Is There a Politics to Friendship? Derrida’s Critique of the Couple in Montaigne, Kant and Levinas

Abstract

This chapter analyses the figure of the couple of friends in Jacques Derrida’s Politics of Friendship. It proposes that Derrida’s critique of fraternity as a model of friendship and political community is also intimately tied to a conception of friendship as between two (male) people. Derrida brings forward the prominence of this figure in Michel de Montaigne and Immanuel Kant. In both, Derrida shows how this presentation of the couple is motivated by a double and contradictory desire: on the one hand, a wish to represent the couple as an apolitical or pre-political moment of friendship, and on the other, a view that it should serve as a ground for and guide to politics. This chapter proposes that Derrida sees something of this problem in Levinas’s own conception of the face-to-face, whereby the relation to the other still holds some possibility of a pre-political relation (before the arrival of the third-party). This can help illuminate Derrida’s response to Levinas’s later work. Furthermore, through this, we come to see that Derrida views every relation to the other, and every potential moment of friendship and community, as fundamentally and inescapably political.