The Question of Community in Deleuze and Guattari (II): After Friendship

The question of friendship is perhaps irresistible, if not inevitable, in any thinking of community. It is always tempting to understand friendship as the most amicable imminence or irreducible structure of community. It could be said that there is no denying the force of thinking which thinks that community follows from friendship. Even Geoffrey Bennington, in a critique of Derrida's Politics of Friendship, where the question of community is apparently inadequately addressed in Bennington's view, writes that "a thought of community should follow from the structure of friendship" (113). If one were to follow this line of thought, in which community indeed follows from friendship, then any study of the question of community in Deleuze and Guattari must necessarily seek out those moments in their writings when friendship figures in the course of their philosophical conceptualization. Or, in other words, in any study that seeks to elicit a thought of community in Deleuze and Guattari, no matter how elliptical that is, that same study must also show that Deleuze and Guattari address the question of friendship. As it turns out, they certainly do. Friendship is in fact not as elusive or oblique in Deleuze and Guattari as community, although it is certainly no less a problematic concept in Deleuze and Guattari than community is. It features explicitly in their What is Philosophy?, particularly in the introduction. And in Deleuze's own work, his very early essay "Statements and Profiles," his Proust and Signs, and his final published essay "Immanence: A Life," all revolve in some significant ways around the topic of friendship. And yet, like the question of community, the question of friendship, in Deleuze, and in Deleuze's work with Guattari, has hardly been touched upon by deleuzoguattarian scholarship.² So like the first essay of this study of community in Deleuze and Guattari, this essay seeks to devote the discussion of friendship singularly in Deleuze and Guattari, by way of the said works of What is Philosophy?, "Statements and Profiles," "Immanence: A Life," and Proust and Signs.

This present paper will maintain the general hypothesis of this study, which is that there is an anti-community force in Deleuze and Guattari only to clear a path for a future thought of community or a thought of a future community, a hypothesis that has been unfolded in the first essay through an explication of Deleuze and Guattari's nomadic war machine. In other words, the argument here will be that friendship as treated by Deleuze and Guattari will reveal a certain anti-community force. Put in yet another way: before touching on community, which is but a touching negatively via anti-community, Deleuze and Guattari will have already smashed from within that amicable element that would structure community. Friendship will be invoked only to have its terrain radically undone. For Deleuze and Guattari, there will be friendship only if it is (already) secant. It will be something of post-friendship or after friendship, not without a sense of violence (reminiscent of the betrayal function of nomadology or of the rupture of alliance in becoming-animal), and not without a post-apocalyptic inflection (as it will be shown towards the end of this paper). But at the same time, any tearing or rejection of friendship is only to look toward another form of relation, a new understanding of relation, in which present notions like friends or friendship will come to be revealed as anachronistic misnomers.

Lone Philosopher

Perhaps it should be stated right at the outset—just so to reset the anti-community tenor that reverberates in the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari—that Deleuze himself is not really interested, at least in writing or thought, in friends or friendship that we are so familiar with in lived experience. As he says in the television interview with Claire Parnet, he is not interested in "an actual friend,"³ but the figure of the friend that manifests in the history of philosophy in heterogeneous ways, the friend as figure of thought appropriated by philosophy. As he will write...