Derrida and the Inheritance of Democracy

5: Politics of Friendship as Democratic Inheritance

100 5 Politics of Friendship as democratic inheritance iargued in Chapter 3 that derrida theorizes democracy such that inheritance is a democratic act. to be democratic, one needs to inherit. This interpretation, however, left certain questions unanswered. First, given the tension between derrida’s diagnosis of a fundamental ambivalence in the structures underlying democracy and his simultaneous support for democracy, the place and role of normativity in derrida’s account were left undetermined. Second, it remained unclear just what such a democratic act of inheritance might look like. i addressed the first issue in Chapter 4, concluding that the values at work in the language derrida engages mark out a space that is already constituted along normative lines. derrida cannot avoid the possibility that his constative analyses at the same time carry a performative force of normative injunction, and this force is located in the language used. in this chapter, i take up the second question and give further determination to the possible shape of democratic inheritance as understood within the derridean framework. i do this by examining a text i have already mentioned in passing a number of times, Politics of Friendship. in this work derrida inherits discourses of fraternity and friendship from the democratic tradition. My task, therefore, is to show how this inheritance, in its conformity with the structure i have been articulated, itself constitutes a democratic act. a tradition of Friendship as geoffrey Bennington remarks, “Politics of Friendship is an unusual book for derrida to have written.”1 Bennington notes that derrida tends to write essays, sometimes very long ones, which restrict themselves to a reading of one, maybe two authors, even Politics of Friendship as Democratic Inheritance | 101 if other names appear in passing. By contrast, the scope of the readings contained within Politics of Friendship is enormous—it contains detailed and sustained engagements with Plato, aristotle, Montaigne, Kant, nietzsche, heidegger, and Schmitt, as well as shorter (but still dense) discussions of several other figures, including Cicero, augustine, Blake, Michelet, Freud, and Blanchot. it is a complicated book, and finding an underlying structure is no easy task. But among all of its twists and turns, one particular thematic constellation emerges in Politics of Friendship involving friendship , fraternity, and political belonging. These three notions are connected in a very particular manner across the tradition that derrida traces in his inquiry, and it is these connections that i will investigate. although the distinction between belonging to a tradition and not will never be a firm one in a derridean text, any attempt to read a tradition must operate according to some criterion of belonging. one must necessarily read some works and not others to advance one’s claims. in Politics of Friendship derrida determines the tradition he will investigate by privileging a phrase quoted by Montaigne that is attributed to aristotle in diogenes laertius’s Lives of Eminent Philosophers—“o my friends, there is no friend [O phíloi, oudeis philos].” This statement is quoted by almost all the authors derrida reads—they all inherit it—binding together the particular tradition of writing on friendship he explores. This phrase is thus the arkhē, both origin and principle, of the lineage of thinkers linked in derrida’s analysis. and to name an arkhē in a derridean context is simultaneously to call it into question both as origin and as principle. “o my friends, there is no friend” is questionable first as origin, for it is a phrase that is only ever attributed to aristotle—it is only ever being said to have been said by him—since it is nowhere found in the writings classified under his signature. it thus may well be a fictive beginning that never took place. Second, the phrase is questionable as a principle , for it appears incoherent, a contradiction, with no obvious meaning. how can a contradiction govern or legislate anything?2 Following a pattern i have shown repeatedly in derrida’s work, such instabilities do not render the aristotelian phrase ineffectual. on the contrary, they are responsible for its particular persistence across time. By citing “o my friends, there is no friend” in one form or another, thinkers ranging from Montaigne to Blanchot each respond to it by giving it an interpretation, making sense of its seeming nonsense. and the fact that there exists no authoritative first record of its utterance only amplifies the freedom and necessity of these citations. The very force of the phrase thus lies in the fact that...