Friend (Fr. l’ami)

In order to begin our genealogical exercise, first let us return and take up in more detail the late correspondence between Deleuze and Mascolo. In a letter dated August 6, 1988, Deleuze writes the following in reply to an earlier letter where Mascolo first raises the possibility that the basis of philosophical friendship (defined as the “solidarity of thought”) would evoke the concrete situation of a friend who shares a suspicion concerning thinking itself:

Your answer was very kind and thoughtful: if there is a secret, it is the secret of a thought that is suspicious of thinking, thus a source of concern [souci] that, if found in another person, is the basis of friendship. . . . Couldn’t we reverse the order? Friendship comes first for you. Obviously friendship would not be a more or less favorable external circumstance, but, while remaining the most concrete, it would be the internal condition of thought as such. Not speaking with your friend or remembering him or her, etc., but rather go through trials with that person like aphasia and amnesia that are necessary 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 in an essential way. I think there are many manners, 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 reevaluation of “philosophy” since you are the only ones who take the word phílos 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. Phílos may have been displaced from Athens to Jerusalem, 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 phílos 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 presupposition (where personal history and singular thinking combine).1

In his reply to Mascolo, Deleuze is responding to the normative view of friendship, one in which supposedly there exists a suspension of other forms of interest and desire (such as the erotic, or the purely egotistic and solipsistic interest) in such a manner that allows the friend to appear to exist beyond suspicion of malevolence. Thus, there is a certain piety that surrounds and protects the person one chooses to call friend, either through discretion or the protection of secrets, as well as the prohibition of overt violence (which, at first, appears to be impossible among friends).

Certainly there can be disagreements, but usually these can be resolved through communication or, most often, suppressed in the name of friendship itself. In other words, it is this special social experience that is concretely lived with others, a form of utopia, that is usually absent from the strife that defines the political sphere, or the sphere of so-called civil society, which is defined by conflicting interests between individuals or classes. Is this by accident, or is this supposed dissymmetry between the strife that defines the political and the utopian experience of friendship itself the ontological reserve of the relationship between these two spheres in Occidental thought? In other words, is not the concrete and everyday experience of the quasi-utopian state shared among friends the very destination of the political idea of friendship, the manner in which the political seems to be destined (to employ a Derridean manner of speaking) from an initial state of war and the conflicting forms of interests between strangers to a final state of union or accord within a society of friends?

Even if it exists primarily as myth or fiction, if what is called the political realm is based on the idea of “free election”—that is, on the idea of friendship as a social determination that is not natural or determined by kinship and the private sphere of the family—then the spontaneous nature of the accord (or alliance) will always be temporal. The specific meaning of temporality has two senses here: first, meaning “not permanent”; second, referring to a spontaneous act or promise that immediately occurs in relation to its past and, in order to exist in the present, must undergo constant repetition. This becomes the basis of the ritual acts of recognition in friendship, which have a profound impact on the particular nature of the accord or alliance in question.

The friend is bound to an oath that is given spontaneously, moreover, becoming the basis for all secret confidences and private communication; because the self in friendship is vulnerable to being exposed to “the Third” (Levinas), this becomes the source of a secret concern that is shared between friends as a mutual limit and source of anxiousness (souci). However, friends do not often speak of this limit—it is avoided, being the repressed condition of their relation that it remain “unthinkable”—but, as often happens, will confess the existence of this limit as the mark of a special protection or confidence. What is this limit? According to Cicero, it is not simply death, but something worse than death—ignominy and hatred.

Why, if mutual love of friends were to be removed, there would be no single house, no single state that would go on existing; even agriculture [i.e., economy] would cease to be. If this seems a bit difficult to understand, we can readily see how great the power of friendship and love by observing their opposites, enmity and ill will. For what house is so firmly established, what constitution is so unshakable, that it could not be utterly destroyed by hatred and internal division? From this we may judge how much good there is in friendship.2

In accepting the election of friendship, therefore, I am bound by an oath to protect the image of the other person (autrui) in the place of my own ego. In some ways this substitution takes the form of an exchange and becomes partly the basis for the special possessive alterity that defines the friend in some sense as “my other.” This is because, from this point onward, the friend is not another like all the others but instead serves as the condition for protection and alliance. Again, for Cicero, protection from violence inflicted by others and by time itself is the condition of the bond of true friendship and even bears the promise of eternal life for the Roman.

By contrast, what do the above examples of concrete situations and categories share in common except that they refer to intensive states of extremity and limit-situations that threaten the social bond: the broken engagement, the couple who become rivals (or jealous lovers), friends who are suddenly separated by incredible distances (whether spatial or psychological) or drawn into an inexplicable trial that threatens to exhaust the possibility of friendship itself. Thus, even though they remain friends, they find themselves struck dumb by their own passivity and can only be silent before one another—or, as with Samuel Beckett’s couples, prattle incessantly about their own selfish cares and “needs” (including the need for friendship itself, or the recovery to friendship).3 From these descriptions we can imagine that the concept of friendship that Deleuze has in mind does not refer to a peaceful state of community, or sharing in common, but rather to the various “limit-situations” and intensive states of difference that can only occur between friends. It seems that a state of friendship can only exist within the narrow confines of a social relationship that is already conditioned by the preexisting interests that determine what is “common” becoming the basis of proximity, identification, and fraternization—but also the implicit conditions of alienation and hostility as well. Consequently, this peaceful state of bliss and consensus is always haunted by the outbreak of a difference thatit cannot pacify, repress, or communicate through, and here we touch on something of a political problem that can only belong to friendship, an event that presupposes or occurs only in a state of friendship with its abstract notions of identity and consensus. But who can say whether this same limit communicates with the limit of the political itself, whose failure and unconscious repetition belongs to the concept of friendship that perhaps we have merely “inherited” but which is not properly founded?

Deleuze refers to these intensive states of difference as “secrets” that become a constant source of anxiety and intense concern (souci) in friendship, and in a certain sense, it is because they represent the various thoughts of suspicion, rivalry, paranoia, even desire, that each friend must keep secret from the other, even though these thoughts are already divided “between friends” and are consequently shared, constituting, perhaps, the positive contents of the unconscious that each friend bears in anxious concern for the other.4 There is always an inherent limit to the friendship hidden within each friend; the sudden revelation of this limit refers to an event (a word, an action of betrayal, or the refusal to act in the name of friendship itself) that was always already possible from the very beginning, even though it may have been previously unthinkable (i.e., barred from the conscious life that is shared between friends). If this event remains secret, perhaps it is because it constitutes a repressed differend (to employ Jean-François Lyotard’s term), perhaps even the seed of a catastrophe that would cause the state of friendship to transform into something else, such as enmity or hatred. It is in this sense that the event is already virtual, referring to statements that are unsayable, deeds or actions that are unrealizable, erotic desires that are unobtainable within the normal limits of friendship—a frequent source of constant anxiety and care. Above all, this seems to imply that friendship is not a peaceful accord, or form of consensus and equality, but rather a very specific form of strife and conflict that is structured by a social form of Mitsein (“being-in-common”), one that enforces a constant vigilance by both parties. Even in the most quotidian relationships defined by friendship there is a secret enmity that could well up at any moment, marking the limit or the end of friendship. Consequently, friends are always suspicious of one another, on the lookout for signs of betrayal of confidences, or worse, the inevitable turning away that marks its extreme limit in death and forgetfulness, like Eurydice’s descent into the underworld. Consequently, as Deleuze also suggests, this implicit or virtual conflict is one reason that the friend must be kept under constant surveillance, under careful guard (implying a different motive for proximity than simple amity). Moreover, every statement made by the friend must already contain the unspeakable as its secret condition, almost as if the actual contents of the conversation between friends are only made to paper over the unsaid, something that seems to increase over the duration of the friendship, offering a plausible explanation to why friends often appear to talk endlessly about nothing, or have a habit of saying whatever comes to mind. One might add that friends are very much like philosophers in this respect, and this may even indicate one of the origins of philosophical enunciation.5

But what happens when, as Deleuze remarks, “friendship puts the ‘distress’ in thinking”? Here, distress is no longer merely “concern” or an anxiety over what is already latent in friendship and appearing as its secret reserve, or its outside. Distress indicates a limit-situation, one that occurs when the unspeakable rises to the level of the expressed or the impossible action is realized, interrupting the peace that is normally associated with its semi-utopian state, thus threatening to transform the friend into a rival or an enemy. For example, a friend can suddenly become duplicitous out of a secret source of jealousy or social envy and can seek to damage the image of the friend in the society of others. This becomes an event that could end the friendship through the charge of betrayal. However, here we must ask, a betrayal of what exactly? Perhaps the unspoken rule between friends, that one should always speak positively of the friend and never seek his or her destruction? Is this not the rule that first defines what friendship ought to be in its utopian concept, if not in reality? The one betrayed might say: “And I thought you were my friend? And yet, you have been speaking behind my back and plotting my destruction all along.” Of course, we all know of those friends who, precisely in the name of friendship itself, will encourage the betrayal of a third friend (especially a lover or fiancé) in order to consolidate their role as “the best friend” and to thus make themselves appear more “proximate,” honest, truthful, and therefore ultimately more sincere than the friend or the lover who always ends up failing the ideals of friendship itself. These are just a few of the concrete situations that cause us to think the concept of friendship in “distress.” In these situations, the friend is now in the very place to betray the semi-utopia of friendship, either through self-interested cunning or desire, or perhaps through a secret hatred of the spirit of friendship itself.

These images might evoke the great figures from William Shakespeare such as Iago or Brutus—a Machiavellian desire, a spirit of revenge, personal envy disguised as the virtues of confidence and true friendship. However, even before Shakespeare’s figures, we already have the ancient figure of Medea, who appears in the center of the polis appealing to the virtues of friendship in the course of committing an infanticide. Implicitly, these historical examples also point to the inherent limitation and weakness of friendship as a social bond or as a primitive dyadic form of social organization; it seems the minute that friendship extends beyond its simple dyad—that is, the moment it attempts to constitute a social assemblage comprised of more than two persons—there occurs a reintroduction of the principle of “the Third” and with it all the accompanying possibilities of rivalry and competition over self-interest that is usually deferred to other social relations, especially political ones. Perhaps this is why Deleuze admits the possibility of “malevolence” and violence into the proximity of friendship and asks whether this constitutes the failure of “the friend”—that is, of this or that particular friend, or rather the failure of a certain concept of friendship itself that we have inherited from the Greeks, including the idea of a democratic assemblage of friends that always number more than two individuals, immediately ushering in the possibilities of competition and rivalry and, at its extreme limit, violence and even warfare. In its original situation, such as Deleuze describes it, the friend is introduced into the relationship to knowledge of the Entity; as he writes: “The Greeks violently force the friend into a relationship with the Thing and no longer merely as an extrinsic persona or Other.”6 Thus, it is no longer that the friend appears extrinsic to the Thing’s essence but is intrinsic to the very nature of the Thing’s revealing and concealing itself, recalling Heidegger’s concept of truth as a-lethia. In other words, from the Greeks onward, philosophy is no longer a conversation about Things (wisdom), and the presence of the friend is essential to thought being divided from itself and pursuing its unity again by means of the dialectic instituted between equals, each of which functions as both claimant and rival to the Thing’s essence. In other words, according to the Greek dialectic of amphisbetisis, friendship can only exist through the vigilance of an active and creative will that intervenes in order to mediate all rivalry and competition over an Entity; by shaping and organizing the component interests into aesthetic and ethical expressions of the Beautiful and the Good (or by excluding or repressing certain desires, especially the erotic and purely egotistic instincts, which would transform friendship into something else); and, finally, by turning concern itself into an exercise that requires moral discipline, athleticism and courage, and an aesthetic sensibility of taste capable of appreciating the virtues of perfect friendship. According to this model, friendship becomes an art, which requires of its creators moderation in appetite, sobriety, purification of thought, and, above all, piety, modesty, and respect.7

But then, how did “the Greeks” force the friend into the relationship with the knowledge of the Entity, and how would this force not also be experienced as a form of violence that might destroy the possibility of friendship or, at least, confront its real limits? In response, Deleuze asks: “Is this not already too great a task?” In other words, was the ideal of friendship already doomed to fail from its very inception? Would not every friend already be destined to betray the perfection of friendship similar to an athlete who, exhausted, having reached the limit of his or her powers, gives up the race? It would seem here that what is commonly called platonic love is not the only impossible ideal introduced by the Greek philosopher: the idea of friendship may very well be an even greater source of contradiction within Occidental societies. Perhaps in a worst-case scenario we might even suspect that Plato invented these ideals from a spirit of malevolence and bad faith rather than simply from an experience of irony combining his own personal history and singular thinking. Another possibility, no less ironic, is that through the transformation in thinking effected by placing the friend in contact with violence and nonthinking as the extreme limit of our knowledge of the Entity (i.e., the social relation itself), modern philosophy introduces the presence of a dark intentionality or evil spirit (malin genie). Then, immediately following the nineteenth century, the invention of the Unconscious that governs the modern social relation fractures our knowledge of the Entity that is posed between friends; there can be no perfect friendship if my good intentions have been poisoned from the beginning by an unconscious egoism associated with class or race, even gender, allowing for the spirit of malevolence behind all overt acts of faith. The crack widens, eventually encompassing friendship itself in a vast conspiracy that has determined philosophy as merely a form of expression that now belongs to “the history of ideology” (i.e., the externalization of the basic underlying division that determines all social relations).8

In response to this history, Mascolo cannot go so far in acknowledging “malevolence” as a possibility that could exist between friends. His concept is still utopian, classical, and not yet modern; or perhaps there is a psychological question of denial that stems from his own personal history that Deleuze, in fact, may be alluding to in his comment concerning his friendship with Robert Antelme and his marriage to Marguerite Duras. Replying to Deleuze’s proposal to reverse the condition of distrust, making friendship responsible for putting thought in distress, he expresses a certain amount of anxiety over what this might imply, for if this were the case it would make friendship itself unthinkable.

You suggest a reversal of the proposition, making friendship come first. Friendship would then be put in “distress” in thought. Once again due to distrust, but this time the distrust of friends. But then where would friendship come from? That is a mystery for me. And I cannot imagine what distrust (an occasional disagreement, of course, on the contrary—and in an entirely different sense that excludes malevolence) is possible of a friend once he or she has been accepted in friendship.9

In response, Mascolo seems to argue that the bond of friendship, while always open to occasional disagreement, is, once a friend has been accepted into friendship, not vulnerable to actual malevolence. This would imply that friendship cannot be placed into distress by the friend himself or herself, which would be not merely “unthinkable” but rather an absence of thought (i.e., care, intimate concern, speech, responsibility) that would lead outside of friendship proper. To summarize the lines that Mascolo ascribes to Hölderlin: Without the life of the spirit between friends, we are by our own hands outside thought.10

Yet, following Deleuze’s elliptical assertion, let us admit this at least as a definite possibility—that the friend could, by his or her own hand, do the unthinkable (at least, that which is unthinkable for Mascolo), and would be capable of expressing true malevolence for “the friend.” The first thing one would have to cautiously ask is whether, consider-ing this possibility, friendship (at least, in its classical sense) would even be possible any longer. What might the “secret” source of distress be that Deleuze refers to here? Recall the various “concrete situations” that Deleuze invokes to begin constructing his concept of friendship—that is to say, the various couples that do not express the presence of friendship as a bond but rather the limit-situations that constitute its end (betrayal, infidelity, etc). As I have previously suggested, in most familiar experiences of the social bond of friendship, these are the “secret” sources of anxiety: the “limit-situations” that constantly underlie and constitute the unconscious reserve of any friendship. 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 proximity of friendship the possibility of real malevolence, which in a Christian universe must also include the possibility of evil, or of “doing evil to the friend”? First, there would be no basis for any belief in friendship, for “having faith in one’s friend” (which, I might argue, may be a more severe expression of nihilism than any existential or historical experience of atheism).11 Second, friendship would become “non-Greek,” the occasion of a different kind of “concern” than was expressed by the Greek principle of dialectical rivalry between equals (amphisbetisis). Instead, it would be a constant source of suspicion, anxiety, fear, unmitigated or unmediated violence, and, above all, an expression of moral vigilance that is accompanied by neither piety nor aesthetic virtue, but by a different kind of disciplinary spirit altogether—one that most closely approximates the modern character of security and control, in the sense of “keep your friends close but your enemies closer.” Accordingly, if the stranger must be kept under constant surveillance, then one must be especially wary of the so-called friend who may be guilty of committing (either in the immanent future, an unknown past, or already in the unconscious present) some unspeakable evil against the friend. Nevertheless, these are the signs of distress in our distressed times, which places any friendship on trial.

In the preface to The Politics of Friendship, which I will discuss in relation to the conceptual persona of “the enemy” (der Feind), Derrida stages a grievance or complaint in the name of the unknown friend who has become the victim of a historical crime, in the quasi-juridical sense of an appeal for a wrong that must be righted, a violence to be redressed, similar to Job’s complaint against “the voice in the whirlwind.”12 Yet he later asks who would be the appellate court that could be considered qualified to hear the case and to sit in judgment? Not society, which stands in the position of the accused, also in many cases not even one’s closest friends, who often turn out to be “miserable comforters.” Moreover, are these not just the expressions of a dystopian state of friendship, or the current state of democracy today? If so, we must return to explore the “catastrophe” that is the cause of our modern dystopia of friendship and to what Deleuze calls the affective disturbances of both amnesia and aphasia that this catastrophe introduces between friends. Aphasia is not determined here by the simple form of strife or conflict that causes a lapse or period of silence, as when “friends don’t speak with one another for a long time,” but rather refers to a more fundamental experience of the loss of a common language of friendship. In turn, amnesia must be understood as more extreme than the simple forgetfulness that occurs between friends as, for example, when they are separated by distance or time. My distance from my former childhood friend is more or less accepted as the inevitable consequence of adulthood, as is the murmur of social anonymity that almost always borders on and threatens any friendship founded by momentary episodes of proximity bounded by space. Thus, the friend emerges from this anonymity only to gradually merge with it again, caught in the ebb and flow that characterizes all social relationships defined by proximity (limited by the conditions of time and space). Normal conceptions of friendship are determined within the limits of permanence and volatility; they are part of what distinguishes “the friend” from other social relationships, such as the relationship with the stranger, the member of the family, or the mere acquaintance. What is particular to the relationship that defines “the friend” is a character of becoming that does not seem to belong to these other relationships.

Yet the experience of real amnesia or aphasia can never be imagined to belong to friendship, unless by the intervention of some catastrophe or by an “outside” force that first appears as violence. I would argue at this point that a state of war becomes applicable as a possible causality, in the name of “catastrophe.” This seems to be what Deleuze refers to under Mascolo’s concept of the friends of the Resistance, which he says fundamentally changes the Greek concept of friendship into something distinctly modern, a change that is philosophical as much as it is historical and political and that, in turn, demands that the concept of phílos be completely rethought. He writes: “Phílos may have been displaced from Athens to Jerusalem, but it was also enhanced during the Resistance, from the network, which are affects of thought no less than historical and political situations.”13 Thus, the militant idea of the friend (or “comrade”) necessarily includes the possibility of “distress” and “betrayal” as the very conditions of friendship, understood in this context as the occasion of secret confidence, or a common goal of association. This is something that the Greeks would never have imagined, since they did not place friendship directly into a relation to war, whereas the modern notion of “the friend” already includes this relation in the opposition between “the friend” and “the enemy” as Schmitt has already argued in The Concept of the Political, where we find the following statement: “War as the most extreme political means discloses the possibility which underlies every political idea, namely, the distinction between friend and enemy.”14

Rather than tracing this distinction through the political philosophy of Schmitt (I will return to Schmitt in chapter 2), I prefer instead to turn to the political theory of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, who fundamentally transformed the original Greek concept of friendship by defining the situation of friends in a distinctly modern sense of war, a war between two classes of society, or the “war between the two estates.” At the same time, Marx-Engels also draw on the same Greek source by defining communism as an absolute gregarious spirit of a society, “the friendship of the proletariat.” Therefore, within the private sphere of the civil society Marx placed all the contradictions that divide the human species (Geschlecht) into different classes; however, he situated the concept of friendship firmly in the political sphere. Furthermore, it is important to note that for Marx friendship would no longer function dialectically to mediate rivalry and competition between individuals and classes, since this belonged to an earlier political form that itself is only a product of a previous “self-alienation” (Selbstentfremdung) of the species. As Marx writes, “The possessing class and the proletarian class represent one and the same human self-alienation.”15

In other words, what would be the basis for political friendship except that of pursuing one’s own “private interests” in the public sphere of the civil society? Since rivalry and competition are only the effects of an original division and the dialectic of friendship (or democracy), they only serve to mitigate and pacify the fundamental contradictions that afflict society. A classless society, however, would be defined by the cancellation of this division and all its consequent differences in the creation of one “species-being” that would henceforth share the same conditions of social existence. For such a species, the very condition of friendship will have changed along with the meaning of the political, which would necessarily disappear along with the division between the political state and civil society. There may be a utopian politics, but there can be no politics in utopia, since this would represent a fundamental contradiction that is supposedly erased (or sublated) by Communism, which cancels out the partial class interests that define the political. Ironically it is only from the condition of the historical present, a perspective that Marx saw clearly, only the state of total war that approximates such a situation, when the internal contradictions of society take on an externalized form of real contradiction between two apparent species-beings. In response to the question “Who is the friend?” Marx will write only the one who shares with me the same conditions of social existence, for every other social species is my enemy. Thus, the term “comrade” bears the militant idea of an ally in a struggle or war as well as the social idea of the friend who is linked to a bond that is not inherited, or natural, but rather is contrived by the introduction of an artificial form of inequality between social relations that will become a source of constant concern (souci). In this case, according to a Marxist materialist practice, concern is defined by “action” and by the labor of negativity (critique) in which all existing social relations, including the social relationship of friendship, are exposed to a process of becoming that Jean-Paul Sartre once compared to being dipped in a bath of sulfuric acid, stripping away their dross and ideological façades and perhaps revealing at the end of this historical process the face of the only true friend.16

Here it should be obvious that the nature of this concern (souci) must be understood completely differently from its earlier political manifestations, since it was Marx who was perhaps the first to announce that it is precisely the appeals to universal friendship or fraternity that one must be especially wary of in a time of war, since “the friend” could in fact turn out to be the worst “enemy.” In other words, as he and Engels warned many times, the very principle of democratic friendship must be suspected of harboring the greatest chances for betrayal. For example, this principle of treachery is clearly outlined by Marx and Engels in their 1850 Address to the Communist League, where they write:

At the present moment, when the democratic petty bourgeois are everywhere oppressed, they preach in general unity and reconciliation to the proletariat, 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 organization in which general socialist democratic phrases predominate, behind which their special interests are concealed and in which the particular demands of the proletariat may not even be brought forward for the sake of beloved peace.17

Of course, we can easily imagine that one of the “general socialist democratic phrases” to which Marx and Engels are referring was the phrase of friendship, which they warn must be “most decisively rejected.”18 It is also here that we might be addressing something comparable to the network of the Resistance that Deleuze refers to in his letter to Mascolo as profoundly transforming the concept of friendship through a concrete and historical situation of war. What both situations demonstrate is the fact that the very principle of democratic friendship was to be distrusted, even to the point of representing malevolence and treachery. One could not be a friend to the petty bourgeois and a friend of the proletariat any more than, as Deleuze suggests in reference to Mascolo’s own experience in the Resistance, “a friend to the SS” and “a friend to the Resistance.” It is only from the overt differences in the historical and political situations that one contradiction would appear to be more extreme than the other; in reality, however, they represent the same contradiction between “the friend” and “the enemy,” creating an extreme antithesis that cannot be resolved dialectically, which is to say, neither by philosophy nor by politics.

Only the acceptance of a state of permanent war will bring this dialectic to the point of an extreme antithesis, in which the two opposing identities are finally split apart, producing the threat of an unmediated and generalized violence that becomes too great for the idealistic aspirations of any political ideal of friendship, which can no longer serve as the principle for mediating new social antagonisms produced by this overdetermined form of contradiction. If the Greeks had been successful for a time, according to Deleuze, in forcing friendship into a certain relation to violence (though by excluding actual violence to another sphere altogether, to a space that lies outside the political sphere), the appearance of this new antagonism becomes too great for this archaic concept of friendship, which falters or fails to reconcile this opposition or, as Deleuze says in a very telling remark, becomes “exhausted,” too weak, or too traumatized to maintain the relationship between different claimants and rivals together in a common accord. Of course, in this description Deleuze is also referring to the dispersion of the city (pólis) as the designated open space (agorá) for these great athletic contests and tragic battles; instead, this space becomes identified with “the world” and at the same time becomes “molecular” and indiscernible, merging with other, formerly peripheral, spheres and can no longer can be gathered and centralized.

According to this final development of the state form, one can invoke Foucault’s thesis concerning modern forms of biopower that exceed the earlier spaces in society reserved for the visible exercise of sovereign power. In response to the appearance of this new form of social contradiction, to employ a classical Marxist terminology, new techniques are forged that assume all the hallmarks of the brutal forms of domination and subjugation that characterize modern so-called political programs, as well as new forms of subjective processes that are more submerged within the so-called private spheres of social life (such as the everyday subjective experiences of racism or sexism, for example). It is precisely at this point, as Deleuze recounts in his latest writings on Foucault, that we witness a transition from earlier disciplinary society to what he calls a “society of control,” since the principle of control is itself premised on a realization of the unmediated nature of the primary contradiction of society itself, as Marx had earlier defined it, and consequently its submission to a series of transformations that seek not to resolve this contradiction—actually, today this conflict is deemed to be permanently irresolvable—but rather to cause it to change into something else so that, if it cannot be canceled out (aufgehoben), at least it can be better managed or controlled!