472 Jacques Derrida 1984–2004
This celebration of a ‘Jewish specifi city’ (having to do with
memory, the future, the anticipation of psychoanalysis, etc.)
seemed very debatable to me in its context [.. .]. I also won-
dered whether Yerushalmi did not risk giving sustenance,
willingly or not, to a political use of the very serious theme of
election (so diffi cult to interpret), and more precisely of the
‘chosen people’.^34Yerushalmi attended the conference and had planned to be in the
audience for Derrida’s lecture. But things turned out otherwise: on
that day, he was ill, and could not leave his hotel room. Only later,
in New York, did the two men try to discuss the issue.
In 1994, Derrida was collapsing under the weight of all his plans.
He wrote to Ferraris, shortly after his return from London:
‘Personally, I’m more overwhelmed by work than ever (in par-
ticular because of Politics of Friendship, that wretched book that I
promised to fi nish by the end of July). I don’t know how I’m going
to manage this summer with the rest, especially with [the text on]
Religion!!’^35
The ‘wretched book’ – which Derrida eventually presented as
a long preface or foreword to a book he would like one day to
write – was the huge expansion ‘of what was merely the fi rst session
of a seminar given under that title, Politics of Friendship’.^36 This
seminar had been given in 1988–89, just after the de Man aff air and
in its wake, even though there was no direct allusion to this. Each
session had begun with the words of Montaigne, quoting a remark
attributed to Aristotle: ‘O my friends, there is no friend.’ In this
book, every chapter is based on this sentence, giving a new twist
to its interpretation, as if ‘the scenography could be set in motion
around itself’. From Plato to Montaigne, from Aristotle to Kant,
from Cicero to Hegel, Derrida reread the classical discussions of
friendship to bring out their unstated presuppositions:
The principal question would rightly concern the hegemony
of a philosophical canon in this domain: how has it prevailed?
Whence derives its force? How has it been able to exclude the
feminine or heterosexuality, friendship between women or
friendship between men and women? Why can an inventory not
be made of feminine or heterosexual experiences of friendship?
Why this heterogeneity between eros and philia?^37One thing which he endeavoured to deconstruct was the ‘familial,
fraternalist, and thus androcentric’ confi guration of the political
that is almost inevitably produced by the traditional analyses of
friendship: