Philosophy after Friendship: Deleuze's Conceptual Personae by Gregg Lambert (review)

Gregg Lambert's excellent new book is the product of a long-held interest in the Kantian idea of perpetual peace as a paradigm for thinking the future of global politics. Philosophy after Friendship can be considered a "theoretical accompaniment and prolegomena" to the Perpetual Peace Project, a partnership of activists and intellectuals which Lambert cofounded in 2008 (161). He argues that Kant's notion of perpetual peace "can still function as an a priori idea of reason for any future political philosophy, for which I propose that we begin to substitute the term 'post-war philosophy"' (22-3). He develops Kant's account of peace as a pure Idea of reason, as something that may not be empirically possible but nevertheless must remain the horizon of our thought. Lambert explicitly offers his book as an alternative to recent attempts to theorize a future beyond the impasses of neoliberal capitalism such as Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek's "idea of communism" and Giorgio Agamben's account of revolutionary messianism. More generally, Lambert argues that if the major theorists of the radical Left, including Deleuze and Guattari, have failed to lead us towards a convincing articulation of an alternative future it is because political philosophy has remained in thrall to the paradigm of war and conflict. Despite late 20^th and early 21^st theory's obsession with the image of a "final end"—whether this be the end of man, sovereignty, capitalism, history or philosophy itself—we have seen strangely little in the way of an articulation of an end to war or a "post-war philosophy" in the absolute sense of the phrase.

Modern political philosophy has thus remained within the Hobbesian framework of an innate state of conflict as the defining feature of the political. But Lambert goes further back to Plato's discussion in the Republic of the barbarian as the "natural enemy" of the Greek polis to argue that the entire history of political philosophy has been characterized by attempts to apply the metaphor or analogy of the enemy to members of the polis itself. This is not only the case with racist and right wing conceptions of the political such as Carl Schmitt's, but also with Marx and Engles' notion of the bourgeoisie as the enemy of the proletariat and Deleuze and Guattari's notion of the nomad as the enemy of the state. The book's subtitle is a bit misleading, perhaps, in that Deleuze and Guattari's work is not the main subject of the book, nor is Lambert's argument significantly more Deleuzian than Derridean. In fact, he at one point demonstrates, quite persuasively, the limits of Deleuze and Guattari's concept of the war machine as a means of thinking a nomadic politics beyond the state form. One of the book's great virtues is the way it moves dexterously between a range of important thinkers including Levinas, Antelme, Blanchot, and Agamben.

Lambert draws on Derrida's critique of Schmitt to maintain that the friend/enemy distinction is a fundamentally unstable one and plagues all philosophical attempts to deploy it in pursuit of a conception of the political. Lambert's key argument here is that we have lost any real sense of the "friend" as a category of thought, and this is why he suggests that the philos in philosophy can be understood under erasure: his introduction is titled "Philosophy after Friendship." A retrieval of the friend as a conceptual persona is thus part of Lambert's answer to the historical and contemporary impasses of political theory.

Friendship has long been viewed as integral to philosophy. To be a philosopher is quite literally to be a friend of wisdom. One of the key reasons philosophy developed in ancient Greece was because of Athenian society's cosmopolitan spirit of friendly rivalry and its willingness, fostered by geographical and economic circumstances, to accept strangers into its midst. The work of Derrida in particular has emphasized philosophy...