Our Adversaries, Our Friends

I’ve been teaching about friendship for the past couple of weeks – Jacques Derrida’s utterly enigmatic Politics of Friendship, to be specific – so I was thrilled to read a reflection by my cross-campus colleague Robert Meagher on where friendship might lead us. There is much to say about friendship. Most of it, if we read the canonical texts on friendship in the Western tradition, places an insanely high standard on “true” friendship. So much so that we hardly think it possible to have such a friend. Or, maybe wonder if, as a student of mine once did after reading Montaigne’s account of his friendship with Etienne de la Boetie, “you really want that much f@#!ing human in your life. We gotta live, man!” No doubt.

But I’m not one to give up on ideals, even when they appear, to those of us living short of the ideal, as smothering or a bit too dreamy. After all, it is an impoverished imagination that measures life’s meaning only according to where we find ourselves. This can’t be all there is, really. Let’s get real. Read on…