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.