Rejecting Friendship: Toward a Radical Reading of Derrida’s Politics of Friendship for Today

We are born, sworn, jealous friends of solitude, our own deepest, most midnightly, noon-likely solitude. This is the type of people we are, we free spirits! and perhaps you are something of this yourselves, you who are approaching? you new philosophers?

—Nietzsche 2002, 42 §44

One must think and write, in particular as regards friendship, against great numbers. Against the most numerous who make language and lay down the law of its image. Against hegemonic language in what is called public space.

—Derrida 1997, 70–71

Philosophy in a Time of Hyper-Gregariousness

By the late 1980s, Deleuze was already suspicious of the nature of communicative sociability and societies, especially those predicated on teletechnologies. They are suspect first because they contribute little to creating concepts in the true philosophical sense. Second, they are oftentimes complicit in perpetuating the capitalist ideology underlying the very teletechnological apparatuses on which they base themselves and that they disseminate. Such sociability or societies only encourage the production and subsequent selling of newer communicative apparatuses, as they buy into those teletechnologies wholesale without critical resistance. The situation degenerates, for Deleuze, when these modes of sociability also buy into the illusion, offered by the industries driving those productions, that they are actively and creatively collaborating with those industries to articulate new “concepts” through information and communicative technics.¹When “instant communication” via “cybernetic machines and computers” was quickly developing into a universal condition of sociability by 1990, Deleuze would announce the arrival of “control societies” (1995, 175), where communicative sociability or societies built on teletechnologies are but the expression of capitalism’s hegemony in digital format. This hegemony was no less discerned by Derrida in the early 1990s, recognizing it in all forms of media technics like “[the] news, the press, tele-communications, techno-tele-discursivity, techno-tele-iconicity” (1994c, 50–51). Derrida will point out that the increasing “homogeneity of a medium, of discursive norms and models,” like the unstoppable shift to network-based communications, is a testimony to the “existing hegemonies” of “the new effects of capitalism (within unprecedented techno-social structures)” (1992, 54, 45, 57). According to Derrida too, all existing dominant modes of communication and discourse are always already products or determinations of a veiled capitalist mechanism that had already evaluated their (speculated) profitability “in the supermarkets of culture” (1992, 101). With Derrida’s analysis, one can perhaps speak of “evaluation societies” to complement Deleuze’s “control societies.” And just as users of teletechnological communications in “control societies” are never the ones in control, neither are those in “evaluation societies” autonomously evaluating their preferred modes of communication. And while users in “control societies” do not create any real concepts, those in “evaluation societies” are neither invested in the Nietzschean transvaluation of existing modes of thoughts and practices. Despite the growing hegemony of “continuous control and instant communication” (Deleuze 1995, 174) or of a dominant mode of communicative sociability, there is to be no compromise, philosophically, for both Deleuze and Derrida, with “control societies” or “evaluation societies.” One must respond with a critical stance against them. For Derrida, “it is necessary that we learn to detect, in order then to resist, new forms of cultural takeover” (1992, 54). Deleuze, adopting a more radical position, will call for “a hijacking of speech” or the creation of “vacuoles of non-communication, circuit-breakers, to escape control” (1995, 175, translation modified).

Fast-forward to our present early twenty-first century, and it is clear that “control societies” or “evaluation societies” are no longer an imminence. However, it is not the case that we have freed ourselves from them today. On the contrary, we find ourselves very much situated within such societies, as they have established themselves as an undeniable reality. Today, they are fortifying themselves stronger than ever behind the global expanse of digital social networks like MySpace, Facebook, Lively, and Twitter. These digital social networks are apparatuses that not only enable communicative sociability to be redefined by the overexposure of real-time messages incessantly exchanged and disseminated via those digital platforms; they...