Abstract
The article attempts to think friendship in its relation to law and justice and provides some arguments for the importance of this concept in Derrida’s ethical, legal and political philosophy. It draws on early texts such as Of grammatology and reads them in conjunction with later texts such as The animal that therefore I am. The relation of friendship to law and justice is explored by means of Derrida’s notion of “degenerescence” understood as the necessity or law of indeterminateness that cuts across, both limiting and de-limiting, all laws, types and generic partitions, for instance, juridical (natural and positive right), humanistic (human and animal), anthropological (sexual difference), philosophical (physis and nomos). Drawing on Derrida’s readings of “sexual difference” in Heidegger and the latter’s evocation of “the voice of the friend” in Being and time, the article addresses the theme of Geschlecht and articulates the exigency to think sexual difference beyond duality together with the exigency to rethink law and right otherwise than on the ground of nativity and “natural fact” and in terms of what Derrida calls “a friendship prior to friendships” at the origin of all law and socius.
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Notes
The erection and the opposition of the two columns (Hegel and Genet’s) in Derrida’s Glas lay down and at the same time submit to the law or logic of generalised fetishism. The opposed columns mirror one another in their hetero-narcissism, seduce, dissimulate, veil and unveil, brush against one another and erect their own orders both by asserting and by stealing the ground from underneath each other. Two concepts, two brothers, “two phalli, erected one against the other” [10, p. 175], the opposition of the same to itself, the destruction of oppositionality; fratricide will have been one of its symptoms as well as the condition of the concept.
In Of spirit, Heidegger and the question Derrida argues that despite the critique of Cartesian-Hegelian subjectivity and the distance he wants to take from biologism and even from all philosophy of life, Heidegger remains faithful to metaphysics and cannot avoid even a “humanist teleology” to the extent that he maintains an “absolute limit between the living creature and the human Dasein” [11, pp. 54-55].
John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson’s translation does not do justice to the ‘strict grammaticality’ of the phrase “as in hearing the voice of the friend that…” by rendering den in “den jedes Dasein…” as “who” rather than “that”. The original text by virtue of den leaves open the possibility that Dasein carries the hearing, the voice and the friend.
One of the most persistent questions in Politics of friendship is that of sexual difference and what Derrida has called the “double exclusion of the feminine” from the canonical, phratrocentric schema of friendship. According to its dominant interpretation, friendship between women or between man and woman could never reach the dignity, virtue or perfection, which men only are capable of.
References
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Staikou, E. Law, Genre and the Voice of the Friend. Int J Semiot Law 23, 283–298 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-010-9154-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-010-9154-0