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Derrida's Politics of FriendshipAmity and Enmity

Edited by Luke Collison, Cillian Ó Fathaigh and Georgios Tsagdis

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About this book

Critically engages with Jacques Derrida’s Politics of Friendship and with the limits of friendship as a political concept
  • Reconsiders the importance of this relatively understudied key text in Derrida’s oeuvre
  • Includes two contributions on Geschlect IV, ‘Heidegger’s Ear: Philopolemology’, published in the French edition but excluded from the English translation
  • Resonates with issues in contemporary politics such as nationalist and anti-nationalist political programmes
  • Offers an interdisciplinary perspective from philosophy, comparative literature and French studies
  • Brings together early career, established and emeritus scholars including Peggy Kamuf, Isabelle Alfandary, Timothy Secret and Pheng Cheah

25 years after the publication of Derrida’s Politics of Friendship (Politiques de l’amitié, 1994), this edited collection gathers 23 critical chapters that revisit this underappreciated text. Engaging closely with Derrida’s text, the contributors analyse, extend and critique the work. They reconsider the place this book occupies in Derrida’s political philosophy and its potential for contemporary politics, when the promises and perils of political friendship have reappeared.

Reviews

The Politics of Friendship has never been more relevant at a time when being a friend seems undermined by fragmentation and a fantasy of individualism. The editors have brought together some of the most important Derrida scholars in this volume to develop critical discussions of this rich text and to remind us why we must return to it again and again.

As time passes, Politics of Friendship, initially a revised version of some of Derrida’s many seminars around the questions of nationalism, universalism, antagonism and alterity that continuously cross over ethics and politics, has become a central element in the interpretation of his oeuvre. It radiates in every direction and summons the deepest interrogations. This rich collection of essays, combining accurate philology and audacious contextualization, does full justice to its importance and will become a necessary companion for its readers.

Table of contents

Welcome Friends: Reading Derrida’s Politics of FriendshipLuke Collison, Cillian Ó Fathaigh and Georgios Tsagdis

Part I: Responses

1. Who or What: Differential FriendshipGeorgios Tsagdis

2. Derrida, Montaigne and the Time of FriendshipJennifer Rushworth

3. Is there a Politics to Friendship? Derrida’s Critique of the Couple, in Montaigne, Kant and LevinasCillian Ó Fathaigh

4. Beyond Presence: Derrida’s Fidelity to Husserl in Politics of FriendshipGiovanni Menegalle

5. Hostility in Philosophy – Between Hegel and HeideggerSusanna Lindberg

6. Responding Justly to ‘the Friend’Joseph Cohen and Raphael Zagury-Orly

7. Another FriendshipPheng Cheah

Part II: Echoes

8. The Time of Friendship: Mourning, Survival, SpectralityRozemund Uljée

9. Friendship and Fission: Personal Identity in Derrida and ParfitKit Barton

10. Two Structures of Friendship: On the Specular and the SpectralCathrine Bjørnholt Michaelsen

11. Dividing the EarIsabelle Alfandary

12. Narcissus as an Anti-NarcissusTimothy Secret

13. The apparition of feminine alterity in Derrida’s Politics of FriendshipDavid Ventura

14. The Possible EchoPeggy Kamuf

Part III: Polemics

15. Political Friendships to Come? – Futurity, Democracy and CitizenshipRosine Kelz

16. The Rhythm of Democracy, The Pulse of DeconstructionNaomi Waltham-Smith

17. Derrida, Democracy and the State of Education: Learning, by Design, PerchanceAllan Parsons

18. The Law of AutoimmunityChris Lloyd

19. The Other that Accompanies MeNicole Anderson

20. Companionship, Kinship, Friendship, Readership – and ‘the Possibility of Failure’Thomas Clément Mercier

21. Interruption and Responsibility: Derrida's Passive DecisionMauro Senatore

22. The Phantasmatic Fiction: Derrida on the Ground of PoliticsGavin Rae

23. Modal Aporias: Derrida on the reale Möglichkeit of Friends and Enemies in SchmittLuke Collison

About the contributors

Luke Collison

Luke Collison is a recent PhD Graduate from the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy, Kingston University London.

Cillian Ó Fathaigh

Cillian Ó Fathaigh is Assistant Professor and Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Fellow in Philosophy at the Jagiellonian University, Poland. Prior to that, he was a Lecturer at King’s College London and a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Universidad Complutense de Madrid. He previously completed his PhD at the University of Cambridge, where he was a Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Scholar. He currently works at the intersection of political philosophy, European philosophy, and the philosophy of the digital, with a particular focus on the concept of institutions. His work has been published in prestigious international journals, including Philosophy and Social Criticism; Journal of Medicine and Philosophy; Angelaki; Paragraph; and Derrida Today. He is co-editor of Subjective Agency and Poststructuralism (Routledge, 2025—with Gavin Rae); and Derrida’s Politics of Friendship: Amity and Enmity (Edinburgh University Press, 2022—with Luke Collison and Georgios Tsagdis).

Georgios Tsagdis

Georgios Tsagdis is Lecturer in Philosophy at Leiden University and a Lecturer at the Architectural Association.