The Politics of Friendship

by Jacques Derrida

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.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Theory, Politics, Friendship, Sociology, France

320 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1994

About the author

Jacques Derrida was a French philosopher best known for developing deconstruction, a method of critical analysis that questioned the stability of meaning in language, texts, and Western metaphysical thought. Born in Algeria, he studied at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, where he was influenced by philosophers such as Heidegger, Husserl, and Levinas. His groundbreaking works, including Of Grammatology (1967), Writing and Difference (1967), and Speech and Phenomena (1967), positioned him at the center of intellectual debates on language, meaning, and interpretation.
Derrida argued that Western philosophy was structured around binary oppositions—such as speech over writing, presence over absence, or reason over emotion—that falsely privileged one term over the other. He introduced the concept of différance, which suggests that meaning is constantly deferred and never fully present, destabilizing the idea of fixed truth. His work engaged with a wide range of disciplines, including literature, psychoanalysis, political theory, and law, challenging conventional ways of thinking and interpretation.
Throughout his career, Derrida continued to explore ethical and political questions, particularly in works such as Specters of Marx (1993) and The Politics of Friendship (1994), which addressed democracy, justice, and responsibility. He held academic positions at institutions such as the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales and the University of California, Irvine, and remained an influential figure in both European and American intellectual circles. Despite criticism for his complex writing style and abstract concepts, Derrida’s ideas have left a lasting impact on contemporary philosophy, literary theory, and cultural criticism, reshaping the way meaning and language are understood in the modern world.

Reviews

[Fergus, Weaver of Autistic Webs · Rating 3 out of 5]

“O friends, there are no friends!”

With this apocryphal and so dubious deathbed “insight” of Aristotle - supposedly from a witness who just happened to be there - Jacques Derrida begins this wearisome labour of despair at the wrong moment.

Some dawns can be bleak. Yet why, to this apocryphal ascription, does Nietzsche immediately thereafter add this madcap rejoinder, "Oh, enemies, there are no enemies?"

To philosophers friendships are founded upon half-truths. Derrida warns us never to give that one secret away. That would spell the end to our shared houses of cards, if that's what they are.

For philosophers, alas, all reality can be political. And thus friendships are expedient measures. Strategic alliances. We must maintain political correctness.

But as Auden says, books like this are written by guys who are, on one hand, Don Quixotes - their idealistic thinking - and on the other, Sanchos - their Divided Selves. If philosophers follow a peaceful ideal, it is because they know anguish.

Is the ersatz quotation from Aristotle, as you will wonder if you ever venture into this book, in fact Dante’s inscription over the doors of Hell: ‘Give up all hope, all you who enter here? " Was for me.

Aristotle had his practical, above-board theorizing, but Derrida has his black, subterranean Friendship. Two sides of one coin. We moderns tend to follow Derrida, I guess.

For if you get caught up in Derrida’s laborious logic, you’ll soon find yourself amid Charon, the Furies, and other infernal denizens of a hellish political underworld, reeling through unending, flaming infernal crises wrought by political underhandedness.

That's because we've become, according to Derrida, not seekers in good faith after truth, but disillusioned sophisticates trying to sift through the rubble of our dreams ever-again to rebuild them.

Isn’t he tarring ALL of us citizens of the world with a single brush, though? Isn’t he forgetting that some of us have strong, inviolable values - that make our lives worth LIVING?

I dunno, but he seems a bit like a petulantly precocious teen who just refuses to take his meds. But sometimes our meds put us to sleep -

And they can strangle us like the Snakes of Laocoon.

So Derrida begins with a dubious kernel of emotionally-charged thought and reconstructs, over the newly deconstructed familiar landmark of friendship, dark labyrinths of affective logic in its place.

What’s the point?

Real, warm and apolitical Friendship isn’t perfect, but it’s one of the best things we’ve got. And, as I say, it’s real. Can it really be founded on the prohibition never to burn our last bridge to one another?

Ever hear of Jules Verne’s fantastical Voyage to the Centre of the Earth? That’s where he’s taking us here. To the Centre of our Selves.

Into subterranean vistas of dark emotion, peaks and valleys of stalactites and stalagmites - down to a sunless sea. With relentless logic (but note again the contradictory starting point).

I sometimes want to wake Derrida up from his unceasing nightmares just as his fretful mother must have yearned to:

‘Jacques!! Wake up and smell the coffee... sun’s shining and it’s a brand new day out there, for criminie sakes!’

Perhaps...

But, you know, just to be sure, from now on I'm gonna Mark ALL my Friendships:

"Caution - Handle with CARE."

[Peter Harrison · Rating 2 out of 5]

I know I'm supposed to find Derrida interesting and challenging and stimulating... etc.. Maybe I'm just not intelligent enough to follow his line of argument, certainly my background is not in philosophy. There is surely however an unnecessary level of obfuscation in the language Derrida uses in this book. Phrases such as:

"possibilisation of the impossible possible"

and

"the long time of a time that does not belong to time"

defy any meaning that I can uncover. This is not the language of someone trying to get complex philosophical points across to the reader, it is the language of someone showing off.

Buried underneath all this are some interesting points. The analysis of the need for an enemy in political discourse chimes well with the experience of the west since the fall of Communism. The interaction between this need for an enemy and the nature of modern warfare, and its impact on democratic politics is insightful. There are interesting points about the nature of friendship built on three separate bases: virtue, utility, and pleasure.

It's just a shame that it is so hard to get to these points you have to wade through such a cascade of meaningless literary contortions.

While there is mention of how friendship and 'fraternity' influences the democratic polity this is essentially a bourgeois vision. The focus is on how the connections between individuals are created and maintained, with some discussion of what might be thought of as 'identity' - race, gender, etc.. What is entirely missing is any sense of solidarity, of a group finding common cause, of class.

There is no doubt that this is complex work of philosophy with insights to offer. I just can't help thinking that the same points could have been made much easier to understand and in about half the space. And it doesn't have an index either, which seems odd for a non-fiction book looking to be taken seriously.

https://marxadventure.wordpress.com/2...

[Bradley · Rating 4 out of 5]

Deconstruction is the desire for thought. Derrida says here - there is no deconstruction without democracy and there is no democracy without deconstruction. For all of his attempts to avoid defining, labelling and reducing deconstruction, this book is actually quite readable and in several places it is very clear as well.

[sologdin · Rating 3 out of 5]

So, it's difficult, of course, slow-going. Wide-ranging, its point of departure is an odd citation to Aristotle in Diogenes Laertius, which does not exist in Aristotle proper. This bit of aristotelian apocrypha is followed through its permutations, with discussion of Montaigne, Cicero, Blanchot, and others. Heidegger makes an obligatory appearance. But the main interlocutor is Schmitt. We should expect Derrida to revel in tearing apart fascist writers, especially ones that have been cited across the spectrum such as Schmitt and Heidegger. The main tenets seem, to me, to be the distinction between hostis and echthroi, which allows Schmitt to maintain his doctrine of politics and enmity while preserving fratricidal conflict of the stasis within the polis. There's also discussion of the distinction between grace as a gift and virtue being paid in theology, an economics smuggled into an allegedly non-economic regime. Both Schmitt and scripture work on an assumption, therefore, that includes surreptitiously what it excludes doctrinally. Though it's not specifically noted, this is Agamben's later point of departure in the Homo Sacer texts. All good times.

[Caspar "moved to storygraph" Bryant]

a neato reread of this one it's SUCH a slow read in a way, I'm dragged over the coals. but that's ok. I stand by my previous assessment that this is one of his most difficult books. nietzsche-schmitt-aristotle. it has little breaks of absolute beaming in it too!

and if he desires my death

[Saettare]

The paradoxical gift of Derrida's obscurantist prose just keeps giving.

[Erin · Rating 4 out of 5]

"There is little room for laughter in Heidegger."

[William Durden]

This is one of Derrida's more challenging works, I've found, and although I have technically "read" it, I have yet to follow that much of what is happening. It's one I plan to return to sometime.

[Jade · Rating 5 out of 5]

“friendship proceeds from self-love… another experience of the possible… friendship, the being-friend, is to love before being loved…” 🥹

[Jack]

This has proved too difficult for me to read at the moment -- I'm loath to admit defeat to a book on the grounds of being 'too busy', for it's easier to imagine I time I'll be busier than a time I'll have the leisure to slowly absorb Derrida and figure out what the deal is. Still, that's what I have to do here; I'm not in education at the moment, so tackling an obscure text doesn't align with my academic ambitions, and I have so much else to read besides. I haven't disliked reading the 100 pages I got through exactly, but I haven't found Derrida's style appealing either. I'm sure his riddles are worth unraveling, just... not right now.

[Owlseyes]

https://www.newyorker.com/books/secon...

[Rodrigo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Is it me or Derrida is hot as hell reading Nietzsche. Like, my guy there was no need for writing so good, pipe down. Anywho, hard as hell but a wonderful reading (if I've understood it correctly cause I'm not so sure that happened)

[Sachin · Rating 3 out of 5]

Intriguing and provocative. as always.

[Michel · Rating 4 out of 5]

An amazing read, made even more vivid in the current Mediterranean context.

[Justin · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'll need to mull this one for a while. I liked large stretches of it, especially the final few chapters, but some of it lost me. There's (not surprisingly) plenty of deconstructive work without much construction. On the topic of friendship (a malleable term), that comes to feel a little sad. There are spectres and death everywhere here, but I can't tell if Derrida is haunted by the process. The perpetual absences endemic to his thought seem to be a miss here; it creates a sort of yearning, but the lack of reality in fulfilling the "gentle rigors of friendship" (if I'm remembering the phrase) leaves much of it untethered.

That said, there's (again not surprisingly) plenty of smart, challenging thinking, considering this topic in either political or interpersonal terms (such as those words would hold up). If it's a challenge, though, it orients me back toward presence, something that the book itself might deny properly existing.

[Buck · Rating 4 out of 5]

Probably the peak of post-war liberal miserabilism Ive read so far. I see this book more as an elaborate attempt to mourn and impose the ethical necessity of the impossibility of reconciling difference with a universalist humanist project.

[Wan Ling]

rec: cinlin

[Hanif · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's sooooo heady.

[Thomas · Rating 5 out of 5]

"O vrienden, er zijn geen vrienden." En daar dan zo'n 300 pagina's over.

[Jacob Lipeles · Rating 2 out of 5]

Meh

[Cain S.]

Derrida’s The Politics of Friendship (1994) is as fine an act of deconstructive tightrope traipse as any of his other works; combing through quotations from known philosophers, through tendentious citations severally removed from the original locutions, in unknown light, and situating in them the inscrutable intentionality embedded in language [langue] as such. As ever, his reading of almost trite, or Canonical, texts bringing about a moment of alterity native to them, and so surprisingly impugning the judgment of their conventional senses, is entertaining, vigorous, prolix and fecund. And, after all these qualifications one must get to the brass tacks, irreducible takeaways tacked onto all iterations hung on his every word: what of the irreducibility that cannot be recovered and yet latches onto what does get said, even beyond the speaker? In so many words, why do people say what must by nature betray them? It is perhaps necesary…

It is easy to sympathise with the death of coherence via meaning as such [a handy philosopheme], and with the entire post-modernist camp which here lights bonfires to undecidables that outlast their urgency, but being tied as we are to finite contexts that both define us and are defined in tangential, even aporetic, ways the motivation for tarrying with imponderables— or, as is the wont of Derrida, the constitutive imponderables which circumscribe the meaning of speech— must remain so long as it is tarrying with ineluctability an impossibility of determination, theory as everlasting hesitation. The impasse of all Derridology [po-faced post-modernist malingering, of which Derrida is less guilty than Derrideans], in the ethical sense of such a nonce word, is that seeking to eliminate the temerations and abuses that speech is liable to is no excuse for a longwinded avoidance of the ineliminable community of meaning which persists despite its impossibility, despite its deconstruction, as the arché-stencil from which traces must incessantly derive themselves. One may say, such spectator position theory theorises itself always-already and is either beast or sovereign, but not human.

The denial of permanence of meaning denies also that such permanence be sought out, infinity paradoxically must end— after what infinite fashion may such a token be sought [such that it is never found]? In summary, even as Derrida says, “infinite différance is finite”, and may one be loathe to rejoinder, sufficiently: finitude is the stuff of the infinite, and insofar as speech, both apt and abortive, is finite, finitude must be privileged? This deflationary movement reduces the deliberation of imponderables to mere preponderances that eliminate finite responsibility, which remains necessary for action; though it risks being misguided action, one must concede, it exceeds theory infinitely in differing from theories’ impasses. Here, one must become, again, a naïve Kantian if only to understand Derrida, Others and their communities to come, to affirm in their cacophonous and wily witnesses decidables that impinge on many a finite existence, finite well being and finite ethics. Infinite responsibility is the ruse of those who must deny finite justice, it is gentrified hubris patient with its ear to the ground, stuck there.


Work Cited

Derrida, Jacques. Trans. Collins, George (2005). The Politics of Friendship. London, UK: Verso.

http://skepoet.wordpress.com/2013/01/...

[Justin · Rating 5 out of 5]

He, who has many friends, has no friends. Thank god I only have just a few.

I’ve been studying this book on and off for the past two years, reading other books in between, researching for a script I just finished. This gave me everything I wanted and needed to fulfill my task and so much more.

If you are looking for philosophy on the true meaning of friendship, give this a read. You won’t be disappointed.

[Stu Napier · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a slightly tough read at the best of times and utterly impenetrable at the worst - but where Derrida does make sense to my uncomprehending brain there are great theories on friendship and democracy to be found.

(If you’re having real difficulties with this book, my advice is this: it’s more forgiving on the brain if you read it in a dive bar, after midnight, and several drinks down already. Do with that what you will.)

[Roberto Yoed · Rating 1 out of 5]

La verdadera amistad es algo que se encuentra más allá, como el amor, de la política.

Si, somos seres políticos como Aristóteles decía, pero, como él también dijo en Ética, somos seres que al encontrar relaciones profundas y genuinas damos todo de manera entregada y sin esperar algo a cambio.

Derrida nunca tuvo amigos.

[Katrinka · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not my favorite of Derrida's, but interesting, as ever.

[Egor xS · Rating 5 out of 5]

A study of piercing eloquence. Kant's black swan--as a figure of repudiation of essential homophilia of friendship--was especially amusing.

[Alex Obrigewitsch · Rating 5 out of 5]

My introduction to Derrida (I know I'm late)(God help me...).
Began my love-affair with a ghost; making me accutely aware of all the ghosts haunting my life.

[Johnna Gurgel · Rating 2 out of 5]

- See "Animal That Therefore I Am" review

[Katarina Ristich]

The highest sense of humanity: an anticipation of afterlife community among the writers / poets / philosophers in earthly present & future time.

[Zac Denman · Rating 3 out of 5]

I liked it when he said willy-nilly