ABSTRACT
Perhaps Jacques Derrida outlines anew, in Politiques de l'amitie — again, only subsequently reflected upon — a mode of speaking that corresponds to this claim still to come. In the course of the argumentation, the vocative, the appeal/call and the address will turn out to be a key both to the concept of friendship that Derrida will develop and to the political context it conveys. When Derrida speaks of overstepping the concept of 'natural' friendship or kinship, then he aims in the end at a definition of the political that is beyond the friend–enemy distinction in Carl Schmitt. In the latter text, as in the former, Derrida's use of legal formulations aims beyond the immediate political context. See Heller who has explicitly referred to the 'empty chair of the Messiah' and to a 'structural messianism' in Derrida's Specters of Karl Marx: 'The empty chair waits for the Messiah.
