Gregg Lambert
Late in his life - in 1988, after Foucault and in the midst of co-writing
with Guattari What Is Philosophy? - Deleuze had a brief exchange of
letters with Dionys Mascolo (the author of Le Communisme and
Autour d'un effort de mémoire: Sur une lettre de Robert Antelme), a
correspondence which quickly turned to the subject of 'the friend'
{philos). It is from this context that I would like to construct a geneal-
ogy of this concept in Deleuze's later writings, particularly in relation
to Deleuze's assertion that the democratic ideal of friendship has been
totally 'corrupted' {pourri), a term that Deleuze employs with greater
frequency in his last works. 1 According to one of the major arguments
put forward in What Is Philosophy? the political idea of friendship,
understood as the democratic consensus of friends or equals, as well as
the instruments of speech and communication, have become corrupted
by being completely permeated by money (for example, appearing
today as the inter-subjective idealism of free markets). 2 But what
happens in this new situation to the possibility of the friend, a concept
that originates in Occidental thought from the period of the Greeks,
which already determines the intersubjective idealism of politics? And
what of Communism? Has it not also been called, in its modern Utopian
version, a universal society of friendship? Consequently, it is precisely
this question that returns two years later in an interview with Toni
Negri, in which Negri raises the question of friendship in the age of
'communication', and asks whether or not it still constitutes a Utopian
version of politics:
Implicitly - here, I might even say cryptically - this last book written
together, 'between friends', repeats an earlier question posed by
Heidegger also in the twilight of his philosophical career: Was Heisst
Denken? {What Is Called Thinking?).4 The secret affiliation between
these two works that span a brief period of forty years is, in fact, is the
figure of Hölderlin who is the frequent subject of Heidegger's meditations
on the subject of 'the friend' and who appears in the second part of the
book, and is cryptically referenced in Deleuze's correspondence with
Mascolo as 'the German poet who wrote in the twilight hour' of the friend
who must be distrusted and who, for that reason, places the thinking (of
friendship, but of philosophy itself as we have seen) 'in distress'. Of
course, given the significance of this 'German poet' in Heidegger's own
Deleuze and the Political Ontology of 'The Friend' 37
for any thinking. I no longer remember which German poet wrote of the
twilight hour when one should be wary 'even of a friend.' One would go
that far, to wariness of a friend, and all that would, with friendship, put the
'distress' in thought an essential way.
I think there are many ways, in the authors I admire, to introduce
concrete categories and situations as the conditions of pure thought.
Kierkegaard uses the fiancé and the engagement. For Klossowski (and
maybe Sartre in a different way), it is the couple. Proust uses jealous
love because it constitutes thought and is connected to signs. For you and
Blanchot, it is friendship. This implies a complete réévaluation of 'philoso-
phy,' since you are the only ones who take the word philos literally. Not that
you go back to Plato. The Platonic sense of the word is already extremely
complex and has never been fully explained. Yet one can sense that your
meaning is altogether different. Philos may have been displaced from Athens
to Jersualem, but it was also enhanced during the Resistance, from the
network, which are affects of thought no less than historical and political
situations. There is already a sizeable history of philos in philosophy of
which you are already a part or, through all sorts of bifurcations, the
modern representative. It is at the heart of philosophy, in the concrete pre-
supposition (where personal history and singular thinking combine) . . .
(Deleuze 2005: 329-30)
ideals from a spirit of malevolence and bad faith, rather than simply from
an experience of irony in which his own personal history and singular
thinking combined in the creation of these concepts.
Returning to the correspondence between Mascolo and Deleuze,
Mascolo cannot go so far as to acknowledge 'malevolence' as a possibil-
ity between friends. Replying to Deleuze's proposal to reverse the condi-
tion of distrust, making friendship responsible for putting thought in
distress, he expresses a certain amount of anxiety over what this would
imply, for if this were the case it would make friendship itself 'unthink-
able', if not 'unliveable':
In his reply, Mascolo seems to argue that the bond of friendship, while
open to an occasional disagreement, is not vulnerable to actual malevo-
lence, that is once a friend has been accepted into friendship. This would
imply that friendship cannot be placed into distress by the friend himself
or herself, which would be not merely 'unthinkable' but rather a thought
that is outside friendship. To summarise the phrase by Hölderlin that
Mascolo refers to here, 'Without [the life of the spirit between friends],
we are by our own hands outside thought' (Deleuze 2005: 331; empha-
sis added). Following Deleuze's assertion, on the other hand, let us admit
this as a possibility - that the friend could, by his or her own hand, do
the unthinkable (at least, what is unthinkable for Mascolo) - and would
be capable of expressing true malevolence for 'the friend'. The first thing
one would have to ask is whether, considering this possibility, which is
the cause of wariness, would friendship even be possible any longer (at
least in its classical sense)? If we have established that the Utopian state
of society shared between friends implicitly informs the various political
idealisms that have been created by Occidental philosophy, following the
Greeks, up to and including the expression of 'absolute democracy'
(Negri), then what would be the political consequences for this idealism
once we admit into the concept of friendship itself the possibility of real
malevolence, which in a Christian universe must also include the possi-
bility of evil, or of 'doing evil to the friend'? First, there would be no more
basis for any belief in friendship, nor for 'having faith in one's friend'
Deleuze and the Political Ontology of 'The Friend' 43
At the present moment, when the democratic petty bourgeois are every-
where oppressed, they preach in general unity and reconciliation to the pro-
letariat, they offer it their hand and strive for the establishment of a large
opposition party which will embrace all the different shades of opinion in
the democratic party, that is, they strive to entangle the workers in a party
organisation in which general socialist democratic phrases predominate,
behind which their special interests are concealed and in which the particu-
lar demands of the proletariat may not even be brought forward for the sake
of beloved peace. (Marx and Engels 1978: 505-6)
46 Gregg Lambert
athlete who fails under too much strenuous effort, but rather by the
experience of violence that is unthinkable in friendship itself.
It is this experience that causes Deleuze and Guattari to be led back,
by way of a number of other conceptual personae such as 'the lover' (or
'fiancé'), 'the couple' and, most of all, through 'woman' herself, to the
friend as the original conceptual persona of thought being divided within
itself in order to establish the original possibility of thinking itself as
either dialogue or conversation. They write:
Unless we are led back to 'the Friend,' but after an ordeal that is too pow-
erful, an inexpressible catastrophe, and so yet another new sense, in a
mutual distress, a mutual weariness that forms the new right of thought
(Socrates becomes Jewish). Not two friends who communicate and recall
the past together but, on the contrary, who both suffer an amnesia or
aphasia capable of splitting thought, of dividing it in itself. (Deleuze and
Guattari 1994: 31)
Each time the question: 'Who is "Autrui}" ' emerges in our words I think of
the book by Robert Antelme, for it not only testifies to the society of the
German camps of World War II, it also leads to an essential reflection.
(Blanchot 1993: 130)
References
Agamben, G. (1998), Homo Sacer, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen, Palo Alto, CA:
Stanford University Press.
Antelme, R. (1992), The Human Race, trans. Jeffrey Haight and Annie Mahler,
Evanston, IL: Marlboro-Northwestern University Press.
Beckett, S. (1984), The Collected Shorter Plays, New York: Grove Press.
Deleuze and the Political Ontology of 'The Friend' 51
Notes
1. As Deleuze suggests, 'Peut-être la parole, la communication, sont-elles pourries.'
The French adjective pourri indicates a much stronger sense of something being
rotten, the term 'corrupted' being a figurative translation. See Deleuze (1990:
238).
2. See Deleuze and Guattari (1994: 7ff).
3. This is a logical (or ontological) conclusion that Deleuze and Guattari share with
Derrida who, in his treatise on The Politics of Friendship published in French
three years later in 1994, writes the following: 'The question "What is friend-
ship?", but also "Who is the friend (both or either sex)?" is nothing but the ques-
tion: "What is Philosophy?" ' (Derrida 1997: 240).
4. See Martin Heidegger (1984). For discussion of Hölderlin, see Part II, pp. 79-
150. On 'the friend,' see also Heidegger (1951).
5. I am not only referring to Heidegger's role in the National Socialist Party, but to
the betrayal of the philosophical friendship with Edmund Husserl when he
removed his previous dedication to his teacher in a later edition of Zein und Zeit.
6. Here, I am particularly thinking of Beckett's later play Catastrophe, which por-
trays three 'talking heads' in overlapping monologue about themselves and their
relationships.
7. Of course, I continue to employ the French term in parentheses to echo the
Heideggerian term for existential concern (or Sorge), which is Angst.
8. A good illustration of the kind of conversation I am referring to, in which the un-
speakable constitutes the linguistic condition of enunciation, expressed in the
forms of prattle and idle speech between friends, is Paul Celan's 'Conversation in
52 Gregg Lambert
the Mountains', which also cryptically refers to a conversation that did not take
place between Celan and Heidegger, and concerns the philosopher's infamous
'silence' concerning the extermination of the Jews. Thus, I would include this
'conversation' in the genealogy of 'the friend who must be suspected', but will
return to this in another context. See Paul Celan (1986: 17-22) 'Conversation :.n
the Mountains'.
9. See Deleuze's earliest description of the Greek dialectic of rivalry (amphisbete-
sis) in 'Plato and the Simulacrum' (1969: 292ff).
10. Here, we might recall that Nietzsche could undergo a diet of atheism only
through a creative spirit of friendship, and particularly his friendship with
women, which is the subject of one of concluding hymns in The Gay Science.
11. In Search for a Method, Sartre uses this metaphor of the sulphuric acid bath
negatively to criticise the idealism implicit in orthodox Marxism where human
beings are reduced to emanations of the historical process foretold by Marx ar. d
Engels. Here, I am using this metaphor in order to underline the process of
'purification', in an anthropological sense, which also belonged to Marx's earlier
definition of the separation of the classes as a species differentiation, and the
identification of the proletariat as a new species {Geschlecht) that will emerge at
the end of the historical process. I will return to take up this analysis in another
context, also in relation to the modern scientific racism of National Socialist ide-
ology. It should be clear to the reader that my discussion on this point is guided
as much by Derrida's reflections on the subject as those of Deleuze, which aire
more elliptical in the last writings. (One can only speculate whether they would
have been more developed in the book on Marx that Deleuze was reported to
have been planning before his death.)
12. Mascolo's own writings on Communism will become the subject of another
chapter. It is important to note, however, that both he and Robert Antelme, who
is the subject of Mascolo's short Autour d'un effort de mémoire (1987), remain
faithful to the spirit of friendship of the communist ideal (i.e. a Marxist human-
ist ideology), even through the disillusionments that the French Communist
Party suffered through the 1950s with the revelations of the Gulag.
13. In order to avoid any association of this image with Agamben's figure of homo
sacer, I would simply point out that the latter is the figure of 'the body' strippe d
of all human resemblance, especially speech, and reduced to bare political life.
By contrast, Antelme insists on speaking, in an incredible effort of memory of
what happened, even when his friends tell him 'by itself his physical appearance
was eloquent enough'. I believe this distinction is crucial enough in itself to dis-
qualify any association between the two concepts. In any case, the concept of
homo sacer is outside any possible relation to 'the friend', and beyond all friend-
ship, even one that belongs to the future. For a characterisation of Antelme's own
speech, see the Preface and Forward to Robert Antelme, The Human Species
(1992).
14. Here, I would argue that Deleuze does not necessarily provide us with this phi-
losophy, even though he is one of the few philosophers (along with Derrida, I
would argue) who first call our attention to this 'new right of thought', accord-
ing to the above quoted passage. Concerning the identification of the friend as a
'presence that is intrinsic to thought', a 'living category', or what Deleuze ar d
Guattari call 'un vécu transcendental' (1994: 3).
15. If there is a secondary, tertiary or purely academic purpose to my reconstruction
of this rich genealogy of the concept of 'the friend' - a form of exposition that
Deleuze and Guattari call the 'pedagogy of the concept' - it is to refute, almost
in its entirety, everything that Peter Hallward has recently argued concerning
Deleuze and 'the political'. Given everything I believe I have established above
Deleuze and the Political Ontology of 'The Friend' 53