"And When Is Now?

" (On Some Limits of Perfect Intelligibility)

Author(s): Samuel Weber
Source: MLN, Vol. 122, No. 5, Comparative Literature Issue (Dec., 2007), pp. 1028-1049
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
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"And When is Now?"
(On
Some Limits of
Perfect
Intelligibility)
Samuel Weber
This
paper
was
originally presented
as the
keynote
address at the Limits
of Intelligibility Conference
at
Johns Hopkins University
on March
10,
2007
Enabling
"The Limits of
Intelligibility"
"The Limits of
Intelligibility"-this phrase,
when extracted from
any
defined context
except
that of
serving
as the title of this conference-is
as
suggestive
as it is
ambiguous:
indeed,
suggestive
because of its ambi-
guity.
Its
ambiguity
nestles first and foremost in the word
"intelligibil-
ity,"
and more
specifically
in the
gap
that
separates
its non-technical
from its
technical,
which is to
say, philosophical, usage.
The
OED,
which traces the use of the word in
English
back to
1610,
gives
as
its
primary
definition,
"The
quality
or character of
being intelligible;
capability
of
being
understood;
comprehensibility."
The definition
given
in
Wikipedia-and
I
hope,
the Williams
College Library
not-
withstanding,'
that I
may
be
permitted
to cite this
source,
at least as
corroboration-[
Wikipedia] goes
further when it states:
"Intelligibility
means
clearness,
explicitness, lucidity, comprehensibility, perspicuity,
legibility, plain speaking,
manifestation,
precision,
a word to the wise.
The
degree
to which
speech
can be understood."
The
question
that such
unambiguous
definitions do not address
is
just
what it is that determines "the
degree
to which
speech
can be
understood"? Or as the OED
puts
it,
"the
capability
of
being
under-
stood,"
of
being "comprehensible"?
Nor do such definitions make
clear what is to be understood
by
the word
"intelligible."
Is
it,
as both
MLN 122
(2007):
1028-1049 @ 2008
by
The
Johns Hopkins University
Press
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MLN 1029
definitions
presuppose, "clarity," "comprehensibility,"
"understand-
ing,"
and
perhaps ultimately, "comprehensibility"?
And if
so,
is such
"comprehensibility"
an essential
property
of
knowledge?
Of "think-
ing"-which clearly
is not
necessarily
the same as
knowing?
Is it a
"property"
at
all,
or rather more akin to a condition-a condition of
"possibility"-that
"of
being
understood"?
Without
pursuing
this line of
questioning any
further,
all that seems
clear at this
point
is that the
dictionary
definitions of
"intelligibility"
are themselves far less
"intelligible,"
in the sense of
being
lucid and
free of
ambiguity,
than one
might
assume. Their lack of
precision,
however,
deserves to be taken
seriously,
since such definitions tend
to reflect the
prevailing conceptions
that inform
widespread usage
of
the
word,
even if such
conceptions
do not
necessarily comprehend
what it is that
they
are
actually saying.
The
ambiguities implicit
in such
dictionary
formulations
acquire
a
new dimension when we consider the more
technical,
philosophical
uses of the word. One of the first traits that
emerges
when one
begins
to
investigate
the
philosophical
notion of the
"intelligible"
is that it
seems
necessarily
linked to an
enabling
"limit,"
namely,
that which
distinguishes
it from what is often called the "senses." Thus
Kant,
in
his
inaugural
dissertation of
1770,
written in Latin and
entitled,
De
mundi sensibilis
atque intelligibilis forma
et
principiis
(On
the Form and
Principles of
the Sensible and
Intelligible
World),
defines
"intelligible"
as
"that which contains
nothing
but what can be
cognized solely through
the
understanding"
(nisi
per intelligentiam cognoescendum).
This tradition
of
defining
the
"intelligible" by demarcating
it from the "sensible"
has,
to be
sure,
a
very long history,
and it is one that
suggests
that
ambiguities
associated with the word are not
just
situated between its
non-technical and
philosophical
uses
(and avatars),
but even
more,
within the notion itself insofar as it is linked to
knowledge.
This
relationship
of
intelligibility
to
knowledge
raises the
question
of the
enabling
limits of both as
early
as Plato's
Republic.
In Book
VI,
Socrates
seeks to determine the relation of
knowledge
to the Good
(I
quote
the
passage
at some
length
in order to recall its
context):
SOCRATES.
The
sun,
I
presume you
will
say,
not
only
furnishes to visibles
the
power
of
visibility
but it also
provides
for their
generation
and
growth
and nurture
though
it is not itself
generation.
GLAUCON. Of course not.
SOCRATES. In like
manner, then,
you
are to
say
that the
objects
of knowl-
edge
not
only
receive from the
presence
of the
good
their
being known,
but their
very
existence and essence is derived to them from
it, though
the
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1030 SAMUEL WEBER
good
itself is not essence but still transcends essence
[epekeina
tis
ousias]
in
dignity
and
surpassing power. (Rep.,
VI,
509b)3
The
cognizability,
or,
if
you
will,
"intelligibility"
of that which can be
known derives not from
any
immanent
property
or characteristic it
may
possess
but from
something
that lies
"beyond"-epekeina-its
"essence"
or
"properties"-ousia-as
well as
beyond
that which reveals itself to
the senses. In thus
demarcating
itself
constitutively
from the world
of the
senses,
that which makes
things
knowable,
their
intelligibility,
defines itself
through
what is held to be its intrinsic
limit,
through
which it
"transcends"
the transient
temporality
of sense
experience.
This
Beyond,
somewhat like the
sun,
is the condition of
visibility
with-
out itself
being simply
visible. If one
attempts
to
apprehend
it
directly
as
though
it were
just
another visible
object,
it not
only escapes sight,
it
destroys
it. As the condition and source of
visibility
and
knowledge,
the Good itself is neither
simply
visible nor knowable. Here is how
Socrates sums
up
the
resulting
situation:
This then is the class that I described as
intelligible
[noetos],
it is
true,
but
with the reservation that the soul is
compelled
to
employ assumptions
in
the
investigation
of
it,
not
proceeding
to a first
principle
because of its
inability
to extricate itself from and rise above its
assumptions,
and
second,
that it uses as
images
or likenesses
...
the
very objects
that are themselves
copied
and adumbrated
by
the class below
them,
and that in
comparison
with these latter are esteemed as clear and held in honor.
I
understand,
said he
[Glaucon]
that
you
are
speaking
of what falls under
geometry
and the kindred arts.
Understand
then,
said
I,
that
by
the other section of the
intelligible
I
mean that which the reason itself
lays
hold of
by
the
power
of
dialectic,
treating
its
assumptions
not as absolute
beginnings
but
literally
as
hypoth-
eses,
underpinnings, footings,
and as
springboards
so to
speak,
to enable
it to rise to that which
requires
no
assumption
and is the
starting point
of
all,
and after
attaining
to that
again taking
hold of the first
dependencies
from
it,
so to
proceed
downward to the
conclusion,
making
no use whatever
of
any object
of sense but
only
of
pure
ideas
moving
on
through
ideas to
ideas and
ending
with ideas.
I
understand,
he
said,
not
fully,
for it is no
slight
task that
you appear
to have in
mind,
but I do understand that
you
mean to
distinguish
the
aspect
of
reality
and the
intelligible,
which is
contemplated by
the
power
of
dialectic,
as
something
truer and more exact than the
object
of the so-
called arts and sciences whose
assumptions
are
arbitrary starting points.
(Rep
VI, 511a-c)4
Glaucon's admission that he understands, although
"not
fully,"
seems
symptomatic
of the Socratic attitude towards the "limits of
intelligibil-
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MLN 1031
ity":
the
intelligible,
which is defined
by
its radical demarcation from
all
experience
based
upon
the senses-that
is,
from all
experience
that is limited
by space
and time-can never be
understood,
in the
sense of
being fully
known. The limits that define it also delimit its
own
intelligibility,
at least in the sense of its
knowability.
As Charles
Sanders Peirce will
put
it at the
beginning
of the 20th
century,
"One
cannot well demand a reason for reasonableness itself."" But what does
that tell us about the function of "limits" in
delimiting "intelligibil-
ity"?
Do the "limits" of
intelligibility
mark
simply
the
point
at which
intelligibility stops
and the
unintelligible begins?
Or do those limits
affect
"intelligibility"
from
within,
as it
were,
vastly complicating
its
relation to what exceeds it?
"Perfectly Intelligible"
These,
at
least,
are some of the
questions
that the title of our confer-
ence
imposed upon
me. I have no
idea,
of
course,
if
they
in
any way
resemble the considerations that were in the minds of the
organizers
when
they
chose this title for our
meeting.
Nor am I in a
position
to
even
begin
to
give anything
like a
principled
or
comprehensive response
to these
questions. Precisely
as
unanswered, however,
they
will continue
to inform and
agitate
the remarks I have to
present
to
you today,
and
which,
you
will
hardly
be
surprised
to
learn,
concern the texts of think-
ers who
chronologically
at least are much closer to us than those I have
just
touched on. But as
you
will soon
hear,
the
question
of
proximity
itself will be one of the issues in what I have to
say.
Let me
begin
then with a
passage
from a short but
very provocative
essay
that
appeared
in
English
in 2004. The text stems from
Giorgio
Agamben
and is
entitled,
quite simply, "Friendship."'
The
essay begins
by stating
that,
as its name
indicates,
"philosophy"
has
traditionally
been "so
closely
linked" to
friendship [philia]
"that without
it,
philoso-
phy
would not in fact be
possible."
However,
Agamben
notes,
"today
the relation" between the two has "fallen" into such
disrepute
"that
professional philosophers"
can
only
confront the "so to
speak
clandes-
tine
partner
of their
thought"
with "embarrassment and
[an]
uneasy
conscience." He then
goes
on to demonstrate this embarrassment
by
recounting
two anecdotes. The first concerns a
project
"to
exchange
letters on the
subject
of
friendship"
that he had elaborated with
"my
friend,Jean-Luc Nancy":
the two friends thus
hoped
"to
stage
a
problem
that seemed otherwise to elude
analytical
treatment."
Agamben began
by writing
the first letter, and then "waited,
not without
trepidation,
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1032 SAMUEL WEBER
for the
reply."
When
it
finally
arrived, however,
Agamben
notes that
Nancy's response
served
only
"to
signify
the end of the
project."
Their
friendship,
he
comments,
turned out to be "an obstacle" rather than
a condition under which this difficult
topic-difficult
at least for
philosophers-could
be confronted
collaboratively.
Agamben
then
goes
on to
give
a second
example
of the
difficulty
philosophers today
have in
dealing
with the
topic
of
friendship.
The
other
philosopher,
who this time is not
designated
as a
friend,
at least
not
explicitly,
is
Jacques
Derrida,
who at the time was in the
process
of
writing
a book that would be
published
under the
title,
Politiques
de
l'amitie (translated
as Politics
ofFriendship).'
For this
book,
Agamben
observes, Derrida,
moved
by
an
analogous
and
probably
conscious uneasiness ... chose as Leitmotiv
[of
his book on
friendship]
a
sibylline
motto,
traditionally
attributed to
Aristotle,
that
negates friendship
in the
very gesture
with which it seems to invoke it:
o
philoi,
oudeis
philos,
"o
friends,
there are no friends."
[sic]8 (2)
But to return now to
Agamben's essay:
his second anecdote is con-
cerned with the correction of a different
error,
this time
involving
the
Greek
phrase traditionally
attributed to Aristotle and so often cited.
The
phrase
itself is to be found not in Aristotle's
writings
themselves
but in
Diogenes
Laertius's Lives
of
the
Philosophers,
in the
chapter
dedi-
cated to Aristotle
(V.21). However,
Agamben
observes,
If we
open
a modern edition of the
Lives...
we do not
find
... the
phrase
in
question,
but rather one almost identical in
appearance,
the
meaning
of which is nonetheless different and far less
enigmatic:
oi
(subscript
iota)
philoi,
oudeis
philos,
"he who has
(many)
friends,
has no friend."
(3)
Agamben
then recounts how he was able to
"clarify"
the
enigma,
or
rather,
to cause it to
disappear:
A
library
visit was
enough
to
clarify
the
mystery.
In 1616 the
great
Genevan
philologist
Isaac Casaubon decided to
publish
a new edition of the Lives.
Arriving
at the
passage
in
question-which
still
read,
in the edition
procured
by
his
father-in-law,
Henry
Etienne,
o
philoi
(o friends)-he
corrected the
enigmatic
version of the
manuscripts
without hesitation.
(3)
As a
result,
Agamben
concludes,
without
hesitation,
the
phrase
"became
perfectly intelligible
and
for
this reason was
accepted by
modern editors"
(3,
italics
mine).
In
short,
according
to
Agamben,
ever since 1616 "modern editors"
have been aware that the
apparent enigma
of the
phrase
attributed to
Aristotle
by Diogenes
Laertius was in fact
merely
the result of a
simple
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MLN 1033
error of
transcription.
No wonder
then,
as
Agamben
tells
us,
that he
"immediately
informed Derrida of the results of
[his]
research." He
does not mention whether Derrida
responded
and if
so,
how. But he
does recount how "astonished" he was
when,
following
the
publication
of
Politiques
de
l'amitie,
he discovered that the book contained not the
slightest
"trace of the
problem"
to which he had
sought
to call Derrida's
attention.
Agamben's appeal
had
gone
unheeded.
However,
as
Agam-
ben
concludes,
"It was
certainly
not out of
forgetfulness"
that Derrida
persisted
in
citing
the
phrase
"in its
original
form,"
but rather because
"it was essential to the book's
strategy
that
friendship
be,
at the same
time,
both affirmed and
distrustfully
revoked"
(3).
In
this,
Agamben
notes,
Derrida
repeats
a
gesture already performed by
Nietzsche,
who also would have been familiar with Casaubon's emendation and
nevertheless
disregarded
it for similar reasons: "Both the
necessity
of
friendship
and,
at the same
time,
a certain distrust towards friends
were essential to Nietzsche's
strategy.
This accounts for his recourse
to the traditional
reading,
which was
already, by
Nietzsche's
time,
no
longer
current"
(3).
There
is, then,
for
Agamben,
a "traditional
reading"
of the
phrase,
and a
modern,
current
one;
the traditional one is
enigmatic,
but
only
because it is based on an
error;
the modern version is
perfectly
intelligible, simply correcting
the traditional error. The
traditional,
erroneous version has nevertheless been retained
by
certain
thinkers,
Nietzsche and Derrida
among
them,
because it suits their
strategy,
which is
ambivalent,
requiring friendship
to be both "affirmed and
distrustfully
revoked."
One is reminded
here,
mutatis
mutandis,
of the
exchange
that Hei-
degger
had with a reader of his
book,
Elucidations
of
Holderlin's
Poetry,
concerning
the remark with which
Heidegger
had introduced one of
his
readings. Heidegger prefaced
his
essay
on
H61lderlin's
poem,
Wie
Wenn am
Feiertage
("As
On a
Holiday")
with the
following
note: "The
[poetic]
text here established is
based,
after renewed examination of
the
original
drafts,
on the
following attempt
at an
interpretation."'
The
reader,
a doctoral student of German
Literature, Detlev Liiders,
wrote
Heidegger asking
for
clarification,
or
rather,
suggesting
that in
the future he correct what seemed to be an obvious mistake:
I don't understand how a text can be based on its
interpretation.
A
text,
I
would have
thought,
is
something
whose
wording
is fixed. Your sentence
contains the
paradox
that the text on the one hand is "established" as a
basis-
"zugrundegelegt
"--and on the other hand is itself
based
on
something
that is therefore even more
original
and fundamental. From this
point
of
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1034 SAMUEL WEBER
view the text can no
longer
be referred to as a "basis." And
yet
this is what
you
call it.'"
Heidegger's reply,
which I have discussed
elsewhere,
begins
with a
phrase
that will be echoed
frequently
in the
writings
of Derrida: "Dear
Mr.
Luiders:
You're
right."
("Sie
haben
Recht, vous
avez
raison)."
And
he therefore
promises
to "strike" the incriminated
phrase
"should there
be a new edition" of his book.
Having
thus abandoned all
rights
to
the
phrase, Heidegger
nevertheless
goes
on to make two
points.
First,
were he to correct the incriminated
phrase by simply inverting
it,
as
Herr
Luiders
suggests, thereby acknowledging
that his
interpretation
is based on the
poetic
text rather than the other
way
around,
this
would result in "a
gross triviality"
and would therefore
essentially
be
"superfluous."
The second
point
that he
goes
on to make consists not
in an
acknowledgement
of error but in a series of
questions:
Of
course,
the
question,
what "a
text" is,
how one should read it and when
it is
completely
established as
text,
still remains. This
question pertains
so
essentially
to the
question
of the essence of
language
and of
linguistic
tradition that I have
always
limited
myself
to what is
absolutely necessary
when
something
was to be noted
concerning, interpretations,
elucidations
etc.
(237)
And after a short remark on the
problematic
and uncertain status
of the then current edition of
H61lderlin,
Heidegger
concludes his
response
with a
question
that for him
presumably
sums
up
"what is
absolutely necessary... concerning interpretation"
and its relation to
its
object, namely
the
question:
"Is there a text in itself?"
Now it is
unlikely
that
Giorgio Agamben,
a keen reader of
Heidegger,
would have ever
responded
to this
question
with a
simple
affirmative.
And
yet,
this is
precisely
what endows what otherwise
might appear
to be a casual
phrase
with
significance.
Casaubon's
emendation,
he
says,
renders the
phrase
attributed to Aristotle
by Diogenes
Laertius,
and
by
a host of eminent
successors,
"perfectly intelligible."
And it
is therefore
only
on the
grounds
of
strategic
considerations that it
could be
ignored by
a
long
and illustrious
tradition,
culminating
in
Derrida's Politics
of
Friendship.
The
question
that has to be
addressed,
then,
is
just
wherein the
strategy
resides that causes thinkers such as
Nietzsche and Derrida to
ignore
the obvious and to
reject "perfect
intelligibility"
in favor of a
"mystery"
that is
really
none at all.
Although Agamben
does not use the
term,
the
primary
characteristic
of the
general strategy
he attributes to both Derrida and Nietzsche
could be described as that of a certain ambivalence,
one that both
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IV L N1U J3
"affirms and
distrustfully
revokes"
friendship
at one and the same
time. It is this ambivalence that causes thinkers to
reject
Casaubon's
emendation,
in contrast to the
contemporary
editors and translators
who have
adopted
it. In other
words,
perfect intelligibility
would be
defined
by
the law of non-contradiction.
"Many
friends,
no friend"
allows for a univocal
interpretation,
whereas "0
my
friends,
there is
no
friend,"
seems
intelligible only
as a
paradox:
how can one address
"friends,"
if one asserts that "there is no friend"?
What I,
borrowing
but also
extending
a Freudian
term,
have
designated
as
"ambivalent,"
and what
Agamben
for his
part
characterizes as a mixture of "affirma-
tion" and "distrustful
revocation,"
stretches the limits of
intelligibility
by splitting
the
object
it intends. If
friendship
is
something
that can
and must at the same time be "affirmed" and
yet
also
"distrustfully
revoked,"
then this fractures the "one and the same" of that "time"
by
removing
it from
itself.
A certain irreducible
spatiality,
as the medium
of
nonidentity
and of
alterity,
is thus introduced into the self
identity
of
"friendship," dislocating
its
meaning
so that it no
longer
reflects a
homogeneous
and coherent internal structure or series or
properties
but rather
appears
as the resultant of a conflictual relation of forces.
To be
perfectly intelligible,
then,
would be to exclude or reduce the
internal dissonance and distance that
prevents
the
object
it invests
from
supporting
and
sustaining
a unified and univocal
meaning.
It is therefore not
entirely surprising
when,
in the short
essay
that
follows this anecdotal
introduction,
the
category
on which
Agamben's
account of
friendship depends
is one that involves
precisely
the reduc-
tion of distance and
correlatively
the
emergence
of what he calls
"excessive proximity."
He elaborates this
conception by interpreting
a
painting by
the
Italian
baroque
artist,
Giovanni Serodine
(1600-31).
This
painting
depicts
the
"Meeting
of Saints Peter and Paul"
(Incontro
dei Santi
Pietro et
Paolo, 1625-26)
(Figure
1).
What
Agamben
finds
particularly
remarkable in this
painting
is that Serodine has
portrayed
the two
apostles
so close
together-with
their foreheads almost
glued
one to one another-so that
they
are
absolutely
unable to see each other. On the road to
martyrdom, they
look
at,
without
recognizing,
each other. This
impression
of excessive
proximity,
as it
were,
is accentuated
by
the silent
gesture
of
shaking
hands at the bottom of the
picture, scarcely
visible.
(4,
my italics-SW)
Let us leave aside
Agamben's
assertion that the two
apostles
"are
absolutely
unable to see each other." It is no doubt an
arguable
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1036 SAMUEL WEBER
Figure
1. Serodine
(1600-1631)
Meeting of
Sts. Peter and Paul
(1625-26).
@ Araldo de
Luca/Corbis.
interpretation,
and it is
by
no means the
only
one. We
may
return to
this later. For the moment let us
merely
consider the
argument
that
Agamben develops
here. This
painting,
his
argument suggests,
is the
visual
counterpart
to Casaubon's emendation. Whereas the latter made
the Aristotelian
quote "perfectly intelligible,"
the
painting
"contains
a
perfect allegory
of
friendship"
insofar as the "excessive
proximity"
of the
Apostles prevents
them
recognizing
each other-and
yet
not
from
making
contact. From this
reading, Agamben
concludes with the
rhetorical
question:
"What is
friendship,
in
effect,
if not a
proximity
such that it is
impossible
to make for oneself either a
representation
or
a
concept
of it?" And this
inability
of
friendship
to be
represented
or
conceived as a
concept
leads him to a second
determination,
this time
negative: "Friendship
is not a
property
or
quality
of a
subject"
(4).
It is no accident that
Agamben
turns to a
painting
to find what he
takes to be a
"perfect allegory
of
friendship."
For
although
the
painting
permits Agamben
to tell us what
friendship
is
not-representable
or
conceptualizable-this negative
definition
negates
first and foremost a
certain
visibility
and
thereby presupposes
it.
Friendship
thus becomes
a
question
of not
being
able to see and be
seen,
whereby "seeing"
and
"recognizing"
are
inseparably
linked. The two
Apostles
are
depicted
so close
together
that,
according
to
Agamben, they
can neither see
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MLN 1037
nor
recognize
each other. When however it comes time to elaborate
not
just
what
friendship
is not but rather what it
is,
Agamben
turns
not to a
painting
but to a
long
and dense
passage
from Aristotle's
Nicomachean Ethics
(1170a 28-1171b35),
which he
suggests
"contains
the
ontological
basis" of Aristotle's
theory
of
friendship.
I will
quote
here
just enough
of this
passage
for
you
to be able to
follow,
hope-
fully,
the
argument Agamben
draws from it:
And if the one who sees
perceives
that he
sees,
the one who hears
perceives
that he
hears,
the one who walks
perceives
that he walks ... and if
perceiving
that we
perceive
or think is
perceiving
that we exist
(for
as we
said,
existing
is
perceiving
or
thinking);
and if
perceiving
that one is alive is
pleasant
(edeon)
in
itself,
and
especially
for those who are
good,
because for them
existing
is
good,
and
pleasant
(for
concurrent
perception [synaisthanom-
enoi]
of what is in itself
good,
in
themselves,
gives
them
pleasure;
and if
as the
good person
is to
himself,
so he is to his friend
(since
the friend is
another self
[heteros autos])
then
just
as for each his own existence
(to
auton
einai)
is
desirable,
so his friend's is
too,
or to a similar
degree....
In that
case,
he needs to be
concurrently perceiving
his friend"-that he
exists too-and this will come about in their
living together, conversing
and
sharing
(koinonein)
their talk and
thoughts
...
(5)
Although
I have had to abbreviate and
simplify
the
passage Agamben
quotes
from
Aristotle,
I trust that nevertheless its main lines will still
be discernible: above
all,
the
emphasis put
on both
perception
and
thinking
as that which defines human existence. But
although
Aris-
totle
previously distinguishes
human from animal existence
precisely
through
the
presence
of
thought
as
opposed
to mere
perception,
in
this
passage
at
least,
it is
perception
that seems to be decisive. And
it is not
just any perception
that is
significant
but
perception
of the
good,
linked to
self-perception:
the
perception
of oneself "in action."
Which in turn means "alive."
Perception
of oneself in
action,
and
therefore
alive,
is
pleasing, "especially
for those who are
good."
Now,
for
Agamben
this sense of
being
alive is what links the self to the other
in
friendship,
and it does so
by splitting
or
doubling
the
perception
of
oneself into the simultaneous
perception
of self and
other,
or rather
of self
"becoming
... other":
Inherent in this
perception
of
existing
is another
perception, specifically
human,
which takes the form of a concurrent
perception (synaisthanesthai)
of the friend's existence.
Friendship
is the instance of this concurrent
per-
ception
of the friend's existence in the awareness of one's own existence
...
The
perception
of
existing
is,
in
fact,
always already
divided
up
and shared
or con-divided.
Friendship
names this
sharing
or con-division.
(6)
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1038 SAMUEL WEBER
Agamben's
notion here of
"sharing"
recalls the
importance
that
his
friend,
Nancy,
attaches to the French word
partage, just
as his
neologism,
"con-division" could be read as an echo of Derrida's
notion of
"divisibility."
What
Agamben's
account of
friendship
here
in
any
case shares-if not divides-with his two absent interlocutors
is what constitutes their common
Heideggerian legacy (although by
no means restricted to
Heidegger:
Walter
Benjamin,
for
instance,
is no less
implicated
in
it):
namely,
the effort to think
friendship
as
something radically independent
of all
subjectivity:
There is no trace here of
any inter-subjectivity-that
chimera of the mod-
erns-nor of
any
relation between
subjects:
rather,
existing
itself is
divided,
it is non-identical to itself: the I and the friend are the two faces-or the
two
poles-of
this con-division.
(6)
Concerning
Aristotle's definition of the friend as "another self'-heteros
autos-Agamben explains
that this
phrase
must be
distinguished
from
its Latin
translation,
as alter
ego.
The Latin
ego
does not
exactly
translate
autos,
which
signifies
"oneself."
The
friend is not another I but an otherness immanent in
self-ness,
a
becoming
other of the
self.
At the
point
at which I
perceive my
existence as
pleasant,
my perception
is traversed
by
a concurrent
perception
that dislocates it
and
deports
it toward the
friend,
toward the other self.
Friendship
is this
de-subjectivization
at the
very
heart of the most intimate
perception
of
self.
(6)
Agamben
understands "concurrent
perception"
as thus
simultaneously
ontological
and
political:
the
self-perception
that constitutes existence
necessarily
entails a dislocation and
displacement
of the self toward
the
other,
a movement that
implies
co-habitation,
a
living together
based not on "a common substance but" on
"a
purely
existential con-
division,"
the
perception
of which he defines as
"friendship.""
Having completed
this brief but dense account of
"friendship,"
Agamben
leaves his readers to reflect on the
following question:
How this
original political synaesthesia
could
become,
in the course of
time,
the consensus to which democracies entrust their fates in this latest extreme
and exhausted
phase
of their
evolution, is,
as
they say,
another
story,
and
one
upon
which I shall leave
you
to reflect.
(7)
Whether this
concluding
remark,
which construes the historical shift
from what
Agamben
describes as an
"original political synaesthesia"
to
the "consensus" that informs modern democracies in their "extreme
and exhausted
phase,"
is not related to the
soteriological
context of
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MLN 1039
the Serodine
painting portraying
the
Apostles
on their
way
to mar-
tyrdom,
this is a
question
to which I will return at the conclusion of
these remarks.
In
any
event,
we are
perhaps finally
in a
position
to delineate at
least
part
of the
"problem"
of which
Agamben
was
surprised
not to
find the
slightest
trace inscribed in
Politiques
de l'amitie. What he finds
both
troubling
and at the same time
symptomatic
of the modern
predicament, epitomized
here
by
Nietzsche and
Derrida,
involves
the sacrifice of a
"perfect intelligibility"
that would
affirm,
but not
distrustfully
revoke,
friendship
as the
experience
of the
self becoming
other in the
process of perceiving
itself
The sacrifice of the
intelligibility
of this
co-perception
involves
notjust
a
cognitive
matter but above all
the "fall" from a certain
"purity":
from that
"pure perception
of
being"
implied by
the
"original political synaesthesia"
that
Agamben
finds in
Aristotle into an exhausted and
degraded
form of ambivalence that
characterizes
contemporary
consensual theories of
democracy
in their
most exhausted
phase.
In
short,
what is at stake is the
history
of a
"fall" from the
experience
of a certain
purity
of existence as
"purely
...
con-division" to a most
impure
consensus that must
deny
what it
affirms. Or
put yet
another
way--and
this is
perhaps
one of its decisive
elements-it is the
problem
of a fall from a certain trust to a distrust of
that
original, originating purity. Friendship
for
Agamben
thus
emerges
as the
promise
of a
healing
of the
wound,
since in
affirming
division
it transcends it as con-division: as that
barely
visible
grasping
of hands
before and
beyond
all
self-recognition.
This is the
problem
of which he finds no "trace" in Derrida's Politics
of Friendship.
Instead of faith in the
"purity"
of an
"origin," Agamben
registers
a
strategy
of affirmation
coupled
with distrust-and
hence,
not the
slightest
trace of the
problem
he communicated to Derrida.
It is as if Derrida failed to
see,
or take note
of,
Agamben's important
discovery.
And
yet,
as we shall
see,
or rather
read,
Politics
ofFriendship
is
laced with traces of the
problem
with which
Agamben
is concerned.
One No More!
The
problem,
however,
is that
Agamben's problem
is not
Derrida's-
not at least in the form in which
Agamben presents
it in his text
and
presumably
also in his communication to Derrida. This however
is not at all tantamount to the
problem being ignored.
Indeed,
an
entire
chapter
is devoted to it. Its
title,
in
French,
is
Replis,
which is
translated into
English
as "Recoils"; it should be noted however that
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1040 SAMUEL WEBER
the French word also
suggests
"withdrawal" or "retreat." It deals with
the fact that there is an alternate version of the remark attributed to
Aristotle,
the one communicated to Derrida
by Agamben,
and that
this alternative demands a certain kind of decision:
The time has
perhaps
come to decide the issue. It would be
fitting
then
to also
give
one's reasons for
deciding,
for
deciding
to lean to one side
rather than to
another,
even
if,
let there be no
mistake,
a
petty'3 philologi-
cal
coup
de
theitre
will never exhaust the venerable tradition
which,
from
Montaigne
to Nietzsche and
beyond,
from Kant to Blanchot and
beyond,
will have bestowed so
many guarantees
on the bias of a
copyist
or of a
reader in a
hurry
who bet without
knowing
it on a
reading
that was so
tempting,
but
misguided
(errante),
and
probably
off the mark
(egaree).
Fortunately
for
us,
no
orthographic
restoration,
no archivist's
orthodoxy
will ever
amputate
[entamera]
this other archive that in the meanwhile
has become
sedimented,
this treasure trove of seduced and seductive texts
that will
always give
us more to think about than the
police guardrails
to
which one would like to
subject
them. No
philological
fundamentalism
(integrisme philologique)
will ever erase the unheard of chance of a
genial
invention. Because what is
there,
no
doubt,
is a
staggering
artifact,
an off-
handed
exegetical coup
that is as
risky
as it is
generous,
indeed limitless
(abyssal)
in its
very generativity.
Of how
many great
texts would we have
been
deprived
if someone
(but who,
in
fact?)
had not one
day
taken,
and
perhaps deliberately feigned
to
take,
like a
great gambler,
one
omega
for
another? Not even an accent for
another,
scarcely
a letter for
another,
just
a soft
aspiration
(un
esprit
doux)
for a hard one-and the omission of the
subscript
iota.
(234/208)14
It is difficult not to see this
passage
as in
part
a
response
to
Agamben's
discovery, although
a rather harsh
one,
as
though
Derrida were antici-
pating
the
essay
that
Agamben
was to
publish many years
later. Philo-
logical
emendations,
so the
argument
would seem to
go,
should not be
allowed to foreclose discussion of the
history
of the different versions
and their relative
significance.
But this
discussion,
and the decision it
entails,
need not be that of an
either/or.
"We are not
speaking
here
of true or
false,"
Derrida continues
immediately
after the
long pas-
sage just quoted.
Rather,
it is a
question
of
"doing justice
to another
passage."
The
"passage"
in
question
is not
just
one textual
reading
or
the other but the transition from the one to the other and what this
movement involves. The
passage
marks the movement from
a
reading
that is
eloquent
but less
probable
and less
convincing
to a
reading
that is more
discreet,
more
steadfast,
more
patient
in
testing
the text? This
passage
could well resemble a
substitution, doubtless,
even a correction
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MLN 1041
of an error. It should however be a
question
of
something
else, and,
we
hope,
of a less
normativizing procedure.
More
respectful
of
great
ances-
tors. Without
putting probity
on trial but out of concern with
philological
probability.
(235/208)
It is worthwhile
underscoring
the
"respect"
that Derrida here insists
on,
given
the
widespread
but erroneous
tendency
to see his work as
destructive of all tradition. Here in
any
case his
strategy
is not informed
by
the alternative true or false and does not aim at
establishing
the
exclusive
right
of the one
reading
at the
expense
of the other:
Without
any
value of
orthodoxy,
without a call to
order,
without discredit-
ing
the canonical
version, [the
passage]
would
engage differently,
and
along
other
paths,
sometimes
intersecting
with the first
(version),
new
adventures of
thought.
This other
wager
will
certainly
be less
risky,
since it
relies on a
greater probability.
It will
put
into
play
another
ante,
another
bias,
certainly,
but without absolute assurance. There will be a
pledge
and
a
wager,
as in all
readings,
there will be
speculation
on
possible
interest,
where the issue does not concern
simply spelling, grammar,
and accentua-
tion.
(235/208)
Is it this Nietzschean affirmation of the inevitable "lack of assur-
ance"-the
"dangerous perhaps"-as
well as the
"speculation
on
pos-
sible
interest"
that
Agamben registers
as the "affirmation and
distrust"
and that he seems to distrust?
In
any
case,
as the title of this
chapter
in its over-determination
sug-
gests,
the two versions are
historically
folded into one
another,
which
does not mean that
they
are of
equal significance.
Derrida here "turns
back" to this "fold" not to confirm the
authenticity
of one of its sides or
to discover which of the two
readings
is more authoritative but rather
"to
mark with several
signposts [reperes]
the
possibility
and the stakes
of an alternative
reading"
(236/225).
This statement is contained in
a
footnote,
in which Derrida
acknowledges
the indebtedness of his
discussion to a number of "friends":
Here I should thank the
friends,
men and
women,
who have
helped
me
along
these international
paths, through
the several
languages,
libraries
or
bibliographies
to which I refer
here,
whether
Latin, Italian,
Spanish,
English
or German ...
(236/225)
The first name on the list that
follows-which,
to be
sure,
is
arranged
alphabetically--is
that of
"Giorgio Agamben."
If there can still be
any
doubt about whether the
message
of this friend arrived at its destina-
tion, this footnote should remove it. The footnote is
appended
to the
third word in the
following passage
of Derrida's main text:
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1042 SAMUEL WEBER
To
my knowledge,
there exists an edition in
English
that is based on the
text,
h6i
philoi,
oudeis
philos,
translated as "He who has friends can have
no true friend." One could also translate: "cannot have
any
true friend."
(236/209)
Derrida's
philological "knowledge"
is thus indebted to a series of
"friends,"
the first of
which,
at least in
alphabetical
order,
is
Giorgio
Agamben.
Derrida
proceeds
to cite similar translations in Italian and
German,
before
concluding
his
survey
with what is
probably
the most
literal
translation,
perhaps
because it is "closer to the
source,"
namely
in Latin: Cui
amici,
amicus nemo
(237/209).
Given that this entire
chapter
is
organized
around a discussion of
the two
possible readings
of the citation attributed to Aristotle and
that
Giorgio Agamben
is named
among
those friends whose
help
was
essential to its
writing,
the
"problem"
with which
Agamben
is concerned
has to lie elsewhere. Could it be
precisely
a
question
of number?
Too
many
friends,
no friend? Too
many
names in the list of friends
acknowledged
in the footnote? Too
many
friends, also,
to be
subject
to the kind of
"co-synaesthesia,"
to that "concurrent
perception"
that
Agamben
construes as the essence of
friendship?
Should we recall
here that in
Italian,
as in French and in
German,
the
primary
mean-
ing
of the word
"concurrent"-concorrenza, concurrence,
Konkurrenz-is
"competition"?
Would the Nietzschean
"agonistics"
be
entirely foreign
to the
problem
that
Agamben
has with Derrida's
strategy?
However that
may
be,
it is true that
although Agamben, among
others,
is thanked for his
help,
there is no doubt that his
equation
of the revisionist version with
"perfect intelligibility"
is
severely
criti-
cized. And this is also consistent with the overall
strategy
or
argument
of the book in which Derrida seeks to elaborate a mode of
inquiry
that would do
justice
to that
"dangerous perhaps"
that Nietzsche
associates with the
"coming philosophers"
in
Beyond
Good and
Evil.'5
This is
why
what interests him is not
just
the
"canonical"
version or
the more
probable,
more
plausible
revisionist
one,
but rather their
interplay
and what this reveals about each. Whereas this revisionist
reading
consists in a direct
statement,
a
declaration,
an
unequivocal
proposition,
or in the
language
of
speech-act theory,
a
"constative,"
the
"canonical"
and
improbable
version
appeals
to Derrida
precisely
because it is first and
perhaps
foremost,
an
appeal,
which is to
say,
also
an
address,
and moreover one that
stages
an obvious and undeniable
"performative
contradiction"
(something
of which Derrida himself
was often
accused).
For how can Aristotle address his "friends" if it is
only
to tell them that "there is no friend"?
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MLN 1043
What
appeals
to Derrida in this
performatively contradictory appeal
is that it
foregrounds
two
things
that the constative version tends to
hide.
First,
it manifests the element of address that inheres in all
language, including
constatives,
insofar as the latter
are,
and
always
must
be,
addressed to some
one,
or more than one. And
second,
the
paradoxical appeal
or address attributed to Aristotle
stages
the
contradictory,
even
aporetical
relation between the constative and
performative
dimensions of
discourse,
each
presupposing
the other
and
yet
each
displacing
and
dislocating
the other. The constative is
presupposed by
the
performative-one
must know what a "friend" is in
order to
appeal
to one. But the
performative
in the form of an
appeal
or address is also
presupposed
and contained within
every
constative,
as a form of utterance in
general.
As Derrida
puts
it:
The reader or listener is not
simply "implied" by
or
"implicated"
in
[impli-
quis]
the structure of the utterance. A minimum of
friendship
or of consent
must be
supposed
of
them;
one must
appeal
to a minimal consensus in
order to
say anything
at all. Whether this
appeal
is in
fact
met
by compre-
hension or
agreement,
if
only concerning
the
meaning
of what is said-this
is
secondary
with
respect
to the
appeal
itself.
The latter is coextensive with
the most constative moment of the statement
(constat).
In
short,
there is
indeed some silent
interjection,
some
"O
friends" in the revisionist version.
It resounds in the
performative space
of an
appeal
even before its first word.
And this is the irrefutable truth of the canonical version.
(242/214)
At the same
time,
the fact that
every
act of
language
has to address
itself to "someone" endows it with what Derrida calls "two
great
des-
tinies" or destinations. The first is that
every
enunciation must be
addressed to "someone" but without ever
being
able to
precisely
or
exhaustively identify
its
addressee,
whether male or
female,
singular
or
plural.
The reason for this
uncertainty
is not
simply empirical.
Rather,
it is rooted in the structure of
singularity
that determines
the "second
destiny"
of the
phrase.
Such
singularity-which
should
be
radically distinguished
from
"individuality"-does
not exclude
multiplicity
but rather
necessarily engenders
it. The
singularity
of an
appeal
or an address is relational and
heterogeneous.
For,
as Derrida
puts it,
"it is
impossible
to address
anyone,
male or
female,just
once."
To be
addressed,
an addressee must be
identifiable,
recognizable,
and therefore iterable. What is iterable-but never
simply
iterated-is
"thus
internally multiple
and divided in its
occurrence,
in
any
case
in its advent as event
(ve'nmentialite)" (243/215).
To "this drama or
this chance of a
singular multiplicity,"
both
versions,
the canonical
and the
revisionist, bear witness
through
their contrast of the
plural,
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1044 SAMUEL WEBER
"friends,"
and the
singular
"friend." There is no
friend, then,
in the
sense that the
singular
can never be identified with the
actuality
of
an
individual,
construed as self-contained and
self-identical; rather,
the
singular
is,
to use a word of Novalis that Derrida does not
cite,
dividual,
internally
and
constitutively
divisible
by
virtue of its
iterability,
without which it can never be
recognized
or
experienced
as
singular.
The
singular,
in
short,
is not
simply
the
unique:
it is
inevitably multiple,
but in a
singular
manner. And it is
only recognizable,
nameable after
the fact. After the
fact, however,
it is no
longer
that which it was. The
experience
of
singularity
then
always
entails a sense of
loss,
a kind
of
mourning.
All of this is summed
up
in a French
phrase
that resists translation:
plus
d'un,
whose
meaning changes depending
on how it is
pronounced:
with the s of
"plus" pronounced,
it means more than
one;
with the final
s
silent,
it means one no more. One
possible English
rendition,
which
however
requires
a rather intricate
scansion,
and which also introduces
an
"appeal"
into what would otherwise be a mere
"constat,"
might
therefore be one-no-more
(but
pronounced, haltingly,
as: "One. No!
More!")
The ambivalence of this "one-no-more!" is close to and
yet
still
quite
remote from the kind of
synaesthesia
or
co-perception
that
Agamben
seems to
envisage
as characteristic of
friendship-and
indeed,
of exis-
tence itself. For
Derrida,
the other cannot be construed as another
self: nor does the self "become"
other;
rather from the
start,
or-to
use a recent American
expression,
from the
"get-go,"
it is irreduc-
ibly
and
aporetically
other. From this
perspective,
it is
by
virtue of
its
singularity
that there can be "no
friend,"
qua
individual,
simply,
because
any
friend would have to be both more and less than one:
one-no more! Because number and time cannot be
separated,
this
inevitably
involves what we call the "indefinite
article,"
that in French
and
German,
but not in
English, overlaps
in the
single
word "un
(e),"
"ein(e)."
In
English
we have to
distinguish
between "one" and "a" or
"an." At
any
rate,
it is
precisely
such
singular
multiplicity
that renders it inevitable that the
political
be taken into account
...
It cuts across what is called the
question
of the
subject,
of its
identity
or its
putative self-identity,
its
supposed indivisibility
that causes it to enter
into countable structures for which it seems to be made.
(244/215)
As this
passage
shows,
the
strategy
of
Derrida,
here as
elsewhere,
is
both
very
close to and
yet very
far from the
argument
sketched
by
Agamben
in his brief
essay.
Both
deploy
a notion of
friendship
that
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MLN 1045
is determined
by
an irreducible
alterity
or
heterogeneity.
But whereas
Agamben
construes this
alterity
or
heterogeneity
in terms of a simulta-
neity
of
perception
in which the self is
"deported" by
and toward the
perception
of
another,
Derrida
develops
his notion of
friendship
as
the effect of a
simultaneity
in which there is no
"becoming"
but rather
a discontinuous
jump
or
leap
or cut in the
unity
of the moment-the
(Nietzschean,
Kierkegaardean) Augenblick.
This
temporality-or
tem-
porization,
as his notion of differance would
suggest-is performed
not
through
a
co-perception
but rather
through
a
co-reading
and
"co-signing"
of
texts,
which retraces and reinscribes the
trajectory
of
citations and re-citations of an
original appeal
that cannot be located
as such-for
instance,
in the
corpus
of the Aristotelian text-and
yet
which
precisely
for that reason continues to take
place
once and for
all in innumerable
ever-singular
iterations.
As a
result,
Derrida formulates a
"principle
of
intelligibility"
that
can never be
"pure"
or based on an
"origin."
Rather,
he locates this
"principle"
in the structural
openness
of
every determining
context:
A context is never
absolutely
closed,
constraining,
determined,
saturated.
A structural
opening permits
it to transform itself or to make
place
for
another context. This is
why every
mark retains a force of detachment that
not
only
can liberate from this or that determinate
context,
but even assures
it its
principle
of intelligibility
and its structure
qua
mark,
which is to
say,
its
iterability (repetition
and
alteration)....
And this is what
happens
with the
history
of our
phrase.
Its entire
history,
from the
start,
will have consisted in
taking
leave of a
unique
context and of an indivisible addressee. That will
have been
possible only
because its initial addressee
(friend
or
enemy
but
in no
way
neutral)
will have been first of all
multiple, potentially
detached
from the context of its initial occurrence.
(245/215)
This
potential
for
detachment,
Derrida
concludes,
is also the reason
that between the "one no more" and the "more than one" there is not
just "friendship"
but also
enmity
and "war":
why
the
enemy
is
always
ready
to take the
place
of the
friend,
and
why
both "take
place
in
taking
the
place
of the other"
(244/216).
Does this amount to the "distrustful revocation" of
friendship
or
the
recognition
of its ineluctable ambivalence? It would in
any
case
suggest
that the "cohabitation" of which
Agamben speaks
can never
have been
pure
but rather has
always
also been the site and the con-
dition for
conflict,
of concurrence in all the
multilingual
senses of that
word. This in turn defines the
"principle
of
intelligibility"
as one that
is
hyperbolic, always exceeding
and also
defaulting
on
itself, which is to
say,
on what
appears
to consciousness as its
initiating
intention:
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1046 SAMUEL WEBER
When someone
speaks
in
private
or in
public,
when he
teaches,
publishes,
preaches,
orders,
promises
or
prophesies,
informs or
communicates,
that
some force in him
struggles
also not to be
understood,
approved, accepted
in the consensus ... it is
necessary
that the
possibility
of failure is not
merely
an accidental
edge
but
something
that
haunts,
and leaves its
impression
on,
the
very body
it seems to threaten.
(246/218-19)
Without
simply "subscribing
to such a
haunting,"
Derrida neverthe-
less concludes that
No
"good"
decision would ever accede to
responsibility,
without which no
event could ever
happen. Undecidability
(and
hence all inversions of
signs
between
friendship
and its
opposite)
is not a sentence that a decision can
leave behind. The crucial
experience
of the
perhaps imposed by
the unde-
cidable-that is to
say,
the condition of decision-is not a moment to be
exceeded,
forgotten,
or
suppressed.
It continues to constitute the decision
as such: it can never
again
be
separated
from
it;
it
produces
it
qua
decision
in and
through
the
undecidable;
there is no decision other than this one:
decision in the matter and form of the undecidable.... The instant of
decision must remain
heterogeneous
to all
knowledge
as such ... even if
it
may
and must be
preceded by
all
possible
science and conscience. The
latter are unable to determine the
leap
of decision without
transforming
it
into the
irresponsible application
of a
program,
hence without
depriving
it of... what makes it a
decision,
if there is one.
(247/219)
"If there is one
...
." Let me conclude
by returning
for one last time
to that
"perfect allegory
of
friendship"
that
Agamben
finds
depicted
the
painting
of Serodine. The two
Apostles,
Peter and
Paul,
meet on
their
way
to their death.
They
are too close to see each
other,
but also
close
enough
to
grasp
each other's hand. This "excessive
proximity,"
in which
Agamben
discerns the
perfect allegory
of
friendship,
seems
thus
inseparable
from the
proximity
of death-but of a death that
carries with it the
promise
of
something
other,
something
not
entirely
visible but
perhaps co-perceptible:
the
promise
of a "cohabitation" that
is
synonymous
with human "existence"
itself.
In
friendship,
human
existence
grasps
itself and
thereby
transcends its limitations. This
seems to be the subtext of
Agamben's reading
of the
painting
that
can be
"concurrently perceived"
in
viewing
it-if,
that
is,
one
only
has sufficient trust. One need
only
have trust in
friendship,
rather
than
affirming
and
revoking
it
"distrustfully,"
in order to
perceive
"concurrently"
what will never be
simply
accessible to the
single
vision
of a mortal self.
There is no doubt that the
"principle
of
intelligibility"-"if
there
is one"-elaborated
by
Derrida in Politics
of Friendship
is
very
differ-
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MLN 1047
ent from the
"perfect" intelligibility
that
Agamben
associates with
Casaubon's
correction,
changing
a vocative
appeal
and address into
what looks like a
straightforward
statement. For the "force of detach-
ment" that for Derrida constitutes the structural condition of the
intelligibility
of
every
mark delimits and limits it at
once,
making
it
always
more and less than
one,
more and less than
itself,
making
it
"one-no,
more!" This
points
toward a different kind of "cohabitation"
from that which the
"perfect allegory
of
friendship"
in its
"perfect"
intelligibility envisages.
Such cohabitation is
perhaps
less
dramatic,
less
perceptible,
and
certainly
less
reassuring
than that which is
depicted
on the
"way
to
calvary"-which, just by
chance,
is also the title of a
painting by
a
contemporary
of
Serodine,
Domenichino
[1610]
(Fig-
ure
2).
In this
painting,
Christ,
tormented
by
his
captors,
fixes the
beholder with his
glance
from
below,
a visual
equivalent perhaps
of
a verbal
address,
appeal
or
interpellation.
Even less
perfectly intelligible, perhaps,
than this
glance
is a
very
different,
and
yet perhaps
not
totally
unrelated
scene,
described in the
Figure
2. Domenichino
(Domenico
Zampieri,
1581-1641)
The
Way
to
Calvary (1610).
@ The
J.
Paul
Getty
Museum,
Los
Angeles.
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1048 SAMUEL WEBER
following passage
from Maurice Blanchot's
Writing of
Disaster,
which
Derrida cites in a footnote to an earlier
chapter
of his
book,
and with
which I will
(finally)
conclude:
If the Messiah is at the
gates
of Rome
among
the
beggars
and the
lepers,
one
might
believe that his
incognito protects
him or
prevents
his
coming,
but
precisely
he is
recognized;
someone,
haunted with
questioning
and unable
to leave
off,
asks him: "When will
you
come?" His
being-there,
then,
is not
his
coming.
With the
Messiah,
who is
there,
the call must
always
resound,
"Come,
Come." His
presence
is no
guarantee.
Both future and
past
(it
is
said,
at least
once,
that the Messiah has
already
come),
his
coming
does
not
correspond
to
any presence
at all... . And should it
happen
that,
to
the
question,
"When will
your coming
take
place?"
the Messiah
responds,
"Today,"
the answer is
certainly impressive:
so,
it is
today!
It is now and
now
again.
There is no
waiting, although
this is like an
obligation
to wait.
And when is now? A now that does not
belong
to
ordinary
time ... does
not maintain
it,
destabilizes it....
(55/46)
Northwestern
University
NOTES
1
"Should I Cite
Wikipedia? Probably
not. Should
you
use and cite
Wikipedia
as
a source for an academic
paper?
The answer
depends
on
your
research
topic.
Wikipedia may
be useful as a
primary
source on
popular
culture,
or for
subjects
that have not been addressed in the
scholarly
literature. For more academic
top-
ics, however,
it cannot
compete
with the
library's specialized encyclopedias
and
online resources. ... Articles in
Wikipedia may
be well written and
insightful,
but
they
are not embedded in the world of
scholarly
discourse. Without
knowing
who
wrote the
article,
it is more difficult to
judge
whether the author's
writing
is
worthy
of
consideration,
or to
critique
his or her motivations or
qualifications.
Without a
known
author,
Wikipedia
articles cannot be considered
authoritative."
2 Immanuel
Kant,
De mundi sensibilis
atque intelligibilis
forma et
principiis,
S3
(Hamburg:
Meiner, 1958)
18-19.
3
Plato,
The
Republic, VI,
trans.
by
Paul
Shorey,
Plato: The Collected
Dialogues,
(Princ-
eton: Princeton
UP, 1963)
744.
4
Ibid.,
746.
5 C. S.
Peirce,
Collected
Writings,
edited
by Philip
P. Wiener
(New
York: Dover Publica-
tions, 1958)
332. For a discussion of this and related
passages
see: Samuel
Weber,
Institution and
Interpretation (Minneapolis:
U of Minnesota
P, 1987)
18-24.
6
Giorgio Agamben, "Friendship," trans.Joseph
Falsone,
Contretemps
5,
December
2004.
7
J.
Derrida,
Politiques
de
l'amitie (Paris: Galil6e, 1994);
Politics
of Friendship,
trans.
George
Collins
(Verso
Books: New
York/London, 1997/2005).
8 Not
having
had the
opportunity yet
to read the Italian text of this
essay,
I will as-
sume that the error in the
English
translation of the
phrase
attributed to Aristotle
is either
typographical
or the work of the
translator,
not the author. The
phrase,
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MLN 1049
in all the citations and translations I have ever
encountered,
distinguishes
between
the
plural "philoi"-friends-and
the
singular philos,
friend,
after
oudeis)
and thus
traditionally
has been rendered as "Oh
my
friends-there is no friend!" Since the
question
of
singularity,
and its relation to the
plural
and the
multiple
will be one
of the main issues raised
by
this
"sibylline
motto,"
the error is
unfortunate,
no
matter from whom it stems.
9 M.
Heidegger,
Elucidations
of
Holderlin's
Poetry,
trans.
by
Keith Hoeller
(Amherst,
NY: Humanity
Books, 2000)
74
(translation
modified here and
throughout-SW).
See also: S.
Weber,
Institution and
Interpretation,
loc. cit.,
85
ff.
10
Ibid.,
236.
11 Barnes: "He
needs, therefore,
to be conscious of the existence of his friend as
well.. ."
(II, 1850).
12 It should be noted that the
repeated
mention of the
"good"
in the
passage
of
Aristotle,
generally
held to be essential in his treatment of
"friendship,"
is not
discussed
by Agamben.
13 Is this
charge
of
"pettiness"
an echo
of,
or
response
to the
charge
that Foucault
addressed at
Derrida,
without
naming
him,
in his introduction to the
Japanese
translation of Les mots et les choses? There Foucault dismissed a certain textualism
as a
"petty pedagogy" (petite pedagogie). Previously,
Derrida and Foucault had been
"friends" ....
14
J.
Derrida,
Politiques
de
l'amitie
(Galilee:
Paris, 1994)
234. Politics
of Friendship,
trans.
George
Collins
(London/New
York:
Verso, 2005) 208;
henceforth cited
parenthetically
as
PF
15
"Perhaps!
But who is
willing
to concern himself with such
dangerous perhapses!
For that we have to await the arrival of a new
species
of
philosopher,
one which
possesses
tastes and inclinations
opposite
to and different from those of its
pre-
decessors-philosophers
of the
dangerous 'perhaps'
in
every
sense"
(PF34).
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