Friendship and Philosophy: An Interview with Giorgio Agamben

It has been said that philosophy speaks of its times, that it speaks to its times, but that it is not confined by them. And it has also been said that friendship is on its own clock. This is all to say that this interview—originally intended for Cabinet no. 36, with its theme section dedicated to “Friendship”—is very late. But somehow this belatedness felt justifiable, even appropriate, given that the philosopher Giorgio Agamben has written at length on both philosophical friendship (“The Friend,” 2009) and on things that are overdue, and yet somehow right on time (The Time That Remains, 2005). Leland de la Durantaye conducted the following interview by email.

Cabinet: At the outset of The Friend, you write that “friendship is so closely linked to the definition of philosophy that it could be said that without it philosophy would not be possible.” Do you think there is an inherent tension between the demands of friendship and those of philosophy? That is, between an imperative to be kind, courteous, helpful, even loving, toward a friend and an imperative to be unsparing in matters of the mind and in matters of philosophy?

Giorgio Agamben: Things are not always courteous, and not always gentle, between friends. Quite the opposite, in fact. With our friends, we are sometimes unsparing, and sometimes implacable. As in love. And as in philosophy. Plutarch says that friendship is an integral part of parrhesia, of being able to say everything. Including, of course, what one’s friend does not want to hear. In this sense, there is no tension between friendship and philosophy. On the contrary, there is proximity and commonality. In friendship there is no place for those horrible Kantian inventions: imperatives and duties.

I would say that the proximity between friendship and philosophy is, as I tried to show in The Friend, of an ontological order.^[1] It is inscribed in the same sensation of existing in which Aristotle founded friendship, a sensation that in every case is always already a shared sensation, a co-sensation, and thus always contains an alter ego. In friendship, we do not share some specific thing; we ourselves are shared. To experience this is to experience friendship.

I always found it telling that philos in Homeric Greek means “one’s own,” and is often used for one’s own heart and one’s own body. Friendship is inscribed in the most intimate experience, the one that is most one’s own, the very sensation that one exists. But this also means that in the consent and consensus of friendship, the very identity of friends is called into question. A friend presents me with another self, with myself as other and with another like myself. And yet this reduction of identity happens serenely, almost imperceptibly. It is one of friendship’s gentlest gifts.

Among the thirty-three short chapters that make up your Idea of Prose, none addresses the idea of friendship. Given that the ideas treated therein are treated in an artfully indirect fashion (e.g., “The Idea of Communism” discusses pornography, “The Idea of Thought” is dedicated to punctuation marks), if you were to add an idea of friendship to that book today, how might you approach it?

By rewriting the idea of pleasure. I came to better understand the closeness of friendship and the sensation of existence through reading Fallot’s extraordinary book on Epicurus.^[2] Epicurus writes that pleasure is what we feel when we feel no pain. This had always seemed to me incomprehensible—until I read Fallot. For Epicurus, pleasure coincides with the lowest limit of sensation—the sensation of existence. True hedonism does not involve the search for excessive pleasures, but lies instead in the—rare—capacity to joyously perceive this minimal threshold. But if this is the case, then the faculty of pleasure and the faculty of friendship are the same faculty. Only he or she who is capable of experiencing the miniscule joy of existing can thus experience friendship. For this reason Epicurus, the philosopher of pleasure, is also the philosopher of friendship.

It is also for this reason that Carl Schmitt is at once right and wrong when he locates the limit of the political in the opposition friend-enemy. In doing so, Schmitt ultimately privileges the moment of enmity. The discord that gives rise to enmity necessitates subsequent determinations with respect to this sharing of the sensation of existing in which we find our friends. But I would argue that the first alterity is that of the friend. The enemy comes quickly thereafter and is the man who refuses to feel himself shared, refuses to feel himself divided, he whom Aristotle calls the faulos, he who feels no pleasure in feeling himself shared, a sharing which entails feeling divided within himself. For this reason, friendship has a political meaning, for when we are able to perceive this threshold something like politics first becomes possible.

Elsewhere in The Friend you recount an attempt you made with a friend—Jean-Luc Nancy—to develop your respective ideas of friendship through an exchange of letters on the topic. You note that the project ended after you had each written one letter. The relative success or failure of this project is obviously a matter between friends, but might you say a bit about what led to its attempt? In other words, what in the idea of friendship do you think resisted analytical treatment and had to be, as you say, “staged”?

Precisely because friendship is a question of proximity and does not share a fixed terrain or a common faith. It shares, instead, the tiniest, the most ungraspable sensation of existing. And for this reason, it can be suddenly reversed, suddenly become distance. Friendship is an antique, an obsolete concept, the practice of which demands courage and patience. I am perhaps the last person who believes in it. This might be one of the reasons I cannot have disciples or, despite my love of teaching, something like a school. I have always treated my disciples, even the youngest among them, as friends, and this has ultimately rendered things difficult. Friendship is like hospitality. But it is a hospitality whose setting is not a house, but the sensation of existing. I would like to succeed at being hospitable with myself and with friends.

Thinkers close to you have co-authored books with friends—figures such as Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt or Deleuze and Guattari. Are you tempted by this idea of co-authorship?

In a certain sense, all my books are co-authored. I am the sole author of none of them, I might not even be their author at all. They give me pleasure only in the measure that I do not feel myself their author—or, at least, their sole author. Virtually all of my books are born of the desire—no, the need—to continue the work of authors I love. Feuerbach once wrote that the truly philosophical element in every text is its capacity for development. The German expression Entwicklungsfähigkeit is ambiguous, meaning as it does as much the (passive) capacity for being developed as the (active) one of developing. It concerns a liminal zone, or a no man’s land, that belongs neither to author nor reader, neither to the original text nor he or she who moves through and interprets it. It is in this no man’s land that I write. In this sense, I have written books with Benjamin, with Foucualt, with Primo Levi, with Heidegger. The canonical form of this capacity for development is found in the commentaries of late antiquity and the medieval period where, on the manuscript page, we find interlinear glosses and lateral columns that encircle the passage commented upon. And in this sense, philological method and philosophical method coincide in a sort of nekyia, a descent into the underworld to evoke the spirit of an author and induce it to think, and to poetize, in us and through us. If the operation is successful, the work that results is, so to speak, anonymous and unattributable—something that gives me a particular pleasure.

Toward which of your books do you have the friendliest feelings?

Can one feel friendship for one’s own books? I don’t think so. We live with our books for months or years in a relation of feverish and exhausting intimacy. And then it is over, as with a passionate affair. The books we write are lovers, not friends.

How do you feel about the public discussion of your personal friendships—whether they be with Pasolini, Morante, Calvino, Heidegger, or anyone else?

I don’t know anything about this.

Are you a friendly person?

I am a man who likes good company.

Translated from Italian by Leland de la Durantaye