therewith, namely, the one by Derrida. Here, everything turns on the interpretation of Aristotle’s (supposedly) habitual saying, hō philoi oudeis philos, normally translated as: “he who has friends can have no true friends.”Footnote4 Or, if the text is taken to read, ō philoi oudeis philos, then: “O my friends, there is no friend!”Footnote5
And yet, of course, translating is not enough – for what is at stake is not simply philological; on the contrary, it is philosophical, and political. Indeed, how Aristotle’s text is understood determines the preferred model of friendship and the privileged concept of politics, although this in turn depends upon determining the text to be understood. So, the stakes could not be higher, at least if we want friends, to be friends, not simply in the traditional way, but in one which breaks therefrom. And if we want a politics, and a politics of friendship, that does not simply repeat or reproduce the heritage of this troubling tradition – in spite of all mutations and differences, all permutations and combinations – then we need a “systematic, and deconstructive, explication” thereof.Footnote6
So, on the one hand, if the text is taken to read, hō philoi, then the “modern” translation and the dominant interpretation – which resolves all “aporias” – is perfectly legitimate, authentic, and verifiable: anyone who has many friends has no true friend.Footnote7 Having “eaten salt together,” the friend – tested over time, like reliable oxen or mature wine – is one whom we can trust, one with whom we are one (in some kind of unity or stable harmonic agreement) and to whom we belong (although precisely not in a Platonic participatory way), which is why we enjoy spending time in one another’s presence, and remain friends in each other’s absence (even unto death), and how we can differentiate friend from non-friend, enemy, foe. Here, self-sufficient friendship – as love and mutual choice of equals, and the recognition thereof – is not simply pleasurable or useful, but good and valuable for its own sake.Footnote8 In other words, it is possible to actually be the most excellent of friends – although not with too many, which would be impossible to test in principle or maintain in practice – if we have an understanding that being friends is a matter of being a friend, not simply having friends, a way of being toward others that actualizes the indivisible (not merely identical) unity of “one soul in two bodies”; or, being friends is the work of loving the friend qua friend, which is how other kinds of friendships are possible pros hen – for “the friend through excellence is the only one.”Footnote9 Or, as Montaigne writes:
In the friendship of which I speak, our souls mingle and blend, one in the other, in a mixture so universal that they efface, and cannot find again, the seam that joined them. If you press me to tell why I loved him, I feel that this cannot be expressed, except by answering: “Because it was he, because it was me.”Footnote10
On the other hand, unfortunately or not, most contemporary classicists base their translation of the (probably apocryphal) text on a corruption – and the Greek should not read, hō philoi; but rather, ō philoi, which is why Montaigne translates: “O my friends, there is no friend!”Footnote12 As Agamben points out: the quote in question
can be found in Montaigne and Nietzsche, both of whom would have taken it from Diogenes Laertius. But if we open a modern edition of the latter’s Lives of Eminent Philosophers to the chapter dedicated to Aristotle’s biography (5.21), we do not find the phrase in question; but rather, one to all appearances almost identical, whose significance is nevertheless different, and much less mysterious: oi (omega with iota subscript) philoi, oudeis philos, “He who has (many) friends, does not have a single friend.” A visit to the library was all it took to clarify the mystery. In 1616, a new edition of the Lives appeared, edited by the great Genevan philologist Isaac Casaubon. Reaching the passage in question – which still read o philoi (O friends) in the edition established by his father-in-law Henry Estienne – Casaubon without hesitation corrected the enigmatic lesson of the manuscript, which then became so perfectly intelligible that it was taken up by modern editors […] Huebner’s 1828 edition adopts the modern version, adding the annotation, “legebatur O philoi, emendavit Casaubonus.”Footnote13
And yet, ironically or not, the text – which serves to found the privileged principle of friendship today and our dominant concept of politics – precisely does not say, “O friends, there is no friend.” The Greek simply reads: ō philoi oudeis philos – that is, “O friends no friend.”Footnote19 In other words, the little word “is,” being, is not there; rather, it is implied – it is neither present in the text nor absent therefrom. And this language of implication is common enough in Greek (and in many other especially non-Indo-European languages, such as Hebrew, Arabic, Russian) – so, the text could have read “is,” but it does not. And, again, this is not just for grammatical reasons; on the contrary, being is implied in order to illuminate how it is neither present nor absent, which means that it should not be thought in terms of presence and absence. Or, if being is implied, it is because that is being’s way of being, because being is an implication. And this, finally, is what constitutes a “radical, thematic break” with the traditional way of speaking to and being friends (and the privileges of the politics derived therefrom) because it opens up a philosophical thinking of the being of the friend and of politics (and of being) as implied.
It is, therefore, necessary to reconsider everything that is said and thought and done in the name of friendship and the political, at least insofar as this implies being – or, more precisely, being qua implied. And again, the stakes here are not just philological – they are philosophical, and “the political stakes are obvious” – in fact, so obvious that they hardly bear explaining, except for those who prefer to think neither of politics nor of ethics, or for those who are privileged enough to avoid considering friendship and philosophy at all.Footnote20 But for the rest of us, once the question of the meaning of being shows itself to be the question of the meaning of implication, once a radical-thematic break with the tradition and its troubling answers has been inaugurated, it is difficult to see how some might remain indifferent thereto. Thus, the questions reassert themselves: “what is to be done today, politically, with this vertigo and its necessity,” what is to be done now, philosophically, with this thinking of being and its implications for friendship – and “what is to be done with the ‘what is to be done’”?Footnote21
In fact, this seems to call for a three-fold response. First, it calls for “an altogether other language,” an other way of speaking of friends and the being thereof.Footnote22 Second, for a reinterpretation of “what the entire tradition has taught us” about being – and being a friend, and so, the thinking of friendship – about presence and/or absence, at least insofar as our heritage can still be enriched by the suspension of its privilege.Footnote23 Third, a reconsideration of the concept of politics, of the politics of this language (and these friendships) and the language of politics, as well as being political; especially if, keeping the old name, “democracy,” we are to rethink it as “never present” – or more precisely, and without fear or favour, never present nor absent.Footnote24
First then, an other language – that is, neither simply speaking nor merely remaining silent, neither showing nor hiding, but implying. Indeed, a radical-thematic break with the dominant language, with the privilege enjoyed by presenting and representing the true (as necessary and/or possible, unnecessary and/or impossible), the preference for bringing truth – and the truth of friendship and politics – to presence (and/or leaving it in absence) over all other ways of speaking, must be suspended. For the suspension of the language of the troubling tradition of presentation is the only way for an other language of implication to respond to the call for an other principle of friendship and an other concept of politics. And this other language of implication not only implies an other way of speaking, it always also implies an other way of thinking about speaking, about the speaker and what is spoken, as well as about the hearer and what is heard. Then, we can no longer simply say that a friend is another Heracles or another self; rather, we should perhaps merely say: “a friend another Heracles, another self” (insofar as a friend implies another self). And not that friendship is one soul dwelling in two bodies – but, “friendship one soul two bodies” or “one soul implied in two bodies”; or that we are friends because it you, because it me, because “I imply you and you me.” Or, taking up a “political translation,” we might not say that the end of the state is the good life, but merely “the end of the state the good life [telos men oun poleōs to eu zēn]” (insofar as the state implies the good life).Footnote25 And not simply “there is democracy [il y a la démocratie]” – present now as real and/or ideal, a possibility and/or impossibility, and so, “to come” – but just “democracy to come” (at least if it neither is nor is not, coming or not).Footnote26 In this way, how we are friends implies how we speak of them, and to one another; or, more precisely, how we speak of friendship is a sign of what friendship is. Thus, if speaking of friends means implying, it is because being friends is a matter of implication – and if a friend is never simply present, but just implied; then we should perhaps not be surprised that (if we are attempting to do justice to friendship) we can only say: “O friends no friend.”
Second, this other way of speaking of the friend and the political is the clue to the discovery of an other way of thinking of friendship and politics; or, if being is just implied in language, it is because it must be thought as an implication, which means that what “the entire tradition has taught us” about thinking being qua presence and/or absence must be rethought – and not just being, but being a friend and being political, that is, what friends are and what politics is. But if our heritage is to be enriched by suspending the privilege of the being of what is present, presented and represented, of what comes to presence and goes out into absence, of being qua presence and/or absence; then it is only by rethinking the question “What is being?” – and so, “What is a friend?” – in order to think How is being?Footnote27 Or, How is being such that it can be the being of beings such as friends and friendship, politics and the political (things and thoughts, objects and concepts, real and ideal, necessary and unnecessary, true and false, possible and impossible)? And How is a friend a friend? For being is, first and foremost, a verb – implied in “O friends no friend” – and verbs express action, the activity of being and being a friend, how something is, not just what it is; and it is to the “verbality” of the verb “to be” that we must turn, at least if we are to think being’s way of being, and our way of being friends and being political.Footnote28 In other words, the entire troubling tradition of thinking being as a being (nature, idea, substance, God or the gods, subject, object, will, etc.), or as essence (beingness qua necessary, true, real, actual, categorical), or existence – all this must be rethought insofar as being is how beings (such as friends) are, and how being is, not what. And then, if being is implied by beings, and beings imply being, any thought of being in terms of presence and/or absence (of nature, idea, substance, etc.) must be suspended, which implies an other way of thinking of implying and qua implying. Thus, the thought of being a friend implies friendship, and friendship is (not present-in and/or absent-from but) implied by the friend; just as being political implies politics – and this is perhaps why thinking, “O friends no friend,” and being friends, is so suspenseful, and why we are implicated in the “radical, thematic break” that suspends how we have thought of friendship and politics, of friends and the political, of thinking and being, and implication.
Third, this other way of thinking of the friend, and of the political, suggests an other way of acting toward friends and politically – at least insofar as the dominance of the troubling tradition that privileges presence and/or absence must be suspended – for being’s way of being, how it is implied, illuminates how we can act as a friend and as political. But then, being a friend is not a question of being present to friends and/or absent therefrom – for if friends present themselves as here, before me, or somewhere else, in another place or time, even if I prefer to privilege the friends who are present, there for me, whether in times of need or not; then their presence and/or absence comes out of how they are implied, at least insofar as it conforms to the motivated traditional reduction or reification, abstraction or impoverishment thereof. We should, therefore, perhaps not be so surprised that the power of the history of philosophy as the philosophy of presence and/or absence (of the friend and of political action) is so dominant that any break therewith, any suspension thereof, is normally met with indifference, if not ridicule and rejection and contempt. But this is precisely what Derrida demonstrates – even if he immediately reduces it to the necessary presence of a possible and/or impossible aporia – when he cites Cicero on dead friends: “et, quad difficilius dictu est, mortui vivunt,” that is, normally, “and – harder saying still – though dead, are yet alive.”Footnote29 But, in truth, insofar as being is implied, the text reads: “and this might be even harder to say, dead alive.” For the difficulty of dead friends, who are not just dead and/or alive, lies in how they are, how their being is: the dead-living or living-dead are neither here nor there; they are implied, and their way of being present and/or absent are how they are implicated in our lives. And not just the dead – for our relations with the dead (friends and teachers, our troubling tradition) also shows us how to relate to the living. For example, in our attempt to consider the thought of dead philosophers, we neither simply revivify nor bury them; on the contrary, we illuminate how they are still implied (with continuous aspect) in our way of thinking (friendship or politics or philosophy, speaking or thinking or acting, or being), especially insofar as we take up the “still unthought” thereby, which also means illuminating how we imply them.Footnote30 And so, our way of acting toward friends, whether living or dead – if we are unwilling and unable to treat them as if they were simply present and/or absent – can only be by implication. So, if I present myself as ready to eat salt with you, it is because I have implied my readiness. Or, if I can be there for you, it is because our friendship keeps me in suspense, suspended – which is precisely why we are friends. And if I may be trusted, it is because my actions – although unable to prove or disprove my trustworthiness – imply my way of being your friend.
And this is why political action – if it is to constitute a radical thematic break – must be implied, action-by-implication. So, the response to the problem of democracy today, to democracy under threat, cannot be some kind of responsibility – which requires the presence and/or self-presence of agents and patients, subjects and objects, the real and the ideal, right and wrong, I and other, consciousness and self-consciousness; on the contrary – and this is “what is to be done with the ‘what is to be done’” – it must be a politics of implication, of implying. But this could clue us into, for instance, a politics that (1) acts neither openly nor in secret, neither reveals nor conceals, neither speaks nor remains silent, but (like a Heraclitian god at Delphi) merely “signs” that which is neither here nor there, neither present nor absent, but can only be implied.Footnote31 Or, it might mean (2) suspending the privilege of the privileged (and their philosophy of presence and/or absence), the power of the powerful, the preferences of the preferred, the rank of rank, and the distinction of distinction, in order to hint at an other way of acting (and of living and living-well) in families and among friends, in states and in the world – for if the insistence upon the presence and/or absence of justice fails to do justice to how justice is implied by what is just (lawful, right) and how we can be just (fair, good, free, equal, friends); then the administrative determination of the political order (laws, rights, responsibilities, norms, punishments), the action of the ordering of “order,” must be suspended as well. Or, it could suggest (3) an other way in which democracy could be “the work of friendship” – not one in which “democracy is a promise,” open and/or closed to the possible impossibility of a “democracy to come” (whether actual or potential, present here and now or past or future and there and then, non-present, absent, possibly or not, which has nothing to do with simple democratic or non-democratic states which understand it as freedom + equality), but perhaps just, “democracy a promise”; not of an absence, but of that out of which the promise comes to presence qua “never present,” presents itself qua “non-presentable,” that is, an implied democracy, a democracy of implication, a democracy in which the being of democracy itself is neither present nor absent – which is perhaps why we could not even act on the claim, as Aristotle suggests, that “democracy is, therefore, more favorable to friendship than tyranny,” but merely, “democracy, therefore, more favorable to friendship than tyranny.”Footnote32 Thus, no promises – not even the promise of democracy – neither now nor then; or, O democracies, O democrats, no democracy.
And so, a radical thematic break with our troubling traditional way of understanding friendship and politics means that our way of speaking and thinking and acting – all this can only be implied. We can neither, (1) positively, assert the presence and/or absence of the friend (and the political), or some combination or permutation thereof, as the history of philosophy does; nor (2) negatively, assert the impossibility of the possibility of the friend (and of politics), of that which “never exists,” is “never present,” of that which “remains” and remains “non-presentable.”Footnote33 Rather, it seems that we can – even must – if we hope to be friends, to be political, say and think, and act upon: O friends no friend, and O democrats no democracy.
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Notes
1 Aristotle, Ethica Eudemia (Oxford UP, 1991), 1245a30; Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, edited by Tiziano Dorandi (Cambridge UP, 2013), 5.20; Aristotle, Politica (Oxford UP, 1957), 1280b38.
2 Jacques Derrida, Politiques de l’amitié (Galilée, 1994), 122.
3 Ibid. 122.
4 Diogenes, op. cit. 356; Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, translated by Pamala Mensch (Oxford UP, 2018), 222. See Aristotle, “the man who has many friends has no friend [outheis philos hō polloi philoi]” (Ethica Eudemia 1245b20–21); “those who have many friends and mix intimately with them all are thought to be no one’s friend [hoi de polyphiloi kai pasin oikeiōs entygchanontes oudeni dokousin einai philoi]” (Ethica Nicomachea (Oxford UP, 1991), 1171a15–17).
5 Michel de Montaigne, Les essais (Arléa, 2002), 147; Derrida, op. cit. 12.
6 Derrida, op. cit. 303. Obviously, the “explication” here is not simply explanatory, not merely exegetical; on the contrary, explaining is interpreting and interpreting is arguing – and in most radical form, it is the act of thinking.
7 Aristotle, Ethica Eudemia 1235b14–15.
8 Ibid. 1236b3.
9 Ibid. 1236b26, 1244b16–17.
10 Montaigne, op. cit. 145.
11 Aristotle, Ethica Eudemia 1240b2–3, 1246a13; Derrida, op. cit. 348.
12 Diogenis Laertii, De vitis, dogmatis et apophthegmatis clarorum philosophorum, edited by Huebnerus (H.S. Casaubon, 1594), 326: this edition simply reads: omega with circumflex and smooth breathing. See also Montaigne, op. cit. 147; Derrida, op. cit. 12.
13 Giorgio Agamben, What is an Apparatus?, translated by David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella (Stanford UP, 2009), 27–28.
14 Derrida, op. cit. 64, 240.
15 Ibid. 52, 55, 62–63, 247, 267–68; Derrida, Dire l’événement, est-ce possible? (L’Harmattan, 2001), 100. For the philosophical origin of this traditional language and logic of both–and, see Plato, Parmenides, Complete Works, edited by John Cooper (Hackett, 1997), 166c2–5; emphasis added:
Let us then say this – and also that, as it seems, whether one is or is not, it and the others both are and are not, and both appear and do not appear all things in all ways, both in relation to themselves and in relation to each other.
16 Maurice Blanchot, Michel Foucault tel que je l’imagine (fata morgana, 1986), 64; Derrida, Politiques 263. Indeed, as Derrida notes (Politiques 252, 259, 282, 320) it is out of a “more originary” otherness, this “non-reappropriable alterity,” irreducible to me, self, self-sameness, that friendship comes. And implication is only a more originary “third” in a metaphorical sense – for presence and absence are not things; they are how implication is and/or is not present and/or absent.
17 Derrida, Politiques 320. As Derrida notes in “Heidegger’s Ear: Philopolemology (Geschlecht IV),” a text which is included in the French version (Politiques 346, 348) but only published separately in English: Heidegger thinks friendship in terms of distance and nearness, Ferne and Nähe, la distance et la proximité, that is, the friend “always goes and comes [stets hin und her]; here, toward presence; there, toward absence” – for the difference is the unity of both through which they happen, that is, the relation through which they come-to-presence and go-out-into-absence, Reading Heidegger: Commemorations, edited by John Sallis (Indiana UP, 1993), 167; emphasis added; see Martin Heidegger, Unterwegs zur Sprache, Gesammtausgabe, GA12 (Klöstermann, 1985), 18. On Heidegger’s thought of “the possibility of the impossibility” (as the structure of being-toward-death) a possibility that must be “understood as possibility, cultivated as possibility, and in relation to it, endured as possibility,” that is, potentiality irreducible to actuality, or “anticipation” qua absence that cannot be translated into the language and logic of presence, see Sein und Zeit, GA2 347–48.
18 Although we cannot consider it here, Derrida (Politiques 225, 234) does not stop with the aporetic interpretation of Aristotle; rather, if both the “modern” and the “ancient” interpretations are equally possible (even necessary, insofar as it is impossible to determine which text corresponds to the original) it is not because, again, this is simply a philological conundrum or merely a matter of “grammatical undecidability” – it is because the relation between the texts (and the friendships and politics founded thereon) itself constitutes an aporia of the non-aporetic and the aporetic, of the or-structure and the and-structure, which Derrida names the “hyper-aporetic.”
19 The German translation is closer: “Viele Freunde, kein freund,” Diogenes Laertius, Leben und Meinungen berühmter Philosophen, translated by Otto Apelt (Meiner, 2015), 234.
20 Derrida, Politiques 289.
21 Ibid. 330.
22 Ibid. 331.
23 Ibid. 332.
24 Ibid. 339.
25 Ibid. 333; Aristotle, Politica 1280b39.
26 Derrida, Politiques 339.
27 Aristotle, Ethica Eudemia 1234b18–20.
28 Emmanuel Lévinas, Éthique et infini (Librairie Arthème Fayard, 1982), 34.
29 Although in the first French phrase, Derrida supplements Cicero’s Latin with being, in the second phrase, he lets being be implied: “Dès lors les absents même sont présents […] et, ce qui est plus difficile à dire, les morts vivent … ” (Politiques 10; emphasis added); Marcus Tullius Cicero, De Senectute De Amicitia De Divinatione, translated by William Armistead Falconer (Harvard UP, 1923), 133.
30 G.W.F. Hegel, Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts (Meiner, 2009), 281. And not only the dead, but death itself (although this is perhaps a topic for another text): it would be easy enough to show that being-toward-death, Sein-zum-Tode, which Heidegger understands in terms of (the event of) the presence and absence of a possible impossibility should actually be thought as implied, which is how my death is implicated in my life – so if I am living, it is not because I am dying; rather, I living implies I dying.
31 Heraclitus, Early Greek Philosophy III (LCL 526), edited by André Laks and Glen Most (Harvard UP, 2016), D41/B93, 156.
32 Aristotle, Politica 1253a37–39, 1280b39, 1281a1; emphasis added; Derrida, Politiques 127, 129, 223–24; Jacques Derrida and Geoffrey Bennington, “Politics and Friendship,” A Discussion with Jacques Derrida (Centre for Modern French Thought, University of Sussex, 1 Dec. 1997; originally in English, transcribed from video by Benjamin Noys). For perhaps a contemporary example, see how “Just Stop Oil” throws cold soup (referencing Warhol) onto Van Gogh’s Sunflowers: https://juststopoil.org/2022/10/31/just-stop-oils-response-to-the-van-gogh-sunflowers-action/.
33 Derrida, Politiques 339.
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