Philosophy after Friendship

Late in his life, immediately following the publication of Foucault (1986) and prior to the publication of What Is Philosophy? (1991), Gilles Deleuze engaged in a brief exchange of letters with Dionys Mascolo, the author of Le Communisme (1953) and Autour d’un effort de mémoire: Sur une lettre de Robert Antelme (1988). This correspondence, which is to form the fulcrum of this study, concerns the writings of both Mascolo and Maurice Blanchot on the theme of friendship (amitié). In his correspondence, Deleuze speaks (very obliquely) of certain “concrete situations” that have caused the concept of phílos to become displaced from its original Greek sources of phileîn and philía, a displacement that he says has undergone through the war an experience that can be likened to aphasia and amnesia and that he and Félix Guattari claim less than five years later requires nothing less than a “complete re-evaluation of philosophy.”1

Taking these comments to heart, in the following reflections I attempt to reconstruct a genealogy of the different concrete situations and social personae to which this final statement might refer in order to arrive at a moment of recollection where perhaps the essential meaning of philosophy might be interrogated anew, especially in relation to Deleuze’s assertion that the democratic ideal of friendship has become corrupted to the point, today, where it may be completely “rotten” (pourri).2 Consequently, following the revelation that I first encountered in the correspondence between Deleuze and Mascolo around the concept of “the friend” (phílos)—a conversation that returns a few years later with Guattari in the opening of What Is Philosophy?—I propose to bracket, or, according to the Heideggerian gesture, to cross out in order to completely work through (durcharbeiten), a very commonplace and patently metaphorical equivalence between the ideas of friendship and the democratic form of politics. In other words, by crossing out the original Greek concept of phílos in the above title, I am only attempting to suspend some of the traditional associations that have overdetermined our understanding of the political sphere as a higher realm of friendship, which today can only have a metaphorical equivalent (which might be based on nothing more than an “etymological fallacy” that is derived from the poetic resources of the Greek language). In fact, the term “friend” actually refers to an original and even primitive “conceptual persona” first invented by the Greeks, the meaning of which is now difficult to discern, as we will see, since many of its social and ritual significations have become hopelessly and perhaps irretrievably lost. Nevertheless, concerning the friend (phílos) and the related concepts of the stranger (perigrinus, the stranger-wanderer or foreigner, and xénos, the stranger-guest), I attempt to recover a few aspects of their original social significations.

In many respects, my research of these concepts and their corresponding conceptual personae has been greatly influenced by the etymological analysis of the famous Indo-European linguist Émile Benveniste, whose two-volume Le Vocabulaire des institutions Indo-Européennes has come to represent for me a touchstone of sorts; although, certainly my main source of inspiration can be found in a description from the first chapter of What Is Philosophy? that “every concept has a history, even though this history zig-zags . . . through other problems or onto different planes.”3 In fact, this perfectly describes the organization of this book and represents my own attempt to reconstruct an etymological history of the concept of “the friend” by constructing a genealogy that passes through the various problems posed by the concepts of the enemy and the stranger, concepts that have bifurcated and occupy entirely different planes composed by the Greek (or Hellenic), Roman, Christian, and finally, the modern, secularized world. As the reader will note, I have rendered the term of each conceptual persona in different languages (ancient Greek, Latin, German, and French) in an effort to historicize the genealogy I am attempting to reconstruct, perhaps by giving it more of an epic form rather than that of a simple vocabulary or glossary of terms. In short, this is my own experimental method of addressing Deleuze’s description of etymology as “a specifically philosophical athleticism,” since in my reconstruction of this genealogy—while some concepts call for archaisms (e.g., perigrinus, xénos) and others for more modern terms (e.g., der Feind)—all these concepts as well as their conceptual personae are “shot through with almost crazy etymological exercises.”4

For example, returning to the common misconception that would place the concepts of friend and stranger in opposition to each other (although in a manner that is different from the friend–enemy grouping), as Benveniste shows, the original term actually belongs to the ancient institution of hospitality (xénia) and designates the ritual persona of the “stranger-guest” (hôte). Of course, this primitive sense of obligation has evolved in modern societies to acquire different moral, ethical, juridical, and legal senses that have overdetermined its social meaning, often coloring the social relationship with mysterious affective or sentimental determination that Benveniste argues did not actually belong to the original meaning of phileîn and philía (friendship). What is even more surprising than the discovery of a uniquely sentimental determination of “friend” that “at first, does not imply any truly social notions” (e.g., duty, obligation, hospitality, etc.) is the conclusion that this association can be originally found in only one language (i.e., Greek).5 This immediately leads to Benveniste’s remarkable conclusion that it is the Greek language itself that is responsible for these later sentimental and affective qualities that now overdetermine the conceptual persona of “the friend,” and this occurred in a manner that he compares to dream-work.6 As I discuss in greater detail below, certainly Benveniste was aware that this argument would appear counterintuitive to the widespread and commonplace sentimental associations of the terms “friendship” and “friend,” and his evocation of the Freudian process of the dream-work stands for an interpretation of this “proto-historical” process of displacement or condensation of earlier traces of memory and experience that belong to language and culture.

In my own study, I could not pursue this etymological history through all its ramifications, especially concerning how a historical language might actually dream and how this dream would have real historical and cultural effects in the translation of this language’s concepts and terms into other languages (such as Latin, German, and French), each of which may also have its own specific manner of dreaming. Instead, I have simply highlighted this metaphorical and poetic overdetermination of the Homeric concept on the authority of Benveniste’s etymological analysis in an effort to recover some of the concept’s original social meaning. Although the concept of hospitality has been a commonplace topic in contemporary philosophy, especially following the writings of Jacques Derrida (who is also directly influenced by Benveniste’s etymological analyses of Indo-European institutions), my own study focuses almost exclusively on the conceptual persona of the “stranger-guest,” which also bears a secondary meaning of “stranger-friend,” a particular kind of friendship that can only exist between a host and various types of strangers, or foreigners (perigrini, advenae), but, as we will see, especially those strangers “who have been deprived of all political rights” (although this same relation could evolve into the enemy opposition as well, as demonstrated by the contemporary polarity that defines the original Greek term xénos).7

Nevertheless, returning to the insight that the relation of friendship might originally bear no affective traits of sentimentality or emotion that are now attached to the social relationship today, this might allow us to understand the origin of a relationship of dependency and mutual obligation, which becomes the condition of any ethical or juridical relationship to strangers, as well as the basis for international law and the treatment of the rights of strangers beginning in the eighteenth century, which also marks the appearance of Immanuel Kant’s treatise Zum ewigen Frieden (1795), where we find the important appendix on “Universal Hospitality.”8 In fact, simply as an exercise, I might even suggest that we restrict the usage of the term “friend” only to the social relation with certain strangers and particularly to “those strangers that have been deprived of all political rights.” I realize that this may simply be the substitution of one metaphor for another (i.e., of an archaic for a modern one), and thus I could easily be accused of committing another “etymological fallacy.” In response, I might suggest that such a “crazy etymological exercise” could also approximate the process of the original dream-work mentioned above—that is, as a corrective to the condensation and displacement of historical and cultural significations that have overdetermined the concept of friendship and the conceptual persona of the friend over several centuries of Occidental thought.

In the opening pages of their last work, Deleuze and Guattari also return to take up a distinctly modern concept of “the friend” (l’ami) in order to highlight our own historical and existential distance from the distinctively Greek idea of friendship that appeared as one of the primary subjective virtues of the early city-state, which was fashioned to contain the intensive states of competition, rivalry, and civil conflict (stásis) between citizens in the form of a “generalized athleticism” where the primary virtue of friendship would also be judged in ethical and aesthetic terms. In this sense, the idea of friendship would also lead directly to the consensus of the common, moral notions of the good, aesthetic judgments of beauty and ugliness, and the creation of a distinctive form of political “opinion” that belonged to the Greek “assembly” (ekklesia, later on meaning “church” in the Christian era), where the number of actual citizens who could legitimately be called “friends” was less than one thousand in any given polis—that is, constituting a group of citizens that was smaller than the population of an average village in the same territory. Simply accounting for the difference in scale in comparison with modern societies, is it any wonder that the original concrete situation of friendship has become too abstract, given the increasing diversity of the relationships that define urban and cosmopolitan centers in the modern world?

Today we might ask whether polities (from the Greek term politika), which was used to designate a privileged place (topos) for the display of civil conflict (stásis), can any longer contain the extreme states of conflict that constantly break out in modern societies—conflicts initially between races, classes, and nations that, in the contemporary world, have evolved even further into the extreme opposition between richest and poorest populations that belong to the global polis.9 As Hannah Arendt first asked following the emergence of totalitarianism, can the contemporary democratic ideal of universal rights (consensus iuris), which Cicero first defined as the consensual definition of right that is the basis for the entity of a “people,” be actually understood as the consensus of equals and respect for the dignity of human rights?10 Or rather, in the absolute newness of totalitarian law itself, which represented a conscious break with any principle of consensus with the peoples of the earth, does the name of “politics” today only designate a fragile alliance that pretends to hold together the various national interests in a lawful accord but in almost all other areas of civil society seeks to preserve the independence of each species-being in its incessant striving for its own biopolitical life? According to Arendt’s earliest and most prescient intuition, which already prefigures Michel Foucault’s later thesis of “biopower,” what is historically unprecedented in totalitarian policy is its claim to “transform the human species into an active unfailing carrier of a law to which human beings otherwise would only passively and reluctantly be subjected.”11 From this point onward, the rationalizing principle of power expands from its earlier juridical forms of sovereignty to become indistinguishable from the laws that govern evolutionary biology and the immunology of living organisms; thus, as a result of this change in principle, man becomes a “carrier of the law,” rather than its subject. According to a well-known statement by Friedrich Hayek, “The individual cannot activate its species-being [its biopolitical value] by participating in the polis.”12 The concentration of biological and economic life and the consequent reduction of the political sphere is fundamental to Giorgio Agamben’s critical appropriation of the concept of biopower, as well as to most current interpretations of neoliberal society. However, if the consensual spirit of law is abandoned altogether, either in favor of the laws of “movement and history,” as Arendt earlier argued in the case of totalitarian polity, or in the favor of purely economic law, as has been argued today concerning the polity of neoliberal “governmentality” (Foucault), then there can no longer be a principle of politics between “peoples,” strictly speaking, only a kind of “generalized Machiavellianism” (Mascolo).13

Returning now to Deleuze’s earlier statement, if every original virtue has been so permeated by money today, to the point where every form of interest is either corrupted—if not altogether “rotten” (pourri)—then what happens in this new situation to the concept of phílos itself, which originated in Occidental thought from the earlier period of the Greeks onward and already prefigures the intersubjective idealism of politics in late-democratic societies? And further then, what of Communism? Has it not also been called, in many of its more utopian versions, a “universal society of friendship”? It is precisely to these questions that Deleuze returns in an interview with Italian Marxist Antonio Negri in the spring of 1990, where Negri raises the question of friendship in the age of the universals of communication and marketing, to ask whether it still constitutes a utopian version of politics today. He asks:

In the Marxist utopia of the Grundrisse, communism takes precisely the form of a transversal organization of free individuals built on technology that makes it possible. Is communism still a viable option? Maybe in a communication society it’s less utopian than it used to be?14

Thus, in the conclusion to What Is Philosophy? Deleuze and Guattari proclaim the idea of the universal market as perhaps the greatest threat to a philosophical notion of friendship, since neoliberal ideology has converted the original athleticism of the Greek concept of stásis into pure economic competition between so-called equals, and the lively debates of opinion over the philosophical questions of the beautiful and “the good life” have become the new universals of communication and marketing but in a manner that no longer corresponds to the political as such, but rather to a kind of permanent and generalized Machiavellianism mediated only by an open—although not necessarily public—sphere of commerce and private finance.15

It is not by accident that in 1991, within a year of these earlier correspondences with Mascolo and Negri, Deleuze and Guattari argue that the original concept of philosophy has been placed “under so much distress” that the early philosophical analogy to the social experience of friendship may no longer designate a “living category” from which contemporary forms of political association can be thought. As they write:

The question is important because the friend who appears in philosophy no longer stands for an extrinsic persona, an example or empirical circumstance, but rather for a presence that is intrinsic to thought, a condition of possibility of thought itself, a living category, a transcendental lived reality [un veçu transcendental].16

In other words, confronted by the perceived loss of its original ground, either through the ideological corruption of the concept itself or by centuries of violence and warfare, the philosophical idea of friendship as an image of thought peacefully divided within/between two beings who think this division in common, in their final work Deleuze and Guattari return to reflect on the question of whether what they thought they had been doing together all along could any longer be called “philosophy.” “It had to be possible,” they write, “to ask the question ‘between friends’ as a secret or a confidence, or even as a challenge when confronting the enemy, and at the same time to reach that twilight hour when one distrusts even the friend.”17

In the above passage we also find a cryptic reference to the figure of Friedrich Hölderlin, who is also the frequent subject of Martin Heidegger’s mediations on “the autochthonic [Greek] friend” and who is also alluded to earlier on in Deleuze’s correspondence with Mascolo as “the German poet who wrote in the twilight hour.” Of course, given the significance of this “German poet” in Heidegger’s own reflections on the original relation between phileîn and philía, here we might understand that the friend whom one should be wary of is Heidegger himself, who should be distrusted for obvious reasons, particularly any political destination of philosophy after Heidegger’s fundamental betrayal of precisely this relationship.18 It is perhaps for this reason, moreover, that the history of contemporary philosophy has increasingly been marked by new revelations of the same betrayal, each one more damning than the last, followed by a series of mitigations that seek to save the name of philosophy from its own catastrophe. In addition to Derrida’s commentary, we find perhaps the most sober assessment of this episode in the following passage from What Is Philosophy?

The Heidegger affair has complicated matters: a great philosopher had to be reterritorialized on Nazism for the strangest commentaries to meet up, sometimes calling his philosophy into question, and sometimes absolving it through such complicated and convoluted arguments that we are still in the dark. . . . How could Heidegger’s concepts not be intrinsically sullied by an abject reterritorialization? Unless all concepts include this grey zone and indiscernibility, where for a moment the combatants on the ground are confused, and the thinker’s eye mistakes one for the other—not only the German for a Greek but a fascist for a creator of existence and freedom.19

It is on the basis of this “concrete situation” that the relationship between philosophy and politics must be situated in light of the above comment, since it is precisely on the original ground where philosophy was first defined on the basis of the social relation of friendship, as “a conversation between friends” (philótēs), that a new situation has emerged where this earlier ground itself is overcome by confusion and the mistaken identity of the original interlocutors (friend, enemy, and stranger), thus causing the conversation to undergo an essential experience of aphasia and stammering.20

As a result of this catastrophe we must ask, by what authority does philosophy continue speaking of human rights today? That is to say, if philosophy is no longer Greek, as Deleuze and Guattari say, then this also implies that the autochthonic conceptual persona of the “celestial stranger” (who appears at the center of the polis, having descended from the sky, or arriving from everywhere) has changed sense and appearance (i.e., “faciality”), meaning the concrete social relation to a particular class of strangers that functions to animate the mask that the modern philosopher wears, a mask that is fashioned from the different classes of actual strangers that populate the modern world. As Deleuze and Guattari write, the irony of the Hellenic autochthony was already that, while it conditioned the emergence of the Imperium in relation to the city-states as the prefiguration of the modern nations, this milieu is only realized inasmuch as it establishes conjunctions with strangers, aliens, and immigrants who come from afar. As they write, “These types come from the borderland of the Greek world, strangers in flight, breaking with the empire and colonized by the peoples of Apollo—not only artisans and merchants but also philosophers.”21 In the modern period (and, I argue, in “post-war” philosophy especially), we have witnessed an entirely new class of “strangers in flight” and, thus, a different series of masks and distinctly new conceptual personae who today have emerged to say “I”—that is, strangers, refugees, deportees, subhumans, and so on. As a result, the philosopher’s vision of the polis or the political is no longer the survey of a central point that radiates outward until it is reterritorialized onto every part of the earth but instead is often established from the perspective of a periphery, even from an archipelago of invisible or unconscious zones, including ghettos, camps, and shanty-towns that are absent from any official census. In other words, beginning at some point—again, we might say, at least since “the war”—philosophy begins to orient its thinking and critique of the political through this new series of conceptual personae, each of which in turn is directly linked to a certain territory, or zone, as well as to a distinctive new class of strangers through which the philosopher speaks in order to critique the limits of the political. For example, when Hannah Arendt writes “we refugees”—who, moreover, prefer to be called “newcomers” or “immigrants”—she is addressing not only the status of a dominant representation of a new class of strangers in American society but the philosophical features of a new conceptual persona in modern political philosophy.

At this point we must turn to another distinction that Deleuze and Guattari make immediately after discussing the difference between aesthetic figures and conceptual personae, which is the distinction between what they call psychosocial types. This returns us to perhaps the first definition of the conceptual personage as a being that appears within the socius and whose origin (or historical selection) remains somewhat mysterious. This distinction is important because these figures appear natural in their territories, and it turns out that we are living among these persona constantly, if not embodied by them. In fact, these can be called deterritorialized personae, most of which were once conceptual personae invented by philosophy itself but whose functions have changed sense and now belong to another system or unconscious structure (i.e., “like a language”). The examples of these personae or psychosocial types include the friend (apart from its original Greek situation) as well as the stranger, the nomad, the exile, the transient, the migrant, and the foreigner; to these we could also add the types of the enemy or the barbarian. To identify these psychosocial types as “deterritorialized conceptual personae” means that they no longer express a relation to immanence of a vital concept but rather a connection to a “category of common characteristics” (from tupos, also meaning impression, figure, or face, and including the facial features that make up social stereotypes).

Deleuze and Guattari refer to these types as “mobile territories” in the sense that the subject can leave home or his native land and carry all these types with him in order to populate another territory or even a universe with these psychosocial types. For example, the stranger will mark a particular psychosocial type, created from law and culture, that can be found everywhere and thus establish a relation and an orientation toward the home or to the native land and, at the same time, toward the hinterland, the frontier, the outback, or even the strange and mysterious land populated by fabulous creatures (“oh what a brave new world, and such marvelous creatures in it”). This is why Deleuze and Guattari always situate the existence of psychosocial types or personages in direct relation to the concept of territory and locate the creation of new personages in the movements of territorialization and deterritorialization. This becomes important for the Greek concept of polis and the autochthonic personage of the stranger through the history of its own deterritorialization throughout the Mediterranean world. In the early Christian world, the stranger and the immigrant (ethnē) become distinctive psychosocial types for the “mobile territories” of Jews and Christians across Asia Minor that end up in Rome as the basis for the creation of a new people and a new earth; later, they undergo a statutory and legal transformation through the deterritorialization that is effected by European colonialism and, today, the deterritorialization of “the West” through the process of globalization. It is true that this movement at each stage already grasps the stranger as a living psychosocial type even though it remains an abstraction until it is embodied or territorialized on a particular class or ethnic group, but this movement is also territorialized on the subject who is endowed with rights, secured by an equally autochthonic claim to territory and soil, to nation and language, which first endows the right to function as a host, including the power to name and to assign the type (for example, to institute the stranger–guest relationship). At the same time, Deleuze and Guattari differentiate these psychosocial types from conceptual personae since in many ways their identity is that of former conceptual personae that have been lost or forgotten in their concepts and become clichés of actual living social relations. Consequently, they write:

We cannot even say what comes first, and perhaps every territory presupposes a prior deterritorialization, or everything happens at the same time. Social fields are inextricable knots in which the three movements are mixed up so that, in order to disentangle them, we have to diagnose real types or personae.22

This seems to be a crucial passage, and in part it will provide the method for this study, in the sense that it outlines a properly diagnostic and genealogical task that takes up these psychosocial types that inhabit us (and we inhabit) in order to restore them to the function of conceptual personae. Of course, this does not imply that it is possible to return to the original conceptual personae from which these types first derived—for example, to restore the original Greek concept of phílos—as if to restore the psychosocial type to its autochthonic territory of homeland, as in the case of Heidegger’s conceptual persona of the philosopher and the poet. Therefore, a “diagnostic” treatment of these types means placing them in relation to the immanence of the concept again, revealing them in relation to their own proper territories by producing a genealogical account that frees these conceptual personae from their archaic psychosocial types—that is to say, from archaic territories that are deterritorialized in our own heads and, at the same time, reterritorialized onto the earth.

Drawing once again on the definition of the social stranger from Benveniste, which will be crucial in our understanding of the original link between the philosophical enunciation of conceptual personae and what Deleuze and Guattari call psychosocial types:

The stranger is “one who comes from outside” (Lat. aduena), or simply, one who is beyond the limits of community (Lat. perigrinus). . . . Consequently, there is no “stranger” as such . . . [since] the stranger is always a particular stranger, as one who originates from a distinct statute.23

In Benveniste’s definition we find the vital manner by which the original conceptual persona of the philosopher, in its identification with a “particular class of strangers” that occupied the Hellenic world, has evolved throughout history, also recalling Deleuze and Guattari’s observation that philosophy has always identified with a nomadic band of those who come from outside, or who appear from beyond the limits of community. (In fact, it is from the composite features of this original grouping that populated the Hellenic world that the autochthonic mask of the “celestial stranger” was born.) At the same time, we must also observe from the above definition that “there is no stranger as such,” and therefore in each case the features that animate the philosopher’s mask are strictly empirical in origin, since these features and various facial types arrive through a distinct statute (or positive law) that determines particular social strangers, given that for every age, and for every territory, “the stranger is always a particular stranger.”

Most recently, of course, the figure of homo sacer comes immediately to mind as a vivid demonstration of both the above observations. Thus, Agamben derives his unique conceptual persona from two distinctive statuses or codices, one archaic and one modern in origin: first, from a codicil on Roman sacrificial law by Pompeius Festus where, according to Agamben’s claims, “the character of sacredness is tied for the first time to human life as such”; second, of course, from the laws passed in Germany in 1933, a few weeks after Hitler’s rise to power, that protected the hereditary purity of the German people and thus functioned as a legal precedent for the racial laws against the Jewish populations under the Third Reich.24 Nevertheless, it is the leap between these two statutes or codices that directly links them together—at once archaic and modern, Roman and German, Christian and Jewish—and that refers to Agamben’s unique conceptual creation, which has effectively modernized the political concept of the stranger and has made homo sacer a dramatic vehicle for contemporary political and philosophical enunciation.

On the one hand, we can only admire the dramaturgy introduced by the creation of this new conceptual persona, a dramaturgy that continues to orient the thinking of the concept of the political in the current moment, and particularly in the post 9/11 context, where the refugee, the deportee, and the enemy have continued to evolve by a new set of determinations stemming from positive laws (such as the Patriot Act). Although we might immediately wish to acknowledge how these figures appear differently than in the earlier writings of Primo Levi or Hannah Arendt from which they are drawn, they belong to the same constellation of types and the new conceptual personae that have marked the extreme “limit-situations” of our political modernity. On the other hand, we might also fault the concept on several levels: first, for its strange admixture of political theology and positive law (i.e., the amalgamation of Walter Benjamin and Carl Schmitt, the quintessential Jewish thinker and infamous Nazi jurist); second, following Derrida’s own criticisms in the late seminar on the figures of sovereignty, for the manner of reterritorializing the concept onto the original ground from which Greek philosophy first emerged since Aristotle. Recalling the earlier comment by Deleuze and Guattari, can we not say that Agamben’s specific reterritorialization has only served to complicate matters even further—albeit, certainly in a manner that is completely different from Heidegger’s reterritorialization on Greece, even though they are not entirely unrelated—and that on this same ground we discover there is still a great deal of confusion and mistaken identity between both ancient and modern combatants, not only between “who is the friend?” and “who is the enemy?” but also, today, between Greek and Roman, German and Jew, and American and Muslim?

For the purposes of my own study of these figures, rather than drawing on Agamben’s conceptual persona of homo sacer I have chosen instead an episode that is important for both Deleuze and Blanchot, concerning the earlier figure of Robert Antelme, who becomes a central figure regarding reflection on the conceptual personae of the friend, the deportee, and the survivor.25 It is around the concrete situation that I have already evoked above as an experience of amnesia and aphasia that we will first find an explicit reference to Antelme: a leader of the French Resistance and the friend of Mascolo himself, who returns from Dachau (rescued by Mascolo, a young François Mitterand, and also by his former spouse, Marguerite Duras), and whose gradual recovery from a state of the broken and completely exhausted victim of the camp, “the bag of tattered rags and bones,” is later recounted in detail by Duras in her memoire, La Douleur (1985). It is from these early days of recovery, and in a barely discernible voice, that Antelme converses with a company of friends who have gathered around him and gives testimony to the catastrophic violence he had experienced, which later becomes the testament contained in the pages of L’Éspece humane (1947). From this experience is born the figure of Antelme in our genealogy of the conceptual persona of “the friend,” which becomes extremely significant for both Mascolo and Blanchot, who, in their own respective efforts to remember the experience that Antelme converts into the living relation of friendship, must acknowledge the very impossibility of an experience that remains both “in-common” (Mitsein) and yet “un-sharable.” In his own commentary on the new conceptual persona of the philosopher as “a Socrates who becomes Jewish,” Deleuze explicitly invokes the writings of Blanchot but also the importance of Mascolo’s idea of communism as the “absolute spirit of friendship,” even though we must now understand the concept of “the friend” as stemming from the concrete experience of catastrophe and existing after it.26 Thus, in his letter to Mascolo, Deleuze himself refers to Antelme’s experience as our new “limit-situation,” thus providing the image of a new conceptual persona of a friend who exists in the wake of a catastrophe, having encountered “the extreme limit of pain” (echoing an image of Hölderlin’s earlier episode of madness and aphasia in France).27

Of course, I realize that by invoking the figure of Antelme, the deportee and survivor of the camp, my own discourse risks becoming somewhat anachronistic today in light of an incredible effort, it seems, to stop invoking the camp as a paradigm of our political modernity á la Agamben—that is, to move beyond a thanatopolitical framework in order to discover a more positive (or “affirmative”) biopolitical order, as expressed in the recent works of Roberto Esposito, Rosi Braidotti, and many others (including Agamben himself!).28 Despite my suspicions that this move is purely speculative (also in a marketing sense of the term), it may also risk vacating an important frame of reference before completely understanding how the experience of a survivor (and not simply the “victim” of the camp or gulag) might foretell something concerning our own “biopolitical futures.”29 In order to avoid any association of Antelme’s persona with Agamben’s figure of homo sacer, however, I would simply point out that while the latter is a pure figure stripped of all human resemblance, especially speech, and thus reduced to a “paradigm” of bare life, by contrast, as Duras recounts in her memoir, Antelme actually insists on speaking in an incredible effort to maintain the memory of what happened, even when his friends tell him that “by itself his physical appearance was eloquent enough.” Finally, my representation of the figure of Antelme as a conceptual persona of the deportee and survivor is made without the least hint of dramaturgy (as in the case of Agamben), much less the narrative basis of a new martyriology or hagiography (although there will be features of these quasi-religious genres in both Blanchot’s and Mascolo’s written accounts), but rather serves only as a philosophical allegory of the possible survival of the concept of friendship itself after an ordeal that has evacuated its previous meanings, since in order to survive and undergo the possibility of renewal in the so-called post-war period, which I will return to question below, the idea of friendship itself may also need to pass through something that at least resembles the experiences of amnesia and aphasia.

“Unless we are led back to ‘the Friend’,” as Deleuze and Guattari write:

but after an ordeal that is too powerful, an inexpressible catastrophe, 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.30

In other words, certainly, today one can say that “we are no longer Greeks and friendship is no longer the same.”31 The idea of friendship certainly has suffered from an essential amnesia or aphasia and no longer signifies thought being divided within itself according to the categories of unity and equality, either because the living category of the friend no longer signifies this identity of thought thinking itself or because friendship has exhausted this division, originated by the Greeks, and we must conclude that the historical image of friendship may no longer have anything in common with philosophy from the present moment onward. In other words, philosophy can no longer refer to a living category to ground its own concept of the political, and its historical image of thought can no longer encompass the living social dialectic without leading it into a violent contradiction, which in turn it must always suppress in favor of its own mythic language of friendship. To put this in stronger terms, perhaps we are witnessing the overturning of an earlier philosophical idealism that invoked friendship as the destination of the political and in its place the emergence of what I will call a nonphilosophical understanding that has determined conflict or war (pólemos), even the realization of a perpetual war between the two permanent classes (or populations), which today are represented by the global rich and the global poor, as the ultimate ground from which any future thinking of the political must now depart.32

Turning now to address the sense of the second title-phrase, “post-war philosophy,” I begin simply by pointing out that this is clearly a misnomer, if only by acknowledging the fact that we have never lived in “a post-war society.” In responding to this aporia, however, rather than invoking “a completely new politics” in the manner of Agamben—“that is, a politics no longer founded on the exeptio of bare life”—or of “a democracy to come” in the manner of Derrida (an expression that calls for a “militant and interminable political critique”), I simply propose the call for a thoroughly “post-war philosophy.” Of course, this raises the question of whether this expression only concerns the “last war” (that is, only the most recent war, including the current war on terror), or the end of war as such—of all wars, both archaic and modern, and immemorial—constituting the specific aporia that serves to distinguish my own formulation of the future of political philosophy from the two former ones above, each of which expresses the future according its own specific aporia (that is to say, according to its own idiom and concrete situation). According to my own formulation of a “post-war philosophy,” therefore, the fundamental principle of political philosophy would be nothing less than to address the conditions (political, social, economic) in order to finally quit the “state of nature,” which in the Kantian sense is equivalent to the state of permanent war. However, Kant also argued that such a departure would need to be preliminary to any higher goal or end (Zweck) that could be imagined in the form of a universal political constitution of man or even the complete working out of the “Metaphysics of Justice.” In other words, as long as there is war, and even if only a portion of humanity exists in a state of war (i.e., a state of nature), then the whole of humanity would remain without the possibility of justice. Of course, this is no less true today than it was at the end of the eighteenth century, when Kant first made a sketch of this task for the future of philosophy in Toward Perpetual Peace (1795) and in the writings that followed outlined a plan for achieving a sustainable peace through the systematic establishment of the principles of politics and a “theory of justice” (Rechtslehre), which I will return to discuss in the conclusion.33 Under its current determination, moreover, one might conclude that the concept of the political has in many respects been reduced to a problem of the “police sciences” (Poliziewissenschafften), and I would argue that contemporary philosophy has become far too juridical in its language and major concepts and that today philosophers appear more like the natural lawyers of Kant’s own time.

As I argue in the conclusion, we have various avatars of this principle in several contemporary philosophies that substitute the end of actual war with other ends, such as the end of capitalism, the end of humanism, the end of racism and neocolonialism, the end of sexism, the violations of the rights of particular groups, and so on. In his later post-war writings, Antelme gives this principle perhaps its sharpest articulation in addressing the situation of the global poor today who are deprived of all political rights—even the possibility of any claim of future rights. In the face of this growing demographic, as Deleuze and Guattari also observe, there is sufficient evidence to show that “human rights will not save us, nor will a philosophy that is reterritorialized on the democratic state.”34 This is because, as we have witnessed repeatedly in recent years, only the “police can control and manage poverty with the deterritorialization-reterritorialization of shanty towns.” Moreover, “what social democracy has not given the order to fire when the poor came out of their territory or ghetto?”35 Perhaps this is what they mean when they say that modern philosophy has replaced the principle of “rivalry” (the social conflict or antagonism of opinions) with an entirely new affective mood, as we have already recounted around the Heidegger episode, including “weariness,” “exhaustion,” and even “mistrust.” On the one hand, this has to do with the experience of a catastrophe that now lies as a condition of political friendship and even constitutes its “internal presupposition”: the shame of being a survivor, which becomes equal to the shame of remaining human in the face of this growing catastrophe.36 On the other hand, this concerns the repeated attempts on the part of those who seek to conceal themselves from this shame by invoking the moral concepts like desperate alibis or by assigning the different degrees of guilt and distributing justice between victims, executioners, and accomplices. And yet, merely the act of living has become a political decision for everyone today, each of whom has to some unconscious degree become an accomplice to this daily catastrophe, no matter how distant in space and time or how much a particular group might claim to suffer “equally,” since as we have seen, the birth of every particular right also brings with it new classes of strangers and those who do not have an allotted share as “co-partners in political rights” (co-partegeant des droits politiques).37 Once again, recalling Agamben’s concept of “bare life,” it is the limit-situation of both poverty and terror that the phenomenological meaning of nudity or nakedness that vividly expresses the shame of a being exposed, outside society, without friendship or hospitality. Or, as Arendt has powerfully argued, it is that which distinguishes between those strangers who are “lonely” and “naked” rather than merely “alone.” Consequently, there can be no “transitional” or “distributive justice” that will compensate for the universal shame of poverty. If we accept this at the beginning of our philosophy, then the idea of the political philosophy itself must undergo a complete and intensive reevaluation.

In the conclusion of The Origins of Totalitarianism, it was also Arendt—who, we recall, was also an astute reader of Kant’s later political philosophy—who first proposed the treatment of particular strangers as a foundational site for testing the limits of any current political form of government. Moreover, she argued that the existence of “terror” represents nothing less than “a conscious break” of that consensus iuris that, as Cicero argued, was the basis for the concept of a “people,” and that, “as international law, in modern times has constituted the civilized world insofar as it remains the foundation-stone of international relations even under the conditions of war.”38 This represents the basis of her most radical thesis concerning totalitarian and all other concepts of law. As she writes:

Totalitarian policy does not replace one set of laws with another, does not establish its own consensus iuris, does not create by one revolution, a new form of legality. Its defiance of all, even its own positive laws implies that it believes it can do without any consensus iuris whatever, and still not resign itself to the tyrannical state of lawlessness, arbitrariness, and fear.39

Today, and especially in the context of the current war on terror, have we not witnessed the complicity and collusion of the modern democracies with the ongoing perpetuation of this “conscious break with the principle of consensus iuris,” even if this break is only partial with regard to certain territories globally and only with respect to international law (for example, in targeting a new class of strangers who, it could be argued, were only created by the “last war”)? Who today represents the “tyrannical state of lawlessness” referred to in the above passage, which is equivalent with the Kantian state of nature as the lawlessness that exists between constituted nations, in vast wastelands and in deserts, except the modern terrorist? And yet, as Derrida has also argued, we also find equivalence between the description of the martial character “totalitarian policy” in the passage above and certain “rogue states” who act “in defiance of all” and even in defiance of their own positive laws with which they can believe they can do without.40 As we will see, it is basically this same principle of the right of nations that Kant himself addressed at the end of the eighteenth century as the primary obstruction to the practical realization of a sustainable peace, since it only “serves to justify those men who are so disposed to seek one another’s destruction and thus to find perpetual peace in a grave that covers all the horrors of violence and its perpetrators.”41 Today, it is this same right that remains a blatant contradiction in the very principle of law and that only guarantees, in place of the idea of “perpetual peace,” the ongoing reality of permanent war.

It appears we have now come full circle, a circle that has merely accelerated to become a vicious cycle. Therefore, in the conclusion I will propose to cut through this cycle—perhaps even a bit precipitously in the manner of a Gordian Knot—and return to the claim that the first principle of any future political philosophy is a critique of actual war, including the juridical–legal conditions of war, the right of the current nation-state, the economic and corporate interests involved in the perpetuation of wars, the notion of “just war” (jus ad bellum) and the continued threat of nuclear war, as well as other forms of warfare directed against entire populations (i.e., the scientific and technological region of “thanatopolitics,” strictly defined in its modern senses by Foucault and Agamben). In response to this global situation, and strictly adhering to Kant’s earlier argument (which I will continue to unapologetically privilege), it is only by “working out” this problem first that a future philosophy may avail itself of the insight and imagination necessary to work out other problems of reason, leading up to the final problem of a universal constitution of the “human species” (a term that I employ intentionally for reasons that are explained in chapter 5). Of course, I realize that many of these claims might sound too fantastic and far-fetched to be believed (perhaps “a philosopher’s sweet dream,” or “an idea fit only for the academy”), but this is founded on the assertion that one finds in Kant’s later political writings that the idea of perpetual peace should be affirmed as a reality, even if this reality cannot be empirically proven—much less, as Kant says, can it be disproven either—and therefore it can still function as an a priori idea of reason for any future political philosophy, for which I propose that we begin to substitute the term “post-war philosophy.”42

To conclude this brief prolegomena, I find it interesting that any proposal to address the actual situation of war is often met with skepticism, as well as claims concerning more generalized but at the same time more specific forms of violence and injustice. However, the most violent forms of inequality and the violation of human rights have historically originated in the conditions of a state of war or have found their forms of specific violence directed against populations and groups through the technologies of war, including genocide, the absence of the rule of law, the restriction or loss of political rights, sexual and racial violence, poverty, famine, hunger, environmental devastation, and the destruction of other species (and, indeed, of all species, in the case of nuclear warfare). Moreover, one does not need to refer to Benjamin’s “Critique of Violence,” which has been employed lately as Holy Scripture by theorists of sovereignty, including Derrida and Agamben, to distinguish between generalized violence and specific violence as well as the conversion between them. Taking up Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of the “planetary war machine,” as I discuss in the last section, instead we might ask how a generalized form of violence that already preexists a condition of actual war (e.g., racism, sexism) can be taken up by the war machine to both provide the conditions of an actual state of war (that is, serving as a principle of justification) and also serve as a “direct object” of specific violence that is partly invented by the war machine itself (e.g., genocide, rape warfare). The more crucial distinction, it seems to me, is this moment of actualization (or conversion) between a form of generalized violence and the multiple forms of specific violence occasioned by the invention of new technologies, as well as new juridical and political forms of right, which function to operate this conversion through the actualization of the “concrete situation” of war itself. In turn, it is the concrete situations of war that will provide the conditions of the new forms of generalized violence that will inflict future generations of survivors, as well as serve as the specific conditions for future wars. Here, we might recall that Deleuze and Guattari often complain about the infinite growth of the modern war machine, “like in a science fiction story,” which takes two opposing or bipolar directions: the creation of “the most terrible local wars as parts of itself” (i.e., the conversion of a generalized violence into new occurrences of local and specific violence) as well as the creation of “a new type of enemy, no longer another State, nor even another regime, but the ‘unspecified enemy’” (i.e., the conversion of a specific form of violence directed against a particular group into a generalized form of violence directed against an unknown and “unspecified” enemy).43

In response to these potential objections, therefore, I would simply ask whether we should begin working through these problems by first addressing their root cause in order to begin to ameliorate all the effects that are determined by this cause, which would take the form of a thorough and systematic critique of all the remaining justifications (ethical–moral, political, juridical, religious, etc.) that today continue to determine the political “rights of war” (jus belli), including especially the removal of any moral justification that belongs to the notion of “just war,” hopefully by the close of the twenty-first century. Another way to put this is that the minute one begins to qualify or to create an exception to the idea of creating the conditions for a permanent and lasting peace, then like the “natural lawyers” of Kant’s time as well as in our own, one is immediately led into the ethical dilemma of justifying this or that particular war and thus of ignoring every kind of atrocity and injustice that will inevitably occur in actual wars. This would be the creation of a contradiction in the very concept of right itself, which Kant said ought to be impossible in principle, if you want to preserve the concept of law as being founded on anything more than a purely empirical theory of justice and law, which Kant compares to the fabled wooden head in Phaedrus (i.e., it may be quite beautiful, but unfortunately it has no brain!).44 In order to resolve this violent contradiction, therefore, philosophically, politically, and sometimes even juridically minded people are left with only two possible choices: either get rid of the principle of law itself as the basis of the concept of right, in which case you remain in a state of war where there can be neither justice nor rule of law; or work relentlessly in order to get rid of the conditions of actual wars, which are responsible for producing the contradiction in the concept of right and justice, in which case you might hope to enter into something that could one day approximate a peaceful—albeit not necessarily “friendly”—state of society.