The Politics of Friendship

Until relatively recently, Derrida was seen by many as nothing more than the high priest of Deconstruction, by turns stimulating & fascinating, yet always somewhat disengaged from the central political questions of our time. Or so it seemed. His political turn, marked especially by the appearance of Specters of Marx, has surprised some, delighted others. In The Politics of Friendship he renews & enriches this orientation thru an examination of the political history of the idea of friendship pursued down the ages. His thoughts are haunted throughout the book by the strange & provocative address attributed to Aristotle, “my friends, there is no friend” & its inversions by later philosophers such as Montaigne, Kant, Nietzsche, Schmitt & Blanchot. The exploration allows him to recall & restage the ways in which all the oppositional couples of Western philosophy & political thought—friendship & enmity, private & public life—have become madly & dangerously unstable. At the same time he dissects genealogy itself, the familiar & male-centered notion of fraternity & the virile virtue whose authority has gone unquestioned in our culture of friendship & our models of democracy. The future of the political becomes the future of friends, the invention of a radically new friendship, of a deeper & more inclusive democracy. This book offers a challenging vision of that future.