西塞罗阅读德里达,德里达阅读西塞罗：一种未来的政治和友谊

Cicero Reads Derrida Reading Cicero: A Politics and a Friendship to Come

德里达的《友谊的政治学》讨论了自柏拉图以来、经由西塞罗、直至布朗肖的友谊概念的历史。政治跟友人和仇敌的概念难以分割,真正的朋友是一种违反常规的例外情况。西塞罗《论友谊》中所描绘的那种罕见的真正友谊是第二个自我,然而朋友又永远是他者,有可能使人对自我的诚实和自洽程度产生疑问。德里达留意到友谊(amicitia)的词源是爱(amor),友谊和爱都让灵魂焚烧,可是情感的火焰也很容易变成仇恨的烈火。

This paper examines Derrida's reading of Cicero's De Amicitia in the larger context of Derrida's work. In1994,Derrida published the Politics of Friendship,a major work that followed 1993's Specters of Marx and Khora. As I have shown Specters of Marx and Khora while possessed of complex genealogies,in many ways represent a settling of accounts with his former friends Julia Kristeva,Philippe Sollers,and the editorial collective that surrounded Tel Quel. The Politics of Friendship is a book about the history of the concept of friendship from Plato to Blanchot by way of Cicero. It is also a book about the inseparability of politics from a concept of both the friend and the enemy. And it is a book that returns again and again to a possibly apocryphal saying of Aristotle's,'Oh my friends,there is no friend. 'The true friend,as the saying makes apparent,is the impossible exception.That rare true friend is portrayed in Cicero as a second self,as the other of myself who reflects myself to myself.And yet my friend,as friend,remains other. And insofar as my friend remains other,he or she,as my second self,has the potential to call the integrity,the sufficiency,of myself into question. There is a potential violence in friendship: a violence that recalls the passion of love. Thus,Derrida notes,Cicero observes that amicitia receives its name from love( amor) and that each sets the soul aflame. The flames of passion only too easily become those of hatred. The context for Derrida's observation is a discussion of Cicero's anecdote about Gaius Blossius and the revolutionary tribune Tiberius Gracchus. The question in the dialogue is how far should love( amor)go in friendship( amicitia),even to the point of treason?