Mr Chris Lloyd

The Politics of Friendship is a seminal text within the apparent ‘ethical turn’ in Jacques Derrida’s work, in which it has been argued that ‘the social and the political,’ and the ‘ethical and juridical,’ became the focus of his attention. However, Derrida’s own thoughts on this ‘turn’ render it dubious as an accurate description of his oeuvre. And yet, contestation over the ‘ethical turn’ aside, The Politics of Friendship does illustrate Derrida’s thoughts on various juridico-political concepts: in particular his critical account of ‘the political’ (in French, le politique) which was so prominent in his work of the 1980s. This chapter concentrates on this aspect of Derrida’s work.

This chapter also reads the works published under the name The Politics of Friendship as representing Derrida’s entire, ‘collected,’ 1988–89 seminar series Politiques de l’amitié. Whilst this is perhaps an unorthodox reading of Derrida’s work – which will be explored below – it provides initial support for this chapter’s two theses (PF, vii). The first is that The Politics of Friendship, qua the 1988–89 seminar series Politiques de l’amitié, houses the inaugural appearances of the concept of ‘autoimmunity’ in Derrida’s work. The second thesis is then that these appearances are best explained not by reference to ‘biological or physiological’ readings of autoimmunity but rather by readings which acknowledge the juridico-political themes which have, for millennia, been attached to the concept of immunity.

This chapter speculatively investigates the relationship between Jacques Derrida’s metaphysical critique (deconstruction) and Michel Foucault’s conception of the politics of life (bio-politics). Drawing on crucial recent works by Kalpana Rahita Seshadri1 and Kevin Attell2 that have posited strong connections between Derrida and “the greatest contemporary divulgator of Foucault’s biopolitical narrative” (Giorgio Agamben),3 the chapter then examines Foucault’s original bio-political thinking – namely, his work on Jeremy Bentham’s “Panopticon” – in an attempt to connect this to a lesser-known area of Derrida’s deconstructive juridical thought.

In an interview first published in 1983 in Le Nouvel Observateur Jacques Derrida explained how he felt himself to be an heir of those thinkers who had gone before him: I feel that I am also an heir: faithful as far as possible, loving, avid to reread and to experience the philosophical joys that are not just the games of the esthete. I love repetition, as if the future were entrusted to us, as if it were waiting for us in the cipher of a very ancient speech–one which has not yet been allowed to speak. All this, I realize, makes for a bizarre mixture of responsibility and disrespect. My attention to the present scene is at once intense, desperate, and a little distracted, as if anachronistic. But without this bizarreness, nothing seems to me desirable today. We have gotten more than we think we know from “tradition,” but the scene of the gift also obliges us to a kind of filial lack of piety, at once serious and not so serious, as regards the thinking to which we have the greatest debt. I would have liked to speak here about Kant, Schelling or Hegel, Marx, Kierkegaard or Nietzsche, and then about Levinas or Blanchot, or still other thinkers today who are my friends.

(Derrida 1995, 130–131). 

We recall Jacques Derrida’s critical engagement with Giorgio Agamben’s biopolitical

framework from Seminar Twelve of The Beast & the Sovereign: Volume 1:

‘‘I don’t believe, for example, that the distinction between bios and zo¯e¯ is a reliable

and effective instrument, sufficiently sharp and, to use Agamben’s language, which

is not mine here, sufficiently deep to get to the depth of this ‘[so-called] founding

event’’’ (Derrida 2009, 326).1 This is a crucial element in Derrida’s critique of

Agamben’s work on bio-politics. However for Kalpana Rahita Seshadri this critique

needs to be subdued and reimagined in order to show how Derrida’s thinking itself

underpins Agamben’s work on bio-politics. For as much as Derrida lambasts

Agamben’s binary separation of bios and zo¯e¯, Seshadri’s HumAnimal: Race, Law,

Language posits that a Derridean notion connects these two concepts, thus allowing

Agamben to highlight and resist the ‘bare life’ resulting from bio-political

mechanisms.

Catherine Malabou’s Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing: Dialectic, Destruction, Deconstruction begins with the affirmation that ‘[t]hisbook is a portrait. It paints the portrait of the concept of plasticity’(2010, 1). This affirmation of Malabou’s at the outset of her vibrantand energetic book introduces the reader to the central concept of plasticity which will serve as the focal point for her thought. Malabou’s book paints a portrait of this concept following its formulation from her extensive engagements with G.W.F. Hegel, Martin Heidegger and her former ‘mentor and interlocutor’ Jacques Derrida (Shread 2010,xxvii).

De Ville’s timely book Jacques Derrida: Law as Absolute Hospitality states as its aim a

comprehensive account of Jacques Derrida’s legal theory presented via a close reading

of Derrida’s work, in which the views on his legal theory are situated within his larger

corpus of work. Accordingly it is early in the book when the reader is informed of the

following: due to this close(r) reading of Derrida’s work, if the book was to be accused

(in so far as it could) of ‘‘policing’’ a certain reading of Derrida, then it would ‘‘[take]

place with the aim of fending off a metaphysical reading of Derrida’’ (7). Such would be,

as de Ville insists, nothing other than what Derrida would want of his texts; ‘‘a careful

and as rigorous as possible a reading of his texts, in context, as Derrida often insisted

should happen’’ (7).