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

Cultural Critique 79—Fall 2011—Copyright 2011 Regents of the University of Minnesota

REJECTING FRIENDSHIPTOWARD A RADICAL READING OF DERRIDA’S POLITICS OF

FRIENDSHIP FOR TODAY

Irving Goh

PHILOSOPHY IN A TIME OF HYPER-GREGARIOUSNESS

By the late 1980s, Deleuze was already suspicious of the nature ofcommunicative sociability and societies, especially those predicatedon teletechnologies. They are suspect Wrst because they contribute lit-tle to creating concepts in the true philosophical sense. Second, theyare oftentimes complicit in perpetuating the capitalist ideology under-lying the very teletechnological apparatuses on which they base them-selves and that they disseminate. Such sociability or societies onlyencourage the production and subsequent selling of newer commu-nicative apparatuses, as they buy into those teletechnologies whole-sale 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 activelyand creatively collaborating with those industries to articulate new “concepts” through information and communicative technics.1 When

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 perhapsyou 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

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“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 teletechnologiesare but the expression of capitalism’s hegemony in digital format. Thishegemony was no less discerned by Derrida in the early 1990s, rec-ognizing 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 “homogeneityof a medium, of discursive norms and models,” like the unstoppableshift to network-based communications, is a testimony to the “existinghegemonies” of “the new effects of capitalism (within unprecedentedtechno-social structures)” (1992, 54, 45, 57). According to Derrida too,all existing dominant modes of communication and discourse arealways already products or determinations of a veiled capitalist mech -anism that had already evaluated their (speculated) proWtability “inthe supermarkets of culture” (1992, 101). With Derrida’s analysis, onecan perhaps speak of “evaluation societies” to complement Deleuze’s“control societies.” And just as users of teletechnological communi-cations in “control societies” are never the ones in control, neither arethose in “evaluation societies” autonomously evaluating their preferredmodes of communication. And while users in “control societies” donot create any real concepts, those in “evaluation societies” are nei-ther invested in the Nietzschean transvaluation of existing modes ofthoughts and practices. Despite the growing hegemony of “continu-ous control and instant communication” (Deleuze 1995, 174) or of adominant mode of communicative sociability, there is to be no com-promise, philosophically, for both Deleuze and Derrida, with “controlsocieties” or “evaluation societies.” One must respond with a criticalstance against them. For Derrida, “it is necessary that we learn to de -tect, in order then to resist, new forms of cultural takeover” (1992, 54).Deleuze, adopting a more radical position, will call for “a hijacking ofspeech” or the creation of “vacuoles of non-communication, circuit-breakers, to escape control” (1995, 175, translation modiWed).

Fast-forward to our present early twenty-Wrst century, and it isclear that “control societies” or “evaluation societies” are no longeran imminence. However, it is not the case that we have freed our-selves from them today. On the contrary, we Wnd ourselves very much

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situated within such societies, as they have established themselves asan undeniable reality. Today, they are fortifying themselves strongerthan ever behind the global expanse of digital social networks likeMySpace, Facebook, Lively, and Twitter. These digital social networksare apparatuses that not only enable communicative sociability to beredeWned by the overexposure of real-time messages incessantly ex -changed and disseminated via those digital platforms; they also enableusers to maintain and augment an archive of almost all the friendsthey have had by creating digital links to an ever expanding networkof friends. Here, friendship is clearly the “concept” that digital socialnetworks are claiming to redeWne or “create,” turning it into a mere“gregarious” buzz where one “deWn[es] ‘friend’ simply as [anyone]who communicates a wish to be one.”2 In the Deleuzian analysis, thiswould only mean that the (philosophical) concept of friendship is inthe process of being appropriated and corrupted by digital appara-tuses. There is also no doubt that digital social networks are deter-mining themselves to be the universal if not dominant (discursive)norm, condition, medium, model, and even law of friendship today.3

Furthermore, that a capitalist machine of “continuous control and in -stant communication” continues to motivate and drive this hegemonicdimension of digital network sociability is evident when the re-“con-ceptualization” and dissemination of friendship through networks oreven as networks serve only to promote the development, prolifera-tion, and selling of all sorts of network technics and services, feedingwhat Deleuze calls “capitalism’s supreme thought” of marketing.4 The“concept” of friendship proclaimed by digital social networks, then,is no less corrupt than the mode of communicative sociability thatDeleuze analyzed in the late ’80s and early ’90s. And users of contem-porary social networks, caught up in, or bought into the friendshiparchive fever and the ecstasy of hyper-gregariousness that digital socialnetworks offer,5 are equally complicit in sustaining capitalist ideologyand its network apparatuses.

Given the global scope of digital social networks today, one couldsay that “control societies” or “evaluation societies” have “upgraded”into an empire of networks or a network empire.6 What remains ofthe Deleuzian/ Derridean philosophical imperative to resist the hege -mony of capitalist information and communication technics in the faceof this network empire? For this paper, I will leave aside the question

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of the critical import of Deleuze’s philosophy for today, since severalcontemporary theorists have already developed Deleuzian responsesand critiques against the network empire.7 I will be concerned ratherwith the potentiality of Derrida’s philosophy today to break with orto “be unequal” (Derrida 1992, 52) to the dominant and universalizing“concept” and communicative norm of friendship as disseminated bydigital social networks. As noted above, the concept of friendship iswhat is centrally at stake or in question in this contemporary networkculture. Can Derrida’s philosophy wrest that concept back from itsideological appropriation by digital social networks or the networkempire, as Deleuze did with the concept of the concept?8 One may per-haps say that this question is raised in an untimely fashion, since Der-rida in 1994 has already published his work on friendship in Politicsof Friendship. Politics of Friendship, in short, exposes the illusion of anyfriendship predicated on counting one’s number of friends and on afoundation of similitude in terms of personality traits, habits, and likesand dislikes. It critiques such friendship as ultimately narcissistic, de -void of any critical attention to the absolute difference if not othernessof the friend. In the wake of Politics of Friendship, network-centric friend-ship comes across as nothing but an immense philosophical letdown.This is because, Wrst, its fever for friendship archive is borne no lesswith an anxiety to make a spectacle of one’s ability to possess andacquire a massive number of friends, as the hyperlinking technics ofdigital social networks allow. Second, these networked friends are usu-ally similar to oneself, hence betraying the fact that network-centricfriendship hardly regards the dissimilar friend. But even before ques-tioning network-centric friendship’s openness to the other who is dif-ferent or dissimilar, it is already difWcult to speak of its genuine interestor sincerity in truly knowing—in the most basic sense—even the hyper-linked friend.9 Given that there is no stopping the technological drivethat will enhance and further proliferate current digital social networks,nor the global dissemination of the doxa that this contemporary hyper-gregariousness is the true condition of friendship today, can a returnto Politics of Friendship allow one to “write and think, in particular as regards friendship, against great numbers” (Derrida 1997, 70)? Tore iterate, the question is an untimely one. However, untimeliness,according to philosophers from Nietzsche to Deleuze, Derrida, andAgamben,10 is but the proper philosophical response to what today or


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the contemporary is, in contradistinction to their hegemonic determi-nation by ideological technics. According to Derrida, philosophy’s crit-ical engagement with today is an opening of the contemporary as the“non-contemporaneity with itself of the living present” (1994c, xix);it is to “take account of other rhythms and trajectories” (1992, 103). Byproposing an untimely rereading of Politics of Friendship here, I wouldindeed like to “take account of other rhythms and trajectories” in thethinking of friendship, and “not to let oneself be fascinated by [the]quantitative immediacy” (103) of the “concept” of friendship offeredby digital social networks.

At this point, I note too that Politics of Friendship builds explicitlyon Nietzsche’s call for an antigregarious solitariness, which is clearlyarticulated in the passage quoted as the Wrst epigraph to this essay.According to Nietzsche, the future philosopher or new philosophyarrives by way of irrupting and disseminating a certain solitarinesswithin communitarian space. The future philosopher, who is “not ex -actly the most communicative spirit” (Nietzsche 2002, 41 §44), yearnsfor such a space so as to stand apart from the rest of the world. Fromthere, he or she can critique the world’s doxa, dominant values, andnorms of communicative discourse, and subsequently create new val-ues and concepts, and new modes of articulation beWtting those newvalues and concepts (and this is why he or she is a jealous friend ofsolitude). With the saturation of the contemporary world by digitalsocial networks, the arrival of the future philosopher or philosophyseems to be at risk today. And should the future philosopher have thechance to arrive, the same saturation would still make him or her morejealous than ever of solitude, since solitary spaces are almost effectivelyprecluded or closed off now. Rereading Politics of Friendship today thenimplies staking a claim for the Nietzschean force of thought, to insiston a chance for a future new philosophy or new philosopher, and onthe chance for the emergence of a solitary if not antigregarious or evenanticommunitarian space amid the contemporary swarming of friend-ship networks.11 That would be the politics of friendship today, a pol-itics of Politics of Friendship also, through which one creates a syncopeto disrupt, displace, if not short-circuit or even hack, the disseminationof the network-centric “concept” of friendship and the capitalist net-work empire behind it. But it would be a politics not in terms of stateor institutional acts but politics in a philosophical sense, that is to say,

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following Derrida, politics as a question of reading.12 Short of any realphysical act, since philosophy in itself is undeniably an exercise ofthought on paper, only a particular mode of reading a particular textor concept, a reading that resists a prevalent doxa, can constitute phi-losophy’s veritable political force. Hence, if contemporary philosoph-ical discourse on friendship is to project a political force, I would arguethat it must put forth a reading that unveils and demolishes the sim-ulacral “concept” of network-centric friendship. That is what I will tryto do with a rereading of Politics of Friendship. And I do that with aview to posit and insist on, in a sustained manner, the disturbing truththat underlies Politics of Friendship, which is the radical truth that thereis no such thing as friendship. This has to be done “in a sustained man-ner” because I think Derrida ultimately does not see the rejection offriendship to its end. As I will show in the course of the paper, Derridaseems to retreat from that trajectory. Yet, for Politics of Friendship to havecritical force today against contemporary hyper-gregariousness, andfor the chance for a Nietzschean solitary space to emerge, it is neces-sary that a reading of Politics of Friendship today does not retreat fromthat rejection of friendship. To that end, this paper will suggest raisinga particular Wgure of thought, the Wgure of the reject as I call it, in orderto establish once and for all perhaps that rejection of friendship.

One more note on the politics of reading (of) Politics of Friendship:one could say that there are two ends of friendship that Politics of Friend-ship observes and critiques. The Wrst, which Derrida spells out in theWrst half of the book, is philosophical, and it is the perfectibility offriendship in order to arrive at a thought, something that has become aquasi-law in the history of philosophy that binds friendship to thought.The second is friendship’s political telos functioning at the state orinstitutional level, which is indicated by the book’s title, and whichconcerns the rest of Politics of Friendship (where one Wnds the famouscritique of Schmittian institutional politics). I do not deny the impor-tance of discussing the politics of friendship or the politics of Politicsof Friendship at the state or institutional level (see Leitch; Thomson).After all, the same digital social networks disseminating and support-ing the network-centric “concept” of friendship have already impli-cated themselves in American party politics in the 2008 presidentialcampaign. They have been instrumental in creating a space or ratherhyperspace of political fraternity by establishing and disseminating


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mutually shared hopes and ideologies, a politics of friendship thatDerrida critiques precisely in Politics of Friendship (see Stelter). I reiter -ate however that the interest of my paper is philosophical: it is investedin the philosophical stakes of thinking about friendship, or ratherantifriendship, today. As such, I would like to limit any notion of pol-itics of philosophical friendship and/or Politics of Friendship to the ques-tion of reading as stated above. In other words, this essay will focuson the Wrst part of Politics of Friendship, leaving aside the second. As Iwill show in a while, the Wrst part contains enough philosophical forceto disrupt any sense of gregariousness, and therefore a close readingof this section will be more useful for the philosophical contour of thispaper. Finally, even if I am short-circuiting the (institutional) politicalteleology of Politics of Friendship, there will also be no manifesto-likepoint-by-point application of my reading or argument toward a pos-sible political action against contemporary digital social networks. Ileave that to activists who, if possible, have the will to reject friend-ship while striking out against social network apparatuses.

POLITICS OF FRIENDSHIP, OR I HAVE ENOUGH OF YOU, MY FRIEND, FOR NOW

Most readers of Politics of Friendship probably will not doubt that thetext articulates a force of rejection against friendship in friendshipitself.13 This takes place after all right at the beginning of Politics ofFriendship, where Derrida puts forth unreservedly the disturbing truththat there is no such thing as friendship, or that friendship is impos-sible. There, Derrida brings to surface the unsayable or “nothing say -able”14 that subtends all friendships, and this “nothing sayable” is butthe Nietzschean “murderous truth” that “there are no more friends”(1997, 1, 54). In other words, friendship, if there is such a thing, is alwaysalready at bottom rent by a projective rejection of friendship (“thereare no more friends”). If there remains an appearance of friendship,it is only because the silence of the “nothing sayable” is maintainedby those who continue to seek friendship, a silence constituting an“illusion” (53) or simulacrum of friendship, a silence kept “amongfriends, concerning friends . . . so as not to tell the truth, a murderoustruth” (54).

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Derrida certainly has no interest in further repressing that “noth-ing sayable” of friendship that rejects friendship. Instead, he makes itthe task of Politics of Friendship to unconceal that dark thought of anti -friendship at the very heart of both friendship and a line of friendshiptexts in the history of philosophy. Before going into that, I would liketo add that the “nothing sayable” of friendship also concerns thoseirreducible occasions when one friend quietly thinks, in an about-turnof friendship, I have enough of you, my friend, for now (and I note thatthis takes place even in the absence of quarrel between friends). Butfor fear of murdering what they have between themselves, friends, intheir respective secret reserves of thought, have not dared to say it.Yet as long as this irreducible moment of refusing friendship alwaysremains, it will forever throw any notion of friendship into disarray.To put it in another way, it will always present itself as some sort ofcontradiction to or in friendship, an impasse or aporia that any thoughtof friendship must always stand before. It is also perhaps another wayof articulating Nietzsche’s antigregariousness or rejection of friend-ship, for Derrida will also explicate the Nietzschean “nothing sayable”or “murderous truth” as the fact that “solitude is irremediable and[therefore] friendship impossible” (54), that we all desire ultimately,at some point, “an untimely being-alone” (55). This fact of “an untimelybeing-alone” is what I call the irreducible anticommunity (and there-fore perhaps also antifriendship) reserve of every individual, the un -deniable desire at times to depart from, or leave aside, the friend.15 Ifthe task of Politics of Friendship is to foreground and maintain the mur-derous “nothing sayable” of friendship, so as to destabilize the amica-ble concept of friendship in the history of philosophy and at present,I would say that one must no longer keep in reserve that irreduciblethought of antifriendship, but to give it exposition with force. Thequestion then is how to articulate and insist on such an exposition. Iwill return to this later.

As Politics of Friendship demonstrates, the history of philosophy offriendship before Nietzsche lacks the will to unveil the inherent rejec-tion of friendship in friendship itself. Derrida’s deconstructive cri-tique of the friendship texts of Cicero and Aristotle then functions tobring them to terms with that repressed truth and force of rejection.With Cicero and Aristotle, Derrida shows that what ultimately over-turns friendship in their texts is not only a narcissistic ipseity that


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essentially supplants any genuine or sincere thinking of the friend,but that this narcissism at the same time involves a perverse lookingforward to death in friendship, looking forward in other words to aphysical breakage in friendship. For Cicero, “virtuous friendship” con-cerns the work of illuminating the exemplary character of the self bythe friend, and this is the narcissistic part of friendship. What is worseis that the seeking of this “virtuous friendship” is actually predicatedon a speculation of the death of the self: one looks forward to thedeath of the self, the absolute (physical) separation of the self from thefriend, because it is only then that the friend’s work of mourning, wherethe friend remembers and embellishes the life and work of the self,can possibly be set into motion.

In Aristotle, one deals not with the death of oneself but the deathof the other, that is, the beloved friend. Here, the death of the other orthe friend is structured around the preeminence of loving or to-love,which Derrida refers to as l’aimance (“lovence” according to GeorgeCollins’s translation), over being-loved. In Derrida’s analysis, thatdeath is inscribed by rendering the beloved or being-loved not onlyan object of l’aimance, but also an object through l’aimance. As Derridawrites of Aristotle’s aimance: “If we trusted the categories of subjectand object [in friendship], we would say in this logic that friendship(philía) is Wrst accessible on the side of its subject, who thinks andlives it, not on the side of its object, who can be loved or lovable with-out in any way being assigned to a sentiment of which, precisely, heremains the object” (1997, 9–10). Such reiWcation of the beloved friendannounces his or her death, even though the beloved friend is not yetdying or dead, because l’aimance of the one who loves or befriendsproceeds and survives (or as Derrida would add, sur-vivre, which isto over-live or outlive any mortality) regardless of whether the object-other knows, receives, and responds to this aimance: in this regard, theother can be presumed to be inanimate or else already dead. Here isDerrida again, reading Aristotle: “One cannot love without living andwithout knowing that one loves, but one can still love the deceased orthe inanimate who then know nothing of it. It is indeed through thepossibility of loving the deceased that the decision in favor of a cer-tain lovence comes into being” (10). In short, the beloved friend is reallysecondary in this scheme of friendship of l’aimance. What matters moreis the perfectibility of a narcissistic giving of friendship or l’aimance

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on the part of the self. One could almost be care-less about the fact ifthe other is living or not in the Aristotelian friendship. Here, the rejec-tion of friendship operates in such a way that it “plunges the friend,before mourning, into mourning” and “weeps death before death” (14).Aristotle’s aimance, in Derrida’s reading, would only be the “grieveact of loving” (14) or a “grieving survival” (15). The narcissism andwork of mourning in friendship in both Cicero and Aristotle then ren-der any thought of friendship nothing but a “post mortem discourse”(5), a projection of an end of friendship, of which Derrida does nothesitate to suggest, chidingly, how tiresome such a scene of friendshipis: “[W]ho does not abhor this theater? Who would not see therein therepetition of a disdainful and ridiculous staging, the putting to deathof friendship itself?” (5).

FRIENDS, OR REJECTS

Once the essential tear in the thought of friendship—ruptured byNietz sche and auto-deconstructed in Aristotle and Cicero—is un -veiled, the point, according to Derrida, is not to weave a suture overthis terrifying rent: “so be it, since it is so; and keep it intact in mem-ory, never forget it” (1997, 27). In other words, one must always giveexposition to the force of rejection of friendship, always make an ex -posé of that rejection, always articulate that “murderous truth” of anirreduc ible antifriendship that is already shared between friends. Onemust plunge friendship into that impasse or abyss and let it dwellthere, especially when anything resembling friendship is at the brinkof (re)founding itself. In short, there must be no rapprochement. Itmust be admitted however that articulating this force of rejection is adifWcult task. Its exposition or exposé in general tends to be repressedand forgotten, especially in the cacophony of contemporary hyper-gregariousness. In order to maintain a constant affront against anyform of gregariousness, and also against any rapprochement with re -gard to the rejection of friendship, I would like to suggest that rais-ing a Wgure of thought in friendship, the Wgure of the reject, may beinstrumental.

By reject, I do not mean only the conventional passive Wgure thatis a target of rejection, abandonment, marginalization, banishment,


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and so forth. The reject as I consider it can turn those objectifyingoperations around and launch its own forces of rejection against thosesame external forces. It might even be the case that it is because thisWgure Wrst rejects other forces around itself that it is rendered a reject.To make this Wgure more interesting, if not critical, I would also liketo think that this reject turns the force of rejection against itself. I cer-tainly do not mean this in any nihilistic sense. Auto-rejection seeksonly to prevent the reject from becoming a static Wgure, to avoid itsossiWcation in whatever disposition it adopts at a particular moment.In relation to friendship, a Wgure of the reject would not only be thesolitary one, the one who stands apart from friendship, but also theone who raises the impasse or abyss of friendship before friendship,raising it before the other and against himself or herself, constantlyplunging friendship into that abyss. I note that this Wgure of the rejectis not a conjuration coming from outside the history of philosophy of friendship. As I will soon demonstrate, it subtends that history. Itsubtends Politics of Friendship too, and it is in this sense that one canregard Politics of Friendship not only as a book about the rejection offriendship but also a book about rejects.

The Wgure of the reject already inheres in Aristotle. This reject isthe being-loved that is unbearable to Aristotle, rejected from Aristo-tle’s theater of “perfect friendship” because he or she knows nothing,does nothing, and says nothing, or in short, does not reciprocate. InAristotle’s perspective, this reject is insensible to the aimance of the lov-ing friend. In Derrida’s nuanced reading of Aristotle’s take on the re -jected being-loved, he posits the following reXection: “Being loved—what does that mean? Nothing, perhaps” (9, emphasis added).16 At Wrstglance, the apparently judgmental “nothing” gives the impression thatDerrida here is speaking in Aristotle’s voice. But the “perhaps” thatenjoins almost immediately disrupts, if not overturns, the Aristotel -ian judgment of the beloved as an insigniWcant “nothing” or merereject. This is because the Nietzschean–Derridean “perhaps” wouldre call the Nietzschean “nothing sayable” that announces the “mur-derous truth” of an essential rejection of friendship within friendshipitself. In other words, the being-loved as reject or “nothing”—the being-loved as meaning-nothing or being-nothing—now comes to represent or signify the violent “nothing sayable” of murderous friendship. Thebeing-loved, previously a targeted or passive reject, now becomes a

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Wgure that potentially bears the active force of rejection of friendship,precisely through his or her silence, inaction, and nonresponse. Assuch, one is now never certain if the being-loved, in his or her secretsilence, is not in fact consciously rejecting acknowledging and respond-ing to the aimance of friendship. In other words, this reject may bealready putting into place or articulating, furtively but in an activemanner, the “murderous truth” of rejecting friendship, through his orher nonresponse. If this is indeed the secret potentiality of the being-loved as reject, perhaps it is toward this Wgure that one should turn totoday, rather than to denigrate it as Aristotle does, so as to locate aforce of rejection to strike out against the contemporary doxa ofhyper-gregariousness.

The reject also Wgures in Nietzsche’s thought of friendship, par-ticularly in his conception of the “new philosophers.” The reject inNietzsche, unlike in Aristotle, is an explicitly active Wgure. And it isnot difWcult to infer that it would probably be this Wgure that initiatesany act of rejection. According to Derrida, these “new philosophers”reject coming to presence, and reject all proximity, resemblance, access,or links to friendship or any communitarian structure. These rejectsare “inaccessible friends, friends who are alone because they are in -comparable and without common measure, reciprocity or equality.Therefore, without a horizon of recognition” (35). They are “the uncom-promising friends of solitary singularity” who “love only in cuttingties” (35). However, that does not mean that Nietzsche’s reject will befree from being a target of rejection. It will not be surprising that fromthe moment these “new philosophers” declare their rejection of anyform of human alliances, they will very quickly become targets ofrejection themselves, for even today, such anticommunitarian spiritremains as unbearable as articulating the irreducible thought of anti -friendship between friends.17 But, once again, perhaps it is preciselybecause this Nietzschean reject bears or articulates something so rad-ically displacing or disruptive against friendship that only the expo-sition of this Wgure can posit a shock to the entire network-centricsystem of simulacral friendship, and in that process, short-circuit orundo that system.

There is the Wgure of the reject in Derrida too. But Derrida doesnot make his reject articulate the irreducible thought of antifriendship.Instead, he makes that enunciation unfold through the other. In other


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words, the other is rendered an active Wgure of rejection, while the selfbecomes the passive target of that rejection. The other must become,like Nietzsche’s reject or the “new philosopher,” the Wgure that activelyrejects friendship. At the same time, the self renders himself or her-self, like Aristotle’s reject (i.e., the beloved friend), a target of rejectionof friendship. In that sense, one could say that Derrida’s reject playsout, in an inverse manner, both the Nietzschean reject that forcefullyinitiates a refusal of all ties with other humans and the passive belovedfriend whom Aristotle rejects but who may be coyly or implicitlyrejecting friendship in his or her nonreciprocity. There are indeed twoWgures of the reject here, and Derrida sets up this scene of rejects forus. This scene takes place “as if I were calling someone . . . saying tohim or her, in sum: I don’t want you to wait for my call and becomeforever dependent upon it; go out on the town, be free not to answer.And to prove it, the next time I call you, don’t answer, or I won’t seeyou again. If you answer my call, it’s all over” (174).18

For Derrida, making oneself a reject in the sense of a passive tar-get, or in other words, an auto-reject, is as critical as actively rejectingfriendship. One can perhaps understand Derrida’s idea of renderingoneself a reject as a preemptive measure against lapsing into the all-too-human weakness for some sense of amicability or gregariousness.In other words, only by reminding oneself that one is a reject in friend-ship, by redirecting the abyssal force of rejection against oneself—atraumatic gesture no doubt for some—can one discourage or resistoneself from any rapprochement with the other. For Derrida, it is alsoby making oneself a reject that one learns to respect the distance of theother, to respect the other as other, absolutely free in himself or her-self, without any need for him or her to approach, speak, respond, ordisclose any information about himself or herself. In Derrida’s words,it is as such that I learn that “I must . . . leave the other to come,”—andgo as I will add—“free in his movement, out of reach of my will ordesire, beyond my very intention” (174). There is the other who willarrive from the future, as Derrida always reminds us. But I will addthat there is also the other who does not want to arrive, and does notarrive, before our presence. Only by rendering myself a reject, becausethe other rejects responding to me, that I will begin to learn to accede tothe “desire to renounce desire” (174) for any amicability or gregarious -ness. Only as such will I not forget the force of rejection in friendship,

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that the irreducible thought of antifriendship is equally desired andshared by the other. Only as such will I not forget the “murderoustruth” of friendship, the truth that we are all rejects in friendship. Rejectsin or before friendship, each and every one of us will have the rightto refuse to respond, or even the right to walk away, silently, withoutexplanation; and there would be neither rapprochement nor reproach.This is what has to be kept in mind at every instance of thinking aboutfriendship, whether at the level of intellectual discourse, or in thepractice of everyday life.

At this point, I would like to add that there is in Nietzsche hardlythat force of auto-rejection where one defers to the nonresponse, if notthe walking away, of the other. (This is perhaps where the [auto-]rejectthat I am elucidating differentiates itself from Nietzsche’s reject.) Asevident from the Wrst epigraph to this paper, Nietzsche senses the im -minence of the “new philosophers,” and hails them. There is no walk-ing away here: Nietzsche does not walk away from their approaching,and he does not tell the new philosophers to disperse, or to be “freein [their] movement, out of reach of [his] will or desire, beyond [his]very intention” as Derrida tells the other. In fact, the address or callto the new philosophers—and Derrida says that Nietzsche makes a“teleiopoetic or telephone call to philosophers of a new species” (34)—is made in expectation that they “follow” Nietzsche and like-minded“free spirits” (see Nietzsche 2002, 104 §210), rather than to not re -spond or leave town as in Derrida’s scenario. This following wouldseem to precipitate, despite the respective solitudes of Nietzsche andthe new philosophers, into some sort of ensemble, which is in factalready presupposed by the “we” that Nietzsche uses to address thenew philosophers. One wonders then if, between Nietzsche and thenew philosophers, the “murderous truth” of friendship has beensmoothened out, as if Nietzsche and the new philosophers are nowsomewhat immune or exceptional to the irreducible thought of anti -friendship. But perhaps one may say that it is precisely because of anacknowledgement of that dark thought of friendship that they willcome to recognize among themselves a “we.” In either case, Nietz -sche’s “we” precariously betrays a certain readiness to abandon hisdeepest solitude and those of the new philosophers, articulating insteada looking forward to some sort of rapprochement between himselfand the new philosophers.19 The auto-reject, on the other hand, always


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keeps in mind the irreducible thought of antifriendship before theother, regardless of whether the other is a new philosopher or not,and ceaselessly insists on the rejection of any slightest sense of rap-prochement. I have indeed said that I would like to stake a chance forthe arrival of the new philosopher and his or her space of solitarinesshere, but it is the possibility of his or her irruption within the contem-porary world saturated by digital social networks that I am seeking.Thinking how that chance may be created does not constitute hailingthe arrival of the new philosopher, demanding that he or she respond,and that he or she join me in this present endeavor. And that is whereI depart from Nietzsche. I will now return to explicate Derrida’s think-ing of friendship, and as it will be revealed, the Nietzschean problem -atic arises in Derrida too.

DERRIDA’S NOUVELLE AIMANCE

Is Derrida’s auto-reject courageous or radical enough to walk away, soas to put in effect a veritable rupture, breakage, or rejection of friend-ship? Or does this auto-reject remain at the borders of an abyssal oralready-rent friendship, hoping and waiting for a rapprochement oreven suture, like what Nietzsche does before the new philosophers? Tobe sure, Derrida never considers such a gesture as walking away; walk-ing away is not Derrida’s strategy, not only in thinking about friendship,but also in all his other concepts like hospitality and democracy-to-come. The Derridean strategy, as is well known, is attendre sans s’atten-dre, or waiting without expecting, as Derrida writes in Foi et savoir andmany other places. My quarrel with this waiting-without-expecting isthat it indirectly sets up a demand for the other to arrive. In otherwords, it inadvertently gives rise to a situation where the other, whohas no desire or intention at all to arrive in the Wrst place, but becauseof some sense of ethical responsibility or obligation to respond, posed(or even imposed upon) undeniably by the presence of the one whoawaits, comes under pressure to (re)approach. One can put it in termsof Derrida’s scenario where the other is instructed not to respond tothe call made by the self: the self might be programming for himselfor herself a kind of waiting-without-expectation, but the fact that theother is instructed to not pick up the phone, in other words, that the

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other is made to know that the self nonetheless is in some way wait-ing for some form of response (though claiming not to expect it), mightultimately compel the other to call back some time later. As such, Ibelieve that Derrida’s stakes for a future radical relation based on anonresponse by the other risk failing in a way reminiscent of Nietz -sche’s case with the new philosophers. Attendre sans s’attendre, an im -minent rapprochement or even a suture over all theaters of friendshipironically begins to emerge as a promising or even possible, realizablehorizon in Derrida’s thinking about friendship, resurrecting, in otherwords, the very thing that Derrida’s deconstructive critique of Ciceroand Aristotle, as noted earlier, seeks to reject.

I would also say that what adds to Derrida’s hesitation to walkaway from friendship is the notion of l’aimance. L’aimance, as pointedout earlier, is a term Derrida reads into Aristotle’s philosophy of “per-fect friendship.” As shown too, Derrida disagrees with such an aimancebecause it is at bottom only a narcissistic loving in friendship thatlooks forward to the death of the friend. Yet Derrida is nonethelessenchanted by the leitmotif of l’aimance, and seeks to maintain it in histhinking about friendship. It is with l’aimance, however, that Derrida’sthought on friendship will make an about-face from its radical trajec-tory and take on instead a limited contour, if not a reactionary swerve.This is because l’aimance, functioning as a supplementary leitmotif ofattendre sans s’attendre, will keep Derrida faithful to some amicablenotion at a point where he could have walked away from friendship,or where the rejection of friendship could have been carried out com-pletely. It is as such that one must problematize Derrida’s aimance, ifDerrida’s thought on friendship is to be a critical force against thedominance or hegemony of network-centric friendship today.

In a way, Derrida’s nouvelle aimance is a recuperation of l’aimanceafter its violent appropriation, at the cost of love or l’amour, by Aris-totle and Nietzsche. Derrida’s critique of the respective aimances ofAristotle and Nietzsche concerns precisely the renunciation of l’amour.Aristotle’s thinking of a “perfect friendship” will reach a point wherehe will say that “loving seems to be the characteristic virtue of friends”or that “friendship depends more on loving” (205–6, 205). However,as Derrida observes, this “loving” or aimance arrives via a denigra-tion of amorous love. Aristotle indeed makes the claim that a “per-fect friendship” of loving is “permanent” or “an enduring thing,” while


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amorous love lacks this quality of everlastingness (197, 196).20 It is fromsuch a critique of love that Aristotle proceeds to set up the preemi-nence of “loving” in friendship’s aimance over l’amour. With regard toNietzsche’s aimance, Derrida locates it in Nietzsche’s “new philoso-phers,” identifying them as those “who love lovence” (1997, 35). Justas in Aristotle’s case, Nietzsche’s aimance will be of a force greater thanl’amour, “a love more loving than love” (64, emphasis added), where allforms of friendship will be ruptured, leaving only “disappropriation”or “inWnite distance” between the “new philosophers” (63). Here, Iwould postulate that it is not difWcult to deduce that l’aimance as such,in excess of l’amour, guarantees the rejection and nonrapprochementof friendship, and that this Nietzschean aimance—as Derrida reads it—is therefore a potential force against any form of gregariousness.21 Re -grettably, Derrida does not go with this aimance, which does not comeas a surprise, given that Derrida, as already evident in his reading ofAristotle’s aimance, is disagreeable with an aimance, such as Nietz -sche’s too, that denigrates l’amour.

As said then, the supersession in Nietzsche and Aristotle ofl’amour—the very concept from which some sense of loving in and ofl’aimance is derived—constitutes Derrida’s critique of their respectiveaimances. In place of the latter, Derrida rethinks, if not countersigns,l’aimance by reafWrming in it a sense of l’amour. In contradistinction toNietzsche and Aristotle, Derrida claims that there is always love atthe beginning, at the heart, and at the end of thinking about friend-ship. Of Politics of Friendship, Derrida will say, after all, “J’aimeraiscroire que ce livre traite avant tout de l’amour,” or “I would like tobelieve that this book concerns love before anything else” (1994a, mytranslation). This love clearly will not be the simultaneously appro-priative and negating aimance of Nietzsche and Aristotle, an aimancethat leaves the amorous love of l’amour as a rejected remnant. Instead,Derrida reinstates love as constitutive of l’aimance. For Derrida, onearrives at l’aimance only when l’amour undertakes a certain movementor crossing, a crossing of love to friendship.22 To be precise, it is throughthe passage of a devenir-amitié de l’amour or “becoming-friendship oflove” that one is granted a glimpse of “a new form of ‘lovence’” ornouvelle aimance (1997, 66).

One gets only a “glimpse” of this aimance because one can supposethat Derrida’s nouvelle aimance is of an ephemeral quality. After all,

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Derrida posits his nouvelle aimance in terms of a momentary or tran-sitory experience, something that happens once in time and that is all:“Perhaps one day, here or there, who knows, something may happenbetween two people in love, who would love each other lovingly . . .in such a way that friendship, just once, perhaps, for the Wrst time(another perhaps), once and only once, therefore for the Wrst and lasttime (perhaps, perhaps), will become the correct name, the right andjust name” (66). Evidently, there is no walking away (from friendship)here in Derrida’s aimance. There is instead an indubitable attendre sanss’attendre for a “friendship,” which “will become the correct name,the right and just name” of a relation beyond all conceptualizationsof friendship in the history of philosophy.23 I certainly do not disagreewith the question of a crossing of love. In fact, as I will explicate later,a passage through love will be necessary for any thought that seeks tosee through to its end the rejection of friendship. The problem I havewith Derrida’s aimance is that in speaking so lovingly of l’aimance, itvery quickly resurrects an all too hopeful promise or possible horizonof “friendship” at the end of this crossing of love. I would argue thatthis possibility is undeniable even though Derrida would claim this“friendship” to be absolutely different from all present ideas of friend-ship. According to Derrida, this new friendship would correspond toits “correct name, [its] right and just name,” in other words, “a friend-ship which will never be reduced to the desire or the potentiality offriendship” (17), a “dream of friendship which goes beyond [the] prox -imity of the congeneric double” (viii).

The announcement of a possible destination in this crossing oflove, and the naming of that destination as “friendship,” are preciselywhat I Wnd problematic about Derrida’s aimance. I would ask: Whystay with the term “friendship”? Why (re)call or (re)name “friendship”as the horizon of l’aimance? By holding on to that name of “friend-ship,” does it not risk a nostalgic maelstrom that will pull everythingthat is absolutely new and different in this aimance back to what hasbeen known as “friendship,” and hence override the alterity properto l’aimance? Derrida might attempt time and again to qualify this“friendship” at the end of the crossing of love as wholly different fromany present conception of friendship, but do not the qualiWcations riskbetraying a wavering or precarious faith in a future relation resemblingnothing that we have at present? Worse, do not the same qualiWcations


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risk betraying an irresistible yearning for friendship as we alwaysknow it, a symptom that seems to be already betrayed when Derridahands over the articulating of I have enough of you, my friend, for now tothe other, rather than declaring it oneself? With this horizon of “friend-ship,” how truly is the other “free in his movement, out of reach of mywill or desire, beyond my intention”? Why not leave whatever hap-pens with l’aimance an open term, an unnameable event, leaving it assomething that has yet no name, leaving it—so as to be true and justto the eventness of l’aimance—to be named only in the future, suchthat it does not in any anterior fashion recall or threaten to recall analready existing concept? Why not therefore completely reject thename of “friendship”? Derrida himself has in fact posited this option,asking of the event of l’aimance, “how can you name an event? For thislove that would take place only once would be the only possible event:as an impossible event” (66). And yet, as shown, Derrida nonethelesstakes recourse in the name of “friendship.”24

One could say then that the renaming of “friendship” as the pos-sible horizon of l’aimance risks undermining the radicality of Derrida’sdeconstructive critique of the history of philosophy of friendship. Con-sequently, it also becomes somewhat unconvincing when in relationto l’aimance, Derrida says, “I am saying nothing, then, that can be saidor is sayable” (70), especially when this “nothing sayable,” as discussedearlier, is nothing but the “murderous truth” between friends, thetruth that a force of rejection underlies all friendships, that friends areall rejects in and before friendship, or that friendship is, in a word,impossible. With the naming of “friendship” as the horizon of l’aimance,I believe that Derrida’s force of thought does not quite match up tohis reading of a Nietzschean wager in an “inWnite distance” or an“uncompromising . . . solitary singularity” at the heart of the “nothingsayable” or “murderous truth” of friendship. The hope for a becoming-friendship of love only reveals a hesitation in Derrida’s aimance at thethreshold of a complete breakage with friendship. Put in another way,the passion to recuperate l’amour back into l’aimance has seeminglymade Derrida give in to an amicable reXex or reXex of amicability inwhat has been so far a radical critique or rejection of friendship. Afully articulated “nothing sayable” of friendship therefore remainswanting in Derrida. In the face of hyper-gregarious digital social net-works that are swarming the contemporary world, which severely

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threatens the solitary space from which the new philosopher will arrive,one cannot entertain all the above risks in any contemporary rereadingof Politics of Friendship. The rejection of friendship subtending Politicsof Friendship must be put forth unequivocally today, without leavingthe slightest possibility or chance to resurrect that concept or evenname of “friendship” that Politics of Friendship has so far critiqued.

One could further problematize Derrida’s aimance. Derrida’saimance might occur only once, for a moment, or “just once, . . . onceand only once, . . . for the Wrst and last time,” but it does not really saythat everything would be renounced, or to put it more positively,would begin again, after that “once.” In other words, there would bethe risk of resting with this “once”—and that would still keep to thesense of being “the Wrst and the last time”—and making it the foun-dation for a future relation or friendship, which then risks cutting offthe event of a further future relation that not only goes beyond “afriendship which goes beyond [the] proximity of the congeneric dou-ble” but also the name of “friendship.” If l’aimance is something reallyephemeral, something that occurs “just once” without it settling downto become a norm or condition that would determine and regulatefuture events of relations, then it certainly must learn to walk away,especially away from friendship. What characterizes the ephemeralafter all is its dispersion.25 Playing on the French aimant, which canmean the person immersed in l’aimance, the adjective “loving,” andalso magnet, Samuel Weber has interpreted l’aimance as something ofa magnetic quality, related to the force that draws magnets together.26

But I would add that the same magnets, when they have the samepoles facing each other, will experience the force of repulsion whenthey try to come together. Yet this repulsion is not an immediate reac-tion. One can feel, even though this sensation is admittedly very minuteand lasts only for an almost imperceptible duration, an undeniableattraction drawing these magnets together before a force Weld is gen-erated between them to prevent them from approaching. If one wantsto keep to the term of l’aimance, I would then like to think of it in termsof this nuanced force of attraction-then-repulsion that develops whentwo magnets of the same pole encounter each other. In other words,what I am putting forth here is that there must be in l’aimance, if oneinsists on that term, a walking away from any recalling or even renam-ing of friendship, a walking away, in other words, also from any attendre


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sans s’attendre. To reiterate: for Politics of Friendship to constitute anadequate philosophical force against the doxa of contemporary hyper-gregariousness, it cannot afford any regressive or reactionary reXex thatrisks reinstating a possibility of friendship. Otherwise, it might evenseem that it gives sanction to that doxa. L’aimance cannot compromisethe radical carrying through of the rejection of friendship. To thatend, one must perhaps bring l’aimance to a point where it does notdare go or dwell, and that would be the abyss of love, or to wit, to bedeep in love.

LOVE, OR THE SYNCOPE OF FRIENDSHIP

As said previously, I do not dispute the crossing or movement of lovethat Derrida puts to work in l’aimance. In fact, I think it necessary thatsuch a crossing takes place, but only so as to arrive at the “murderoustruth” of the rejection of friendship, rather than to invoke the possi-bility of another form of amicability, no matter if one tries time andagain to claim that this new amicability will go beyond all presentforms of friendship. That is to say, I do think that Derrida’s aimance,which reinstates l’amour and initiates its movement or crossing, canremain to be a critical force against any form of gregariousness. Except,contrary to the hopeful trajectory that Derrida gives to l’aimance,where the optimistic horizon would be the becoming-friendship oflove, one must dare to think that love does not fully succeed in thecrossing toward friendship. One must dare to think that love will failfriendship, precisely in that crossing. With love, there will be no deliv-erance to a future friendship. To put it in another way, the crossing oflove would only bring about a syncope of friendship. In other words,love will suffocate, choke, smother, sink, drown out, all possibilitiesof friendship. Love’s syncopic operation will only bring to the surfacethe suffocating silence of the “nothing sayable” of friendship, the “mur-derous truth” between friends that “solitude is irremediable and friend-ship impossible.” In short, it is with love that the force of rejection offriendship comes to the fore afWrmatively. If one were to claim a stakefor l’aimance as a critical force combating the contemporary doxa ofhyper-gregariousness, one must then follow where love in l’aimanceleads to. In other words, one must sink to the depths of love withl’aimance, rather than to strive towards “friendship.”

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At this point, the discourse of Catherine Clément, who speaks ofsyncope as the promise of a new mode of thought, might help furtherelucidate the syncopic experience of love. Clément’s syncope bears inmind the pathological experience of a loss of consciousness, and shepays particular attention to the crossing from that syncope to the returnof consciousness. What fascinates her about syncope is the durationinvolved in this syncope before consciousness is regained. For her, thisduration is reminiscent of the musical notion of syncopation, a time-lag or “a note lag[ging] behind” (119),27 which she argues to give placeto a whole new dimension of thought and experience. Clément goesfurther to say that it is imperative to remain a little with or within thattime-lag, to dwell within that abyss, so as to experience the “radicalsurprise [where] one remains syncopated” (125). Whatever is new liesin that time lag. In that sense, one must learn to survive not only thesyncope but also what comes after it, for everything will not be thesame anymore. Any return to a prior state of reciprocal relation is for-ever lost in the syncopic experience of love. According to Clément.“from syncope, just as from love; no one returns the same as when heleft: he will not come back as he was at the beginning, he will neverbe the same. He will be ‘dis-similar.’ . . . It is the impossible return tothe same” (128). Out of the syncope of love, there is no rapprochement,no return to love’s previous conditions or stability; and likewise for a future love, there will be no reciprocity that is often expected orworked towards to in love. As Clément writes, “love will never be re -ciprocal, between a man and a woman,” “and syncope will be theeffect of such a perfect technique” (130).

If there is to be l’amour in l’aimance, it is this syncopic experienceof love then that l’aimance must dare to dwell with, a love whose cross-ing does not return to a previous amorous state, a love that breakswith any future reciprocity, and more importantly, a love that rejectsfriendship. In this aimance, parties are walking away. Someone, or bothaimants, would have walked away from a past love, and someone willalso be walking away from a future possible return to love, walkingaway also from friendship. Perhaps one can say that all are, once again,rejects in l’aimance. In a way, the syncopic experience of solitary loveis not foreign to Derrida’s aimance in Politics of Friendship. I tend to thinkthat it potentially lies in the references to night, darkness, shadows,or obscurity that Derrida attaches to his notion of a future friendship


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of l’aimance.28 But I would reiterate that one must be willing to dwellif not get lost absolutely in those dark syncopic spaces. Of l’aimance,Derrida has after all also spoken of a desire to get lost in similar syn-copic spaces: “J’aime y risquer des pas, j’aime aussi m’y perdre, letemps de m’y perdre” (“I like to risk steps there; I also like to losemyself there, and the time of losing myself there”) (1994a, my trans-lation). Nietzsche’s “deepest, most midnightly . . . solitude,” whereinlies the “nothing sayable” of friendship, is certainly another syncopicspace, provided one does not commit the Nietzschean lapse, as I haveshown, of proclaiming a “we” that will hail the other into some sortof rapprochement. In a time of hyper-gregariousness, a time and spacewhere the chance of the arrival of the Nietzschean solitary new phi -losopher or philosophy is at risk, one must learn to love getting lostin the syncopic experience of solitary love, without casting out a namelike “friendship,” or an address like “we,” as a possible lifeline out ofthe abyss and darkness of syncope. One must learn how to walk awayfrom any buoy that is marked with “friendship.” One must alwaysremember to reject “friendship,” or remind oneself that one is alwaysa reject in and of friendship. And that is perhaps “the most impossi-ble”—and I would add, necessary—“declaration of love” (1997, 174).

Notes

1. As Deleuze says in an interview, “ These days, information technology,communications, and advertising are taking over the words ‘concept’ and ‘cre-ative,’ and these ‘conceptualists’ constitute an arrogant breed that reveals theactivity of selling to be capitalism’s supreme thought, the cogito of the market place”(1995, 136). For Deleuze, the task of creating concepts does not lie with informationand communications industries and advertising enterprises. Instead, it properlybelongs to philosophy, and the true (philosophical) act of concept-creation has notime for, or has nothing to do with, communication, conversations, discussions,and gossips. (See also Deleuze and Guattari 1994 on this question of concept-creation.) In fact, according to Deleuze, things predicated on speech and commu-nication are not only nonphilosophical or nonconceptual but also corrupt: “Maybespeech and communication have been corrupted. They’re thoroughly permeatedby money—and not by accident but by their very nature” (1995, 175). It seems thenthat for Deleuze, speech and communication are intrinsically already inclinedtoward buying into, or even bought by, capitalist ideology, hence his mistrust notonly of them but also of any “concept” that they claim to articulate.

2. See Stross. I recall Deleuze here, who says that the true, philosophical task

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of concept-creation requires the commitment to the difWcult endeavor “to under-stand the problem posed by someone and how the latter poses it,” and “to enrichit, to vary the conditions, to add to it, [and] to relate it to something else” (1995,139, translation modiWed). The mere or frivolous communicative gregariousnessof network-centric friendship then surely disqualiWes it as a real concept, andhence one must refer to it only as a “concept.”

3. The New York Times article cited in the above note (Stross) also reports thatpeople over thirty years of age have been resistant to the kind of friendship offeredby digital social networks. However, as “each week, a million new members areadded [on Facebook] in the United States and Wve million globally; the 30-and-older group is its fastest-growing demographic.” It also notes an evolving “Lawof Amiable Inclusiveness” among digital social network members, where theyaccept without much, if any, thought, any request by anyone to be their friend justby a quick and simple digital function. See also CNN’s September 16, 2009, report,“Facebook Nearly as Large as U.S. Population,” on Facebook crossing the 300 mil-lion users threshold, close to the number of 307 million people living in the UnitedStates, and that its “fastest growing demographic is people older than 35.” Thereport also quotes Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg saying that Facebook is “justgetting started on [their] goal of connecting everyone.” The universalizing or uni-versal dimension of network-centric friendship will give the Deleuzian perspectiveanother occasion to point out that network-centric friendship does not constitutea real concept since, according to Deleuze, “a concept is not a universal” (1995,146, translation modiWed).

4. See n.1. Digital social networks as a source of information to be commer-cially mined by telecommunications corporations for the development and salesof future products or objects of desire is evident in a report on the launch ofMotorola’s mobile phone Cliq. In the report, a Motorola spokesperson proudlyproclaims that Cliq, with its “Internet-based service called Motoblur that inte-grates all of a user’s e-mail and social networking accounts . . . is meant for youngpeople obsessed with social networks” (Hansell). I also point to the controversialBeacon software that Facebook subjected its users to in 2008. The software stealth-ily tracked consumption patterns of Facebook users, and the information gath-ered from those evaluations was then sold to enterprises that in turn sent productadvertisements to all the friends of those users to generate greater sales. Accord-ing to a report, this dubious “sharing” of personal information, “without users’consent,” is but a testimony of companies “looking for more ways to make money”(Cohen); see also Aspan. And on the proWtability of Facebook, see the CNN reportcited in n.3.

5. Cf. Stross. But the phrase “ecstasy of hyper-gregariousness” is evidentlyinformed by the works of Baudrillard. I use “hyper” in “hyper-gregariousness”on the one hand to refer to the virtual or electronic dimension (as in “hyper-space,” “hyperlink,” “hyper-reality,” or “hypertext”) where the contemporary formof friendship is developing. On the other hand, I also use it in the Baudrillardiansense, as in Baudrillard’s notion of the “hyper-real” or the simulacrum, which


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refers to things more real than real or in excess of the real, yet at bottom are in factempty or without truth (see Baudrillard 1988; 1994). In that sense, the hyper-gregariousness of friendship proliferating in digital social networks is but a symp-tom of hyper-friendship—empty and without truth. The notion of “ecstasy” is ofcourse taken from Baudrillard’s Ecstasy of Communication. Baudrillard was writingthere mainly on television culture, and not on real-time digital connectivity, buthis observation that “ecstasy is all functions abolished into one dimension, thedimension of communication” (1988, 23–24) clearly is applicable to contemporarynetwork culture. Predicating friendship on the incessant real-time exchange ofmessages in hyperspace, reporting on almost everything—from the extraordinaryto the most mundane and banal—of one’s everyday life, has certainly given net-work-centric friendship a quality of ecstatic “cool communicational obscenity”(24). Baudrillard’s notions of “hyper-real” and “ecstasy” no doubt relate to Deleuze’sargument that superXuous conversation exchanged only for the sake of commu-nicative exchange neither underlies nor leads to any true concept.

6. Here, I am following a line of contemporary theorists like Michael Hardtand Antonio Negri, Alexander Galloway and Eugene Thacker, Brian Massumi,and McKenzie Wark. Building on Deleuze’s prophecy of “control societies,” thesetheorists identify the mode of “continuous control and instant communication”of “control societies” in the twenty-Wrst century in the form of something like anetwork empire, which “has emerged as a dominant form describing the natureof control today” (Galloway and Thacker, 4), and which “not only regulates humaninteractions but also seeks directly to rule over human nature” or “social life in itsentirety” (Hardt and Negri 2000, xv). And pertinent to the point at hand, Hardtand Negri also argue that the network empire is the manifestation of “capitalism’scolonization of communicative society” (404). See also Massumi (87).

7. See n.6.8. Cf. n.1, where I point to Deleuze’s commitment to reclaim the task of

concept-creation back to philosophy, by revealing the false and ideological naturebehind the “concepts” that information and communications industries and adver-tising enterprises claim to “create.”

9. Following Stross, I note that while digital social networks allow one tocount friends incredibly in the thousands, many of these “friends” are most likelypeople with whom one would have merely exchanged a message or two in hyper-space. In other words, they are hardly those one would have met physically andinteracted with for a duration of time in real life. I contrast this with Blanchot’sidea of friendship as “a slow work of time” in Pour l’amitié: “Sait-on quand ellecommence? Il n’y a pas de coup de foudre de l’amitié, plutôt un peu à peu, un lenttravail du temps. On était amis et on ne le savait pas” (Does one know when[friendship] begins? There is no love at Wrst sight of friendship. Rather, little by lit-tle, it is a slow work of time. One would be friends and one would not know it”)(7, my translation).

10. Cf. Nietzsche: “the philosopher . . . has, in every age been and has neededto be at odds with his today: his enemy has always been the ideal of today” (2002,

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106 §212). See also Agamben’s “What Is the Contemporary?” in the collectionWhat Is an Apparatus? And Other Essays (2009). The collection also includes Agam-ben’s essay on friendship, where he draws an almost unfriendly distinction withDerrida. This is not the space to treat Agamben’s thinking of friendship and itsdifference from Derrida’s. For that, see Weber; Wortham.

11. In this respect, I depart from the strategies of resistances of contempo-rary theorists mentioned in n.6. Their strategies often take on a communitarianand even communicative outline. For example, as some form of counter-empire,Hardt and Negri (2000, 407)—and this would apply to Cesare Casarino too—invoke the “common,” constituted by “singularities” that are those who have broken off from the ideological capture and control of network empires and arewresting back their rights to “free access to and control over knowledge, infor-mation, communication, and affects” (see also Casarino and Negri, 82). Hardt andNegri, and Casarino, make it explicit that the common is predicated on commu-nication or conversation, but a mode of communication different from that which“has become the central element that establishes the relations of production,guiding capitalist development and also transforming productive forces” (2000,347–48; see also Hardt and Negri 2004, 204). Casarino puts it this way: “ To con-verse is to be in common, to produce the common” (Casarino and Negri 2008, 2).“Multitude,” Hardt and Negri’s other term for “the common,” resonates in cer-tain ways with Virno’s “multitude,” which is no less communitarian. The com-munitarian basis of the latter is not determined by a teleological goal, such asbuilding a single body like a State to govern all. Instead, it comes from the ground,its “unity” arising from “language, intellect, the communal faculties of the humanrace” (Virno, 25). Virno will also say that it is created by “idle talk,” in contrast tothe negative implication Heidegger gives to that term. For Virno, the commu-nicative mode of “idle talk” is liberating, radical, and inventive (see 89–90). Withthese communitarian and communicative aspirations, a certain distinction is clearlydrawn between these contemporary theorists and Deleuze. Derrida, like Deleuze,is not inclined toward the thinking of anything like a common either. As Derridahas said, “If I have always hesitated to use [the] word [‘community’], it is becausetoo often the word ‘community’ resounds with the ‘common’ [commun], the as-one [comme-un]” (Derrida and Ferraris, 25).

12. This is what Derrida says of the politics of his Specters of Marx. In responseto queries about the political dimension or responsibility of Specters of Marx, Der-rida will say, “the form of my gesture would seem to include, at a minimum, thedemand that one read, a demand which remains, for its part, at once theoreticaland practical: it asks that people take into account the nature and form . . . of thisgesture, if only to criticize its utility, possibility, authenticity, or even sincerity”(1999, 200). Jean-Luc Nancy, in speaking about the politics of Derrida’s works,argues for a form of politics “on paper”—albeit a politics of writing or conceptu-alizing rather than reading—instead of concrete political action on the part of phi -losophers: “[T]he political character of a work of thought is not to be measured only,indeed far from it, by the practical interventions of the man. . . . The thinker . . .


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acts politically before all else by thinking the truth . . . of a world, of the situationof a world in which concepts like politics, as well as aesthetics or ethics, have tobe put back in play, put to work, and elaborated. The Wrst political duty of a phi -losopher is to philosophize, just as the Wrst political duty of a musician is to com-pose” (qtd. in Fabbri, 216).

13. Just to cite two recent readings of Derrida’s Politics of Friendship: Phillipswrites that “what we learn about friendship in Politiques de l’amitié is, strictly speak-ing, unacceptable; friendship itself will turn out to be unacceptable” (166); and inthe words of Wills, “friendship [in Politics of Friendship] involves turning one’sback” (§8).

14. I note here that the French original is “Rien peut-être de dicible” (Der-rida 1994b, 17).

15. I have previously treated the question of anticommunity, and also thenotion of friendship, with regard to Deleuze and Guattari (see Goh 2006; 2007).

16. In the French original: “Être aimé, qu’est-ce que cela veut dire? Rien,peut-être” (Derrida 1994c, 26). Compare the French original of “nothing sayable”quoted in n.14.

17. On the refrain also of contemporary theorists from breaking away fromthe thinking of community, see n.11.

18. One could also argue that Derrida’s reject arrives by way of modulatingAristotle’s oft-cited phrase, “O my friends, there is no friend.” It is with this phrase,in its form of an address, that one can elicit too the sense that both the self and theother are rejects in or before friendship. On the one hand, the address rejects theother by structuring the latter’s imminent disappearance. According to Derrida,through Aristotle’s phrase, “[friends] are summoned to be spoken to . . . then dis-missed . . . saying to them, speaking of them, that they are no longer there. Onespeaks of them only in their absence, and concerning their absence” (173). In otherwords, a certain dismissal of friends is at work in this phrase, rendering the frienda (passive) reject. On the other hand, the phrase also signals some form of refusalof the other to respond to the address. This is where the self is rendered a (tar-geted) reject, because “there is no friend” that has responded.

19. As Derrida observes too, “Nietzsche makes the call . . . to his addressee,asking him to join up with ‘us,’ with this ‘us’ which is being formed, to join us andto resemble us, to become the friends of the friends that we are!” (1997, 35). I dothink that Derrida also Wnds this Nietzschean “we” suspicious. When Derridaspeaks of the “unheard-of” and “totally new” “arrivant” (29) that is to come in orfrom the future, I do not think that he attributes it to Nietzsche’s free spirits ornew philosophers. Reading §214 of Beyond Good and Evil, Derrida underscores thatin the “we” of Nietzsche and the new philosophers, Nietzsche also “declares hisappurtenance qua heir who still believes in his own virtues” (33), claiming analliance to a no doubt rare but nonetheless existing or past spirit whose virtuesare or have been to strike out against other past values (e.g., Platonic philosophyand Christian religion). This only means that Nietzsche is always ineluctably tiedto the past, and as such, the question of a “totally new” or “unheard-of ” “arrivant”

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will be undeniably diluted in Nietzsche and also, by implication, in the newphilosophers, by virtue of the “we” that Nietzsche addresses them with. Perhapsthis is also why Derrida in Politics of Friendship argues that “we will not followNietzsche” (33)? I do agree with Derrida’s reading. Nietzsche may indeed pro-claim that he and the new philosophers are “not to be stuck to our virtues” (2002,39 §41) but, “beyond what [Nietzsche] believes, what he thinks he believes” (1997,33) as Derrida says, there is always that one virtue that explicitly and forcefullyremains, which is Nietzsche’s will to demolish old values, morals, religions, andphilosophies. And in relation to Derrida’s “arrivant” that rejects both setting a tele-ologic program for itself and all a priori or existing programs, Nietzsche’s singu-lar virtue is undeniably programmatic, which is perhaps betrayed in his followingwords on the new philosophers: “we do not want to fully reveal what a spirit mightfree himself from and what he will then perhaps be driven towards” (2002, 41 §44).

20. In Aristotle’s words, “Young people are amorous too; for the greater partof the friendship of love [in contradistinction to the friendship of l’aimance] de -pends on emotion and aims at pleasure; this is why they fall in love and quicklyfall out of love, changing often within a single day” (196).

21. I emphasize that this radical Nietzschean aimance is a result or effect ofDerrida’s reading. I have already pointed out above that Nietzsche’s Beyond Goodand Evil in fact reveals the problematic of a possible rapprochement, on Nietzsche’spart, between Nietzsche and the new philosophers, rather than “disappropria-tion” or “inWnite distance” as Derrida reads it.

22. One could also add that Derrida is countersigning Aristotle’s aimance inanother way here. Aristotle’s aimance only loops back to the self or the lovingfriend. In other words, it begins and ends where it starts in the Aristotelian per-fect friendship. With Derrida however, it is from a space outside of friendship, i.e.,love, that l’aimance begins, and it reaches something other than what it was itselfbefore, which in this case would be friendship.

23. Let me say that I do not refute the ethics that arises from not walkingaway from friendship or from this waiting-without-expectation at the margins offriendship (and love). Contrary to Aristotle’s aimance, which concedes to the insur-mountable experience of chronological time and therefore sets up a practical limitas to the number of friends one can love, Derrida’s aimance will not put arithmeticinto operation. Waiting without expecting, Derrida’s aimance is not averse to theimmanence and imminence of whoever, whatever, or anyone (to follow Derrida’srhetoric in his texts on cosmopolitanism and the voyous) that arrives. Derrida’saimance does not count who or what can arrive. It looks toward a relation betweensingularities that do not add up, an aimance that opens up (to) a “singular worldof singularities” that is “of non-appurtenance” (42). There, one does not know,and one is not interested to know, how to begin counting the singularities withinsuch a relation: “How many of us are there? Does that count? And how do youcalculate?” (35). There will be no quantifying of friends, nor delimiting the bound-aries of friendship by predicating it on a recognition of similarities. In other words,Derrida’s aimance is open to a noncounting multiplicity of singularities and their


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heterogeneity. It does not judge any of these singularities as good or evil, friendor enemy, and therefore it also takes the audacious risk of welcoming even theWgure that is, or potentially is, monstrous.

24. One regrets how Derrida is not as forceful here with the rejection of theterm “friendship” as he is with regard to the term “forgiveness.” The rhetoricDerrida deploys in speaking of forgiveness is almost similar to the rhetoric in hisinstruction to the other to not pick up his call. In the latter, he warns that shouldthe other pick up the call, friendship will be undone, “it’s all over.” With regardto forgiveness, he writes, “forgiving must . . . be impossible. . . . If when I forgive,the wrongdoing, the injury, the wound, the offense become forgivable because I’veforgiven, then it’s over” (2007, 234, emphasis added). There, Derrida will repeat-edly insist on an impossibility of forgiveness. One then wonders why Derrida doesnot insist on the impossibility of friendship as thoroughly as he does with theterm of forgiveness.

25. I note that dispersion also constitutes part of the theoretical strategies bythe aforementioned thinkers like Hardt and Negri, and Galloway and Thacker,against the network empire, and one might add that the strategies are reminiscentof the tactic of Deleuze and Guattari’s nomadic war machine in A ThousandPlateaus, i.e., the tactic of smashing a system from within. I will just cite the exam-ple from Hardt and Negri. According to them, for the multitude to resist the net-work empire, the tactical position that is “most effective is an oblique or diagonalstance. Battles against the Empire might be won through subtraction and defec-tion. This desertion does not have a place; it is the evacuation of the places ofpower” (2000, 212). For desertion as a future “resistive act,” see also Galloway andThacker (2007, 101, 111). But once again, the difference between my position andtheirs is that there is no “construction of a new society” (Hardt and Negri 2000,404) nor any opening into “the common” (Galloway and Thacker, 111) at the endof my dispersion.

26. “L’aimance comme l’attirance de l’autre: Réponse à ‘L’aimance et l’inven -tion d’un idiome’ d’Abdelkébir Khatibi,” paper presented at the colloquium “Khat-ibi’s Œuvre: Materiality and Writing,” Northwestern University, April 12–17,2007. I thank Samuel Weber for sending me his manuscript.

27. I am aware that Jean-Luc Nancy speaks of syncope and love too in theessay “Shattered Love,” but a critical discussion of syncope and love in Clément,Derrida, and Nancy only occasions another paper.

28. I will just cite two examples here. First, there will be the moment whenDerrida speaks of the necessary faith in indecision or indetermination, or “a breakwith calculable reliability and with the assurance of certainty” in thinking aboutfriendship, and Derrida will say, “the truth of friendship, if there is one, is foundthere, in darkness [‘l’obscurité’ as the French original goes (1994b, 34)]” (1997, 16).Secondly, the imperative to refrain from any outward gesture to compel the friendto enter into a proximity with the self essentially “produces an event, sinking intothe darkness [here, the French original says ‘pénombre’ (1994b, 63), which couldmean half-light or penumbra] of a friendship which is not yet” (1997, 43).

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

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