ABSTRACT
In ‘The Politics of Friendship’, published in 1988, Jacques Derrida suggests that ‘all the great ethico-politico-philosophical’ discourses on friendship rest on two exclusions: the exclusion of friendship between women and the exclusion of friendship between a man and a woman. This double exclusion, he concludes, confers on that discourse
the essential and essentially sublime figure of virile homosexuality. Within the familial schema…this exclusion privileges the figure of the brother, the name of the brother or the name of brother, more than that of the father-whence the necessity of connecting the political model, especially that of democracy and of the Decalogue, with the rereading of Freud’s hypothesis about the alliance of brothers.
