A local bookclub is doing Montaigne's On Friendship this week, and while reading up on it, I came across this in Derrida's Politics of Friendship.

Will one say, in a rather Aristotelian gesture, that this friendship has merely an accidental and analogical relation with friendship in the strict or proper sense? Or with friendship which is “perfect of its kind” (Montaigne)?

The question thus becomes: “What is friendship in the proper sense?” Is it ever present? What is presence for this philia protè or for this teleia philia, whose aporia we have caught a glimpse of? “What is the essence of friendship?” If we are not close to answering this question, it is not only because of the very large number of philosophical difficulties still before us, which we are going to try to approach. In a preliminary, principal way, at once simple and abyssal, it is because the question “what is? (ti estin),” the question of essence or truth, has already unfolded itself, as the question of philosophy, starting from a certain experience of philein and philia.

There is not enough space here to tie this question to the elaboration that Heidegger proposes of it, notably in Was ist das—die Philosophie? This elaboration concerns the moment in which the philein of Heraclitus’ philein to sophon, after having been determined as originary accord (ein ursprünglicher Einklang, harmonia) would have become an orientation toward research, a jealous and tense inquisition or striving (strebende Suchen) “determined by Eros” (50—51). It is only with this eroticization of the questioning about beings (“was ist das Seiende, insofern es ist?”) that thought (das Denken) would have become philosophy. “Heraclitus and Parmenides were not yet philosophers” (52—53). The “step” toward philosophy would have been prepared by the Sophists and finally achieved by Socrates and Plato. Guided by a vigilant reading of this interpretation, we might attempt to follow the very discreet thread of an incessant meditation on friendship in the path of Heidegger's thought. The meditation passes, in particular, by way of the unexpected and isolated allusion to the “voice of the friend (Stimme des Freundes) that every Dasein carries within itself” (Sein und Zeit §34, 163). The existential analytic of Dasein that “carries (trägt)” this voice in itself, let us not forget, is neither an anthropology, nor a sociology, nor an analytic of the subject, consciousness, psyche, or the ego—neither a morals nor a politics. All these disciplines presuppose it. This loads the allusion to the voice of the friend—and thus friendship itself—with a very particular ontological signification, in the chapter on “Dasein und Rede, Die Sprache” (160-67) and not even in the analytic of Mitsein. This strange “voice,” at once both internal and from elsewhere, perhaps has some relation to the “voice” of conscience (Gewissen) of which Heidegger also proposes an existential analytic (§57). The provenance of the call, its Woher, is an Unheimlichkeit (§58). The voice of the call is, moreover, experienced as an alien, non-intimate voice (unvertraut—so etwas wie eine fremde Stimme) by the everyday “they” (§57: 277). Since the sex of this “friend” is not determined, I would also be tempted to graft onto this reading the questions I have elsewhere posed on the word Geschlecht and sexual difference in Heidegger (Derrida "Geschlecht: différence sexuelle, différence ontologique" and "La main de Heidegger (Geschlecht II)").

Continued.  ¶ 8:22 PM