ABSTRACT

The concept of friendship appears in Derrida's work at the end of the 1980s, operating as an entry point into his analyses of democracy and the political. In Politics of Friendship Derrida argues that the first model is dominant in the tradition, operating most strongly in Aristotle, Cicero, Montaigne, and Kant. It begins with Nietzsche's reversal of the Aristotelian phrase: Analysing these and other remarks in Human, All Too Human, along with the philosophers of the future named in Beyond Good and Evil, Derrida articulates a view of friendship based in solitude, distance, and difference. To the extent that deconstruction is also engaged in the artifactual production of events through its interventions within institutions, its re-readings of philosophical texts and traditions. Its injunctions to follow a certain spirit of Marxism and to develop a critical culture of the media deconstruction likewise take shape in relation to teletechnological mechanisms and processes.