Derrida and Deleuze: Constructing a Friendship

Table of Contents

• Abstract
• Introduction
• Derrida on Friendship
• Deleuze on Friendship
• Derrida and Deleuze: Foes
• Deleuze and Derrida: A Friendship
• Conclusion
• Bibliography

Word Count: 13,122 (including abstract)

Abstract

Friendship as a philosophical topic of enquiry has historically relied upon the notion of a coherent, bounded and static subject. This paper seeks to put forward a conception of friendship which resists the urge to think it as a relation between such subjects. It brings together the works of Giles Deleuze and Jacques Derrida, drawing on their specific work on friendship as well as their wider oeuvre, in order to ‘create a friendship’ between them; an encounter which in turn produces a novel concept of friendship. Focusing on the role of Derrida’s notions of ‘limits’ and ‘impossibility’ and Deleuze’s virtual possibility space and ‘Body without Organs’, this paper argues that friendship is an experience of the impossible which can bypass contemporary notions of subjectivity laying the foundations for a resistance practice to come; friendship is the space of an (as of yet) unknown collective consciousness which lies within the virtualities of thought, and which can inform resistance praxis and confront the aggressive atomisation and individuation of capitalism.

Key Words: Deleuze, Derrida, Friendship, Deconstruction, Subjectivity, BwO

Introduction

‘I only know that these differences never left room for anything between us but friendship’(2001A:193).

— Derrida on Deleuze

‘As for the method of deconstruction, I see what it is, I admire it a lot’(Deleuze cited in Bearne, 2000:442).

— Deleuze on Derrida

In ancient Greece, the term ‘philos’ was used to signify both ‘friend’ and ‘lover’ in the contemporary sense, and as such the concept played a central role in the intersections between the philosophical, social and political organisation of society. Evoking this history and continuing in a similar trajectory, Derrida invokes the ambiguity around the French word aimer, which means both ‘to love’ and ‘to like’, constructing the term ‘aimance’ for that which is ‘beyond love and friendship following their determined figures’ (Derrida cited in Protevi, 2004:143). Rather than using the limited space here to delve into the different registers of affinity (between friend and lover), this essay similarly seeks to interrogate the role of friendship (understood without such distinctions) within the work of two philosophers whose challenge to the modes and structures of thought reach all the way back to the ancients and stretch forwards to a future to come.

Despite the notable similarities between Deleuze and Derrida, from their shared language and philosophical training within the French academic system, to their rejection of intellectual dogmas, there remains a surprisingly limited body of work which compares these two giants of twentieth century philosophy. The purpose of this essay is to provoke such an encounter, and to structure this encounter around the notion of friendship both as it appears in their work and as it might be creatively constructed out of other disparate areas of their respective intellectual projects. In creating a friendship between these two post-structuralists, the essay hopes to create a concept of friendship which might circumvent the trap it has tirelessly fallen prey to, from Aristotle (2002:208-241), Cicero (1909), Montaigne (2004), Kierkegaard (1946 [1847]), Kant (1991), Nietzsche (1969 [1883]; 1999 [1878]), Schmitt (1996 [1927]; 2008 [1928]) to Blanchot (1997), who construe friendship as relation between two finite and coherent selves (despite their varying degrees of optimism or pessimism for the possibilities of friendship). Similarly, the feminist intervention into the subject of friendship from the 1980s onwards (Schwarzenbach, 2009; O’Connor, 1992; Faderman, 1981; Raymond, 1986; Coates, 1996) follows a similar logic of subjectivity. Though these feminist studies are fascinating and offer an important perspective on understanding friendship as tool of resistance and solidarity, they remain within the strict confines of a two millennial old Western intellectual episteme which maintains the subject at its kernel.

Given the intervention that both Deleuze and Derrida have made into the notion of subjectivity, this essay tries to think through what a friendship which encompasses these insights might look like, in order to utilise it as a strategy against contemporary individualism and save it from being recaptured by a discourse trapped within a bounded and static notion of subjectivity.

This task becomes particularly pertinent when paired with the fact that capitalism (and its related oppressive power structures) is underpinned by an individualism which rests upon this coherent notion of subjectivity (Lazzarato, 2012; Dardot and Laval, 2013; Burchell, 1993; Brown, 2015). This structure is advancing at exponential rates under a neoliberalism which fosters an aggressive atomisation and administration of society, in which individual subjects become ever more distant from one another (Bauman, 1993; 1995; 2010; Davis, 2013) yet increasingly reliant on the structure of capitalism for their material survival (Harvey, 2007; Marcuse, 2002; Debord, 1994; Lordon, 2014). Given the severity of the current permeation of power in society, it becomes a strategic necessity to think through concepts such as friendship which may allow us to undermine the basis upon which capitalism is built (individual subjectivity) and to found a resistance praxis in a radical new mode of being, in a path we have yet to open up.

Any social action oriented towards progress implicitly contains within it the assumption that things can be made better and that this measure of progress may be achieved through solidarity, human empathy and communication. Anyone who refuses both a nihilistic and fatalistic position, and who works towards the erasure of oppression (through social action) does so by operating in relation to a notion of freedom (whether articulated verbally or not) and through the implicit assumption that those on either side of the moving line between victim and perpetrator can be brought to understand ‘another possible world’ through contact with the standpoint of an Other. This phenomenon has a complex materiality to it, a biology that might well be contained within material sophistications such as mirror neurones cells which ‘respond to both observed and executed actions’ (Wohlschläger and Bekkering, 2002:335). Thus, a collective reflection on the problems of the Image of thought, resemblance and the fallibility of language to arrive at the best uses for the joined materialities of our bodies is perhaps one method to reach a world beyond the current aggressive atomisation of society by capital. This trajectory, which fires arrows towards another possible world and which leaps between two ‘bodies’ at once, which is here explored under the term ‘friendship’, acts as a ‘something’ beyond the momentary experience friendship is currently bound up within, and which leaves only fragments of itself the moment it is touched.

In order to construct this notion of friendship, this essay is split into four sections. The first of which analyses friendship in relation to Derrida’s oeuvre. Given that Derrida has written most extensively (of the two) on friendship in begins with his work in order to build a foundation from which to contrast against Deleuze, and to build upon. Rather than focusing too narrowly on his specific work on friendship, the essay integrates this area into a broader analysis of his work more generally, in order to extend a reading of friendship further then Derrida himself may have done. With a focus on the impossible possible and the role of limits, the first chapter ties these to an understanding of how we might experience the ‘impossible’whilst uniting this with a notion of friendship.

Taking a similar methodology, the essay then turns in the second section to the work of Giles Deleuze. This section begins with his writings on the ‘friend’ and later builds upon his other theories in order to save friendship from the glum outlook and projection Deleuze predicts. The main strategy of this essay then is to draw out unlikely comparisons, to excavate lines between texts that have previously been hidden beneath a history of differences. A concept which resonates in one corner of one text of one author may then be made to reinvigorate a different concept elsewhere; the creative assemblage located between the two thus produces new directions and new possibilities. Accuracy with respect to novel dogmas is precisely what is to be undermined here, as it is the moment when one is caught trying to unearth the ‘truth’ of two authors whose version of the truth jumps erratically and necessarily from point to point, which stifles creative thought and difference.

Though several comparative points and notes have been made throughout the first two sections, the third section – Derrida and Deleuze: Foes – begins a more starkly comparative assessment. It focuses particularly on the tensions between materiality and language, and seeks to attempt a way to unite these two thinkers despite their respective approaches which at first seem incompatible. After having navigated around this fundamental problem, this section then moves on to some more subtler points of differentiation that emerge upon a closer reading of the two thinkers; from stylistic differences to a fundamental difference in the reliance on positions of immanence and transcendent, points which lie at the core of their philosophical projects.

The final section begins a synthesis of the earlier chapters whilst more thoroughly engaging with their similarities and using their differences as the basis upon which to construct and create a conceptual assemblage. Entitled ‘Deleuze and Derrida: A Friendship’, it shows how each philosopher, by orienting their philosophical project towards a future to come and away from a coherent notion of the subject, through a complex topological folding of reality, both leave open a future to come which undermines the subject of capital and capitalism.

Having utilised the theories of one of these great thinkers to rush to the aid of the other, the essay concludes that it is by taking these two thinkers in tandem, and by drawing selectively from each, that we are able to construct a notion of friendship which may hold the potentiality of a future to come; a friendship which acts and as a practical route for solidarity and social activism which confronts capital, and which awaits a moment of collective awakening that ‘folds’ reality upon itself to provide a new mode of thinking which as of yet can only be glimpsed at. Such a friendship may then act as the foundations upon which a ‘truly revolutionary’ politics can be practised. As a very close friend of Deleuze made clear:

truly revolutionary action, requires that we move beyond the limits of our “person,” that we overturn the notion of the “individual,” that we transcend our sedentary selves, our “normal social identities,” in order to travel the boundaryless territory of the body, in order to live in the flux of desires that lies beyond sexuality, beyond the territory and the repertories of normality (Guattari, 2009:209-210).

Derrida on Friendship

It was arguably Derrida, and his thesis on The Politics of Friendship (2005A [1997]), that re-situated friendship as a central philosophical question of the twentieth century, invigorating the debate around its conceptualisation¹. Rather than simply situating Derrida’s work on friendship within the broader context of his oeuvre, this essay attempts to take Derrida’s own logic forwards, applying areas of his thought to the topic of friendship in ways that Derrida himself did not. Such a creative task, however, necessarily begins with an exposé of his work, in order for us to refine the areas of interest and arm oneself with the appropriate tools to conduct, construct and create such an analysis.

Derrida is perhaps most celebrated for his deconstructive approach, a method first outlined in Of Grammatology (1997 [1967]), which turns texts upon themselves, searching out new meanings, purposes and contexts. This seminal work, one of Derrida’s first, complimented two other texts of the same year; Writing and Difference (2005B [1967]) and Speech and Phenomena (1973 [1967]). It commandeers text in order to expose their assumptions and preconditions, leading to a more general critique of a text’s implicit arguments and hidden functions. The approach is incredibly useful, and has been used across a broad range of disciplines, from legal and medical texts to literary and philosophical ones, and allows for a constantly reinvigorated analysis of an ever changing world. This type of approach makes language dance and shift constantly beneath the reader, a movement which I will later contrast to a Deleuzian notion of difference and becoming. This method, Derrida argues, underpins the central question that punctuates his work: ‘from what site or non-site can philosophy as such appear to itself as other than itself, so that it can interrogate and reflect upon itself in an original manner?’(Derrida, 1984:108). This approach ultimately stems from an interrogation of words, texts and communication at the most basic of levels. In stark contrast to Habermas, whose entire theoretical framework relies upon the argument that ‘understanding is the inherent telos of human speech’ (Habermas, 1996:162), Derrida takes an utterly different approach:

The relation of “mis” (mis-understanding, mis-interpreting, for example) to that which is not “mis-,” is not at all that of a general law to cases, but that of a general possibility inscribed in the structure of positivity, of normality, of the “standard.” All that I recall is that this structural possibility must be taken into account when describing so-called ideal normality, or so-called just comprehension or interpretation, and that this possibility can be neither excluded nor opposed. An entirely different logic is called for (Derrida, 1988:157).

It is precisely the possibility of miscommunication, contained within the ‘inside’ of communication, which makes communication possible at all, and which also acts as a horizon upon which communication can take place. This ‘entirely different logic’ sets Derrida’s semiotics in motion, and it is here that we see the first glimpse of how alterity can be contained within the ‘inside’ of the Idea, word or concept.

It is in opposition to logocentrism (which masks an original object or form) that Derrida proposes the deconstructive method. Arguing that ‘the ties between words, concepts, and things, truth and reference, are not absolutely and purely guaranteed by some metacontextuality or metadiscursivity’ (1988:151, italics in original).

This notion of communication relates closely to the Derridean notion of undecidability. In which an ‘undecidable’ resists categorisation into either camp of a binary opposition (precisely due to the dissolution of the distinction between inside and outside that Derrida’s approach instigates). In this way, deconstruction sets out first as a critique of Platonism, in a similar sentiment to Deleuze’s own ‘reversal of Platonism’ (Beistegui, 2013) (yet strikingly different in its conceptual approach), Derrida attempts to reverse the hierarchies that have come to dominate a Western intellectual episteme whose roots can be traced back through the classics, subsequently placing the entire notion of binary oppositions in doubt (the second stage of deconstruction). Oppositions which are conceived in this way (man/woman, black/white, body/soul, speaking/writing, essence/appearance) thus harbour the other ‘within’, and as such deconstruction works not only to challenge historical privileges (man over woman), but actually goes further to erode the very distinctions upon which these categories are premised, transcending this ‘manichean logic of binary coding’ (Gilroy, 1993:198).

One such example of an ‘undecidable’ that Derrida often gives is that of the ‘supplement’:

The concept of the supplement… harbours within it two significations whose cohabitation is as strange as it is necessary. The supplement adds to itself, it is a surplus, a plenitude enriching another plenitude… but the supplement supplements. It adds only to replace. It intervenes or insinuates in-the- place-of; if it fills, it is as if one fills a void (Derrida, 1997:144-5, italics in original).

This shows that between the oppositions of plenitude and lack, the concept of the supplement never finds its proper home. As such, it ‘can no longer be included within philosophical (binary) opposition, but which, however, inhabit philosophical oppositions, resisting and disorganizing it, without ever constituting a third term, without ever leaving room for a solution in the form of speculative dialectics’ (Derrida, 2002 [1972]:43, italics in original). Instead of finding the ‘true’ origin of binaries, words or significations themselves, Derrida shows how difference itself is the only ‘real’ ‘origin’:

Representation mingles with what it represents, to the point where one speaks as one writes, one thinks as if the represented were nothing more than the shadow or reflection of the representer. A dangerous promiscuity and a nefarious complicity between the reflection and the reflected which lets itself be seduced narcissistically. In this play of representation, the point of origin becomes ungraspable. There are things like reflecting pools, and images, an infinite reference from one to the other, but no longer a source, a spring. There is no longer a simple origin. For what is reflected is split in itself and not only as an addition to itself of its image. The reflection, the image, the double, splits what it doubles. The origin of the speculation becomes a difference (Derrida, 1997:36, my italics).

In his later work, Derrida resurrects the notion of undecidability in relation to his work on the gift, mourning, forgiving and hospitality (and perhaps also the ‘friend’ too), and their possibility (thus they become neither possible nor impossible at the same time). His analysis of the gift is useful here in order to determine the subtle shift from the early Derrida to the late, a topic which acts as ‘the main vehicle for his deconstruction-reconstruction of ethics’(Johnstone, 2004:2).

In order to be a gift, a gift must be given without reciprocity, yet in order to truly be a gift, it must also be identified as such (Derrida, 1992A). In order to undermine the impulse towards reciprocity (which would turn the event into a trade and exchange (permeated by capital), as opposed to a gift), the gift cannot be known and as such a dilemma emerges. Taken to its logical (and illogical) limit, the gift must not be a gift in order to be a gift, it has a limit of impossibility.

It is on this notion of the gift (which underpins Nietzsche’s notion of ‘good friendship’), that Derrida dismantles the (im)possibility of friendship, locating it instead as an aporia situated within Nietzschean madness:

A logic of the gift thus withholds friendship from its philosophical interpretation... this logic calls friendship back to non-reciprocity, to dissymmetry or to disproportion, to the impossibility of a return to offered or received hospitality: in short, it calls friendship back to the irreducible precedence of the other (2005A:63).

Nietzsche’s reversal of the statement made by Aristotle (‘O friends, there are no friends!’) which was repeated through Montaigne - ‘Enemies, there are no enemies!’ - also captures Derrida’s attention. It is this playful reworking of binaries taken to its illogical, nonsensical and ‘mad’ conclusion that suggests new possibilities for thought; ‘an inversion from thinking in terms of exclusive opposites into another way of thinking, from the logic of opposition and exclusion into another logic’(Van Tongeren, 2000:210).

The point of outlining deconstruction and communication in this way has been to show the value that Derrida continually placed upon limits. It is upon the notion of limits, and in particular the limit between the self, the other and the infinite that friendship will find its place, and where a novel contrast with Deleuze will be made; what limits must be placed on friendship?; what limit does the friend act as?; between two ‘selves’, where is friendships’ limit placed?

Derrida’s later work positions a ‘pure event’ as the actualisation of the impossible which occurs at this limit – ‘but barely’ (Derrida and Roudinesco, 2004:52). Perhaps this moment, in which the impossible event occurs, ‘but barely’, is a rare example of true friendship? A moment impossible between two discreet ‘subjects’, but which occurs within a third plateaux – friendship in and of itself – a ‘pure event’ which Derrida suggests is

a miracle… in an instant, not lasting more than an instant, it may happen. This is the… possible happening of something impossible which makes us think what hospitality, or forgiveness, or gift might be (Derrida, 2006:102).

It is an experience of the impossible that takes place in a location impossible for the subject alone, yet contained within friendship; an experience which contains particular singularities of each subject, combined into its own series, distinct from each individual and perhaps ungraspable to an individual alone but perceptible in moments of friendship.

Indeed in Derrida’s own life, it was his friendships more than anything that produced unexpected new modes of thinking. The ‘zigzag’ line sketched across and connecting his friends’ life with his own, opened particular moments of perception and ingenuity:

What my first friends and first hosts in Strasbourg, Phillipe Lacoue-Lanarthe, Jean-Luc Nancy, and those close to them, taught me to think, as early as their first invitation some thirty-five years ago (in short, almost our entire adult lives), is that thinking, what I call here by this at once modest, abstract, and pompous word thinking, the thinking that traverses and exceeds philosophy, literature, poetry, music, theater, drawing, and painting – as well as politics – this thinking would not think, it would not give anything to be thought, it would not let itself be thought, without the body of love, of friendship, of hospitality, without the experience of the gift at the limits of the possible and the impossible (Derrida, 2014:5).

The Politics of Friendship, then, is situated within Derrida’s broader deconstructive approach and acts as a new platform from which to re-launch the critique of binaries and their hierarchies. Published a year after Spectres of Marx (1993), these works mark what has been described as the ‘political’ or ‘ethical’ turn in Derrida’s work, and is ‘a thoroughly political intervention’ (Peeters, 2013:464). In line with his sustained attack on hierarchies, Derrida roots out the notion of fraternity implicit in historic notions and considerations of friendship. Beginning with the Aristotelian declaration ‘O my friends, there is no friend’, Derrida adopts his usual (and unusual) playful and elusive style, tracing the notion of friendship through Cicero, Montaigne, Kant, Nietzsche, Schmitt and Blanchot, showing friendships suppression of difference through its privileging of male bonds and fraternity, through an assessment of its relation to the citizenship, democracy and the political.

It is within friendship, then, that Derrida asserts that the future remains undecidable, as something to be creative and awaiting our mark. Thus friendship itself is seen as a limit, racing towards the horizons of the unknown, the impossible and the other. As Derrida’s later work suggests, it is precisely through its impossibility that its possibility emerges:

Now, the thought of the ‘perhaps’ perhaps engages the only possible thought of the event - of friendship to come and friendship for the future… The possibilization of the impossible possible must remain at one the same time as undecidable - and therefore as decisive - as the future itself (Derrida, 2005A:29).

Thus the friend acts as the limit or horizon of an intersubjectivity that transcends two subjects (unlike Habermas’ notion of intersubjectivity which still relies upon two coherent subjects (Couzens Hoy, 1997)), Derrida instead creates a third space for friendship (which necessarily results, as Derrida acknowledges, in the destruction of the friend and the self). Two friends contained within each other at a singular point, creates a new notion – friendship, structured entirely differently to other notions of subjectivity. It is this third space (which can be shared with more than two friends; three, four, etc.), that distinguishes the ‘friend’ from the ‘other’, because the friend is not the ultimate alterity. Two friends contain within them mutual points (memories, experiences, sensations and intensities), or more precisely a singular point spread across two bodies, a point which throws the entire notion of a bounded subjectivity into disarray. As a singular point spread across what have historically been (incorrectly) understood as two contained subjects, the notion of subjectivity in its singularity comes under threat. It is within friendship that we find the greatest challenge to bounded and static subjectivities; ‘I would never be the person I am without you’ (without you, ‘I’ am an impossibility).

If ‘the self is not contained in any moment or any place, but it is only in the intersection of moment and place that the self might, for a moment, be seen vanishing through a door, which disappears at once’ (Winterson, 1989:80), then similarly there is a moment contained within friendship where a new, more powerful entity is created which spreads across two bodies, and is glimpsed at, if only for a moment. Such a space, or limit (the horizon of the horizon) is ungraspable, and evaporates as one approaches it (gaining a new horizon). Friendship is a moment in which the radical alterity of the Other (who becomes a friend) is brought momentarily within the fortifications of ourselves, in which, through the relation of friendship, the inside and outside of each doubles over, so as the moment ‘we’ (for want of a better word, to describe greater than (and formally understood) as two ‘I’s’) reflect on its actuality, it returns to an impossibility. This construction of a concept of friendship weds a Derridean notion of limits and undecidability to a Deleuzian notion of becoming, whilst elaborating on the insights these post-structural thinkers have made into the nature (or not) of subjectivity; a point to which the next section of this essay turns.

Deleuze on Friendship

In his sixth and final collaboration with Felix Guattari, What is Philosophy? (1991), Deleuze and Guattari assert that ‘the philosopher is the concept’s friend’, putting forward the task of philosophy as ‘not a simple art of forming, inventing, or fabricating concepts, because concepts are not necessarily forms, discoveries, or products. More rigorously, philosophy is the discipline that involves creating concepts’ (2009:5). Though Deleuze and Guattari mobilise a metaphor of the ‘friend’ here in order to delineate the task of philosophy, they do not present friendship as a concept in itself. Rather than constructing a concept of friendship, the friend appears as a ‘conceptual personae [personnages conceptuels]’ (ibid:2), who ‘plays a part’ in the concept’s definition. A conceptual personae which counts amongst the ranks of the Idiot, the Madman, or any of Nietzsche’s characters (Deleuze, 2001B:92-101). It is interesting to note also, that the trajectory of Deleuze’s thinking in relation to friendship mirrors Nietzsche’s, whose later work repudiates friendship seeing it as ‘inadequate and perhaps even dangerous’ (Smith, 2011:130), despite both thinkers being particularly reliant upon their friends (Nietzsche’s friends travelling to take care of him after his nervous breakdown).

The friend, as conceptual personae, appears in their work as harbouring a potentiality critical to the interior of thought:

The friend who appears in philosophy no longer stands for an extrinsic persona, an example or empirical circumstance, but rather for a presence that is intrinsic to thought, a condition of possibility of thought itself, a living category, a transcendental lived reality (ibid:3).

Deleuze and Guattari claim that philosophy has forced the friend from its role in relation to an other, instead relating it to an entire entity (philosophy), entrusting in it a much grander role as ‘the friend of wisdom, of truth or the concept’ (ibid). In a similar vein to Derrida, Deleuze goes on to challenge friendships’ historic relationship with citizenship and democracy (fraternity), stating that ‘the idea of a Western democratic conversation between friends has never produced a single concept’(ibid:6).

In relation to philosophy, friendship is dissolved as a relation between beings, brought instead into the interior of thought, providing the stimuli and desire for philosophy (of/as immanence) in the first place:

This is not two friends who engage in thought; rather, it is thought itself that requires the thinker to be a friend so that thought is divided up within itself and can be exercised. It is thought itself which requires this division of thought between friends (Deleuze and Guattari, 2009:69).

The notion of friendship outlined earlier – as something that could contain the singular interior of two ‘bodies’ (to use a word which doesn’t collapse into what we think we know of a subject) at once as its own (a new exterior) – is thus excluded from this Deleuzian reading which posits the only real friendship as that between the subject and their thought. This friendship is the only real friendship for Deleuze since friendship between friends ‘has its rivalries’ (ibid:88) in which each ‘friend’ moves to protect their own concepts (just as Plato protected the Idea). Friendship as anything other than this ‘thus reaches its zenith’, and as such Deleuze projects that it is in its ‘twilight hour when one distrusts even the friend’ (ibid:2).

Since philosophy, thought and concepts reconstitute themselves on a plane of immanence, Deleuze is able to do away with the ‘traditional’ friend and it is here that we can locate Deleuze’s pessimism towards friendship:

There is indeed catastrophe, but it consists in the society of brothers or friends having undergone such an ordeal that brothers and friends can no longer look at each other, or each at himself, without a “weariness,” perhaps a “mistrust,” which does not suppress friendship but gives it its modern color and replaces the simple “rivalry” of the Greeks (ibid:107).

Though Deleuze is right to document the changes in friendship since the Greeks (particularly when paired with the changes in subjugation described by Foucault (1977; 1985)), he remains overly pessimistic about the possibilities of friendship to reinvigorate itself and dispel this ‘mistrust’ and ‘weariness’. This pessimistic outlook is also apparent in the letters Deleuze wrote to Dionys Mascolo between April to October 1988, in which he developed the ideas which would lead to those discussed above.

In these letters, Deleuze begins to formulate an idea of friendship as ‘an internal condition of thought as such’, again predicting its ‘twilight hour’ through a discussion of friendships ‘wariness’ and ‘distress’ (Deleuze cited in Stivale, 2008:3). Clearly then, given the language and pessimism Deleuze shows towards friendship, the thoughts and narrative that he develops in these letters with Mascolo act as a precursor to his later work with Guattari.

Despite Deleuze’s cynicism, like Derrida his own friendships were absolutely critical to the development of his theory, as were his encounters with other thinkers such as Hume, Nietzsche, Bergson, Spinoza and Leibniz, who are often similarly described as Deleuze’s ‘friends’ (Smith, 2013:21). Though Deleuze never describes friendship as a concept in terms of either a ‘fold’, or a third plateaux comprised of singular points of each subject (as described above in relation to Derrida), he nevertheless comes close when speaking more personally about his own friendships, particularly his friendship with Félix Guattari; ‘[w]e didn’t collaborate as two different people. We were more like two streams coming together to make a third stream, which I suppose was us’ (Deleuze cited in Dosse, 2010:10, my italics). At other times he referred to his and Guattari’s way of working/thinking as ‘pensée à deux’ (thinking at two) (Deleuze cited in Stivale, 2008:6), or as Stivale has called it elsewhere - ‘two-fold thought’(Stivale, 1998).

In an attempt to resuscitate friendship and its potentialities, Stivale looks to these practices of friendship as a way to undermine Deleuze himself, and overturn his pessimism:

However, Deleuze’s myriad practices of friendship, I maintain, stand in sharp contrast to any ultimate recognition of friendship as distress, for such a defeatist view would fail to acknowledge that this distress constitutes but a complementary fold in the active engagement of friendship (2008:14).

This approach, which Mengue refers to as ‘contra Deleuzum sed pro vero Deleuzo! (Against Deleuze then, in order to be with Deleuze!)’ (2006:175), is an approach also favoured by Stivale and which this essay takes in order to create a friendship with Derrida (despite Deleuze’s own pessimisms). Stivale hopes that by placing importance on Deleuze’s practices of friendships, and linking these to diverse sections of his work, he may create a ‘zigzag’line, which acts as a ‘figure of the spark and leap of creation’ (2008:22) linking areas of Deleuze’s life and work together in order to revive friendship from its ‘untimely’ death. Not too dissimilar from the approach here, Stivale hopes that this zigzag, though ‘difficult to locate… draws together creative forces and often incites the spark that unleashes potentials and thought’ (ibid).

In a process of deterritorialization on a plane of immanence, thought, once established, is able to affect itself ‘by revealing the outside to be its own unthought element’ (Deleuze cited in Stivale, 2008:23). Subjectivity then appears to be an emergent property of thought, with ‘the emergence of one strange final figure… a thinking being who problematizes him [or her]self, as an ethical subject’ (ibid). This result Deleuze labels the ‘fold’ of subjectivity (Deleuze, 1986) (arguably thought itself is already the ‘fold’ of the outside), a concept he utilises and develops in Foucault (2006 [1986]) and The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque (1993 [1988]). Taking this concept further still and uniting it with an enquiry into friendship, Stivale endeavours to outline what he terms the ‘fold of friendship’.

Given Deleuze’s cryptic and cynical writings on friendship, I would like to turn the task to address less the specific meditations Deleuze had on friendship, and more to assess which other areas and concepts we may be able to cherry pick from his work, in order to attach them to the assemblage that has begun to be created here (as was done with Derrida above and in line with Stivale’s method). Since the ‘friend’ has been reduced to a conceptual personae whose purpose is to ‘help the philosopher in question to negotiate and establish a new image of thought’ (Marks, 2005:279), what remains of friendship? The task now becomes less one of joining Deleuze and Guattari on their quest to ask ‘what friend signifies’ or what the role or character the friend plays is (2009), and instead on the greater task of constructing a concept of friendship. In particular, I would like to consider the ‘fold of friendship’ as a currently under-realised, underdeveloped and underutilised potentiality of thought.

Difference and Repetition (2001A [1968]) is often considered to be Deleuze’s Magnum Opus, it marks his first foray into actively ‘doing’ philosophy, as opposed to his early monographs which Deleuze counted among the history of philosophy. This work stands as one of Deleuze’s most influential and as ‘the keystone to Deleuze’s philosophy’ (Williams, 2013:33). In it Deleuze takes aim at the ‘Image of thought’ embedded in philosophy since the ancients, and which was (re)produced and altered through thinkers such as Descartes and Kant. This ‘Image of Thought’ presupposes itself and is tied to representation (which in turn ‘essentialises’ the world being thought), producing a dogmatic notion of what it means to think, as well as thinking’s supposed ‘natural capacity’ and ‘common sense’. This excavation, which does not ascribe to a linear view of history, instead marks a methodology which Deleuze terms ‘noology’ and ‘geophilosophy’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 2005 [1980]; 2009 [1991]) – as the study of Images of thought and their historicity (a historicity which then opposes transcendence). Turning this on its head, Deleuze locates the challenge to revolve around a notion of difference which precisely cannot be thought – a differential difference (as force or relation, precisely opposed to representation).

What is key here is that the current permutation of thought (the contemporary Image) is presented as a particular singularity rather than a transcendent a priori truth, within which thought remains immanently tied to the outside – indeed it is provoked by it. Taken together with Deleuze’s assessment of the virtual – that the universe/reality contains an infinite myriad of virtual possibilities which are not all necessarily actual but are nonetheless still real (Deleuze, 1966 [1988a]; 1983 [1963]; 1990A; 1990B). These two propositions taken together produce the hypothetical space of the virtual possibilities and tendencies of thought itself. What this means is that there may be other modes of thinking, perhaps currently ungraspable to us now, but which may be ‘opened up’in a future to come. Though this may seem like science fiction, it is an important and central conclusion in Difference and Repetition. The possibility of this proposition is also eluded to in Deleuze’s other work on subjectivity, and the post-structural challenge more generally. In this school of thought, the subject becomes historical and as a point (and vehicle) within power relations; for Deleuze this process is further located within (and emerges out of) the fold of thought (since discourse and power relations still affect a materiality – they continue to impact the ‘outside’ upon which thought and subjectivity are immanently tied and derived). It is often claimed that the Greeks ‘discovered’ subjectivity (Deleuze, 1988:100; Foucault, 1985), but regardless of the exact accuracy of this statement it suffices to say that it was at some point discovered (i.e. it is neither God-given nor transcendent; it is not a priori).

Manuel De Landa extends some of Deleuze’s propositions and reconfigures others in order to make them more palatable to the analytic tradition (thus bridging the continental gap). In outlining Deleuze’s notion of the diagram (and the virtual), De Landa discusses the ‘possibility space’ or ‘sphere of possibilities’ open to something (De Landa, 2006; 2013). For instance, a knife has a sphere of possibilities, all of which are real but some of which may not be actual – the knife can always cut though it may not be presently cutting (this metaphor is one which Deleuze uses in The Logic of Sense (1990B)). The question here thus becomes one of the sphere of possibilities open to thought, and it is in relation to this notion that I would like to propose a concept of friendship – as a concept detailing the possibility space of thought, which may not be actual, but which may be yet to come. This approach opens thought up (immanently) to a future yet to arrive, and to possibilities that cannot, by definition (since we are operating in the medium and mode of thought), be currently comprehended within the confines of contemporary thinking. Just as subjectivity is unable to be comprehended until the moment that it is, other potentials within thought remain real, yet currently unactualised. The purpose, then, of friendship, would be to create glimpses into these moments, and into the way this may in turn fold upon reality, potentially emerging as a strategy against the individualisation of capitalism which has historically relied (in ever greater ways) upon notions of the individual and thus of a coherent and bounded notion of subjectivity.

Another area of analysis within Deleuzian theory which holds promise for a new notion of friendship is the concept of the ‘Body without Organs’ - the BwO. This term first emerged in The Logic of Sense (1990 [1969]) in a passage in which Deleuze outlines how the schizophrenic (another character personae) is concerned not with ‘recovering meaning’ but with ‘destroying the word’, and the Body without Organs appears as the vehicle for beginning this task (ibid:88). This route to creative destruction, unconcerned with recovering meaning resonates with those criticisms of Derrida’s own elusive meaning (Searle, 1977, 1996; Habermas, 1991), assertions that seem to position Derrida as the schizophrenic Deleuze speaks of. This concept reappears in Deleuze’s work with Guattari – Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus – refined, reinvigorated, and ripe for use in relation to a new concept of friendship.

This notion of the BwO appears as a way to utilise the organisation of life (on a background of chaotic noise) as an example of the vitilistic striving of life. It is an attempt to understand organisation away from a notion of ‘the subject’ (and in fact away from both ‘form’ and ‘the idea’ also), thus opening life’s movements up to an immanent organisation allowing room for creative exploration (and territorialisation) on a plane of immanence. Given that anything that is thought of as a body might be reconsidered instead to be a ‘body without organs’ (as say, capital is (Deleuze and Guattari, 2013 [1988]:10;101)) then perhaps friendship too can be considered a BwO, which operates across ‘subjects’, transcending the very notion of subjectivity instead working to create connections, lines of flight and deterritorialisations on a plane of immanence which resists the individuation of capital. Such a description of friendship allows it to escape reterritorialisation by the subject and offers a theoretical and practical example of new modes of being, or rather, new modes of immanently becoming might be both theorised and practised.

As the introduction made clear, friendship has usually been thought of as a relation between selves. However, if the distinction between the finite-infinite is rethought or collapses, particularly in light of post-structural theory and assertions, what implications might this have for friendship? O’Sullivan in one such author who puts this relation into question, presenting other modes of subjectivation which challenge notions of subjectivity in which the subject is finite, bounded, static and coherent. In such a view, is there perhaps a potentiality for overlap, since two ‘subjects’ may be opened up to one another, given that their relation with the infinite is being rethought?

Opening up the possibilities of subjectivation in this way, the final section of O’Sullivan’s work begins a preliminary ‘speculative’ search for new permutations in thought and subjectivity ‘beyond’ its current production. From ‘the question of technology’ to the ‘new universes of reference that are also being opened up by the World Wide Web’ (2012:201), O’Sullivan claims a new space for collectivity, alluding to ‘the production of collaborations and alliances that work against that atomized individualism produced by the faciality machine’ (ibid). The argument which I have so far developed throughout – that it is within moments of friendship that this horizon may be glimpsed; when an assemblage of thoughts, intensities and subjectivities move together, for a moment, to create an something entirely new, a beyond subject – is also briefly mentioned by O’Sullivan:

Deleuze’s work on Spinoza would be particularly relevant here – the mapping out of productive, joyful encounters that increase our capacity to act in the world (that is, friendship) (ibid).

By combining the strengths of a Deleuzian approach (either through O’Sullivan’s rethinking of the finite-infinite debate or through my own exposition of the possibility space for thought) with a Derridean (one which utilises friendship as a passage of a future to come, and which holds friendship as the impossible horizon which may be grasped only fleetingly), friendship is able to blossom into a potent force with which to move beyond the aggressive atomisation and administration of life in late modernity, away also from the production of current modes of subjectivation within contemporary neoliberal society (a subject which acts, as Foucault points out, as both a product of, and a vehicle for, power (Foucault, 1988a:98; 1977)). Given that this encounter between Derrida and Deleuze has been somewhat forced, there remain important differences to be considered, to which the next section of this essay now turns.

Derrida and Deleuze: Foes

The exposé of both Derrida and Deleuze’s work above, particularly in connection to friendship, begins to draw each author more thoroughly into the orbit of the other, especially since they both grapple with remarkably similar problems and concepts; difference, repetition, identity, post-phenomenology, a reversal of Platonism and in their earlier works; the simulacrum (the intricacies of these similarities will be explored further in the final section). Despite these similarities, however, one of the first differences (of many) that any reader of both Deleuze and Derrida will note is their differential styles of writing. Derrida’s style underpins his method – playful and provocative – he forces words and their meanings to buckle under the weight of his pen. Deleuze, on the other hand, though similarly championing an, at times experimental style which forces language to ‘stutter’ and ‘stammer’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1986), his own style varies more drastically from an experimental ‘pop-philosophy’ in his join works with Guattari (2005 [1980]; 2013 [1988]; 1986; 2009 [1991]), to a more analytical style inspired by Spinoza in Difference and Repetition and The Logic of Sense. It is precisely by acknowledging these differential styles that Lambert asks the question ‘could we then say that the difference between Derrida and Deleuze could be reduced to a question of ‘style’?’ (2004:125). It is not my intention here to reduce the differences between these two philosophers to a stylistic theme surrounding a shared ‘economy of disequilibrium’as Lambert does (ibid:129), instead it is to use this point as a jumping off board with which to further explore these two thinkers.

One of the fundamental disagreements between Derrida and Deleuze appears to emerge when one attempts to navigate the treacherous course between language and materiality. Deleuze, often considered a realist, materialist and empiricist, jettisoned the linguistic turn (as well as the analytic position of logic), opting instead for an ontology of difference, thus moving ‘into mathematics: the differential calculus, group theory, non-geometric geometry’ (De Landa, 2013:221). Such a move seems irreconcilable with the (in)famous Derridean statement: ‘Il n’y a pas de hors-texte’ (Derrida, 1997:158) – a position Derrida maintains since each sign leads only to further signs.

Contrary to the (in)famous quote in the paragraph above, Derrida, however, rejects the idea the there is nothing beyond language, that is to say; a materiality. Instead he means to extend the influence and impact of language into material areas such as the body or subjectivity (Derrida 1986; 1981) and to question our relation to this materiality every time we attempt to grasp it through language – how to speak it’s ‘truth’. Instead Derrida’s ‘text’ refers to an ever-unfinished process of differentiation, as the ‘text’ contains difference already within it – thus there is nothing beyond difference. The task, for Derrida, is to extend the notion of text away from the privilege the ancients placed on speech (over writing), and to open this to the discursive fields which structure the strata of reality. Such an approach need not be incompatible with a Deleuzian approach, since Deleuze does not shy away from an analysis of language, showing it as one relation or force which structures the strata and which can represent ‘the other strata into a sufficiently deterritorialiszed system of signs’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987:62). Further to this, Deleuze shows how language can be stretched to its limit, in order to collapse upon itself, in which a minor literature forces the major to ‘stutter’ and ‘stammer’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1986; O’Sullivan, 2009). At times Derrida admits a similar position that ‘if the absolute other is irreducible to a concept it is because it transcends the orders of language’ (Smith, 2004:59). Though clearly not exactly the same point, this alludes to a space outside of language, as a materiality that cannot be encompassed by it (only by a notion of difference), and is again something that Deleuze also spells out:

Maybe speech and communication have become corrupted. They’re thoroughly permeated by money – and not by accident but by their very nature. Creating has always been something different from communicating. The key thing might be to create vacuoles of non-communication, circuit breakers so we can elude control (Deleuze, 1995:175).

Unlike Deleuze, Derrida assumes that materiality is already thoroughly penetrated by language and meaning. Thus when an event happens, it does so having already been structured by language and thus it is already heavily impregnated with meaning beyond the point of return (through differentiations within a ‘text’). Importantly, Derrida refutes the search for a ‘pure event’ outside this process which projects a transcendent notion of originality or authenticity. Since reality is already imbued by language, Derrida rejects the notion of shattered this ‘meaning’ in search of a ‘first truth’.

These points are important since any attempt Deleuze makes to discuss the relation of words and things, or as Deleuze may call it, the interlocking of various series (Deleuze, 1990B), necessarily passes through what Foucault called the ‘great model of language (langue) and signs’ (1988b:114). The entirety of Deleuze’s oeuvre is then forced to confront and accept this great model as any account of materiality or intensities passes through language, forcing it to accept, at least in part, Derridean approaches and conclusions (particularly to metaphysics and his deconstructive approach). Though this may seem to initially add an instability to the Deleuzian programme, it is perhaps by attaching Derrida’s work on language and metaphysics to the assemblage of Deleuzian theory we have constructed here that one is able to truly circumnavigate this treacherous problem, particularly since Derrida’s insights do not negate Deleuzian ones. Since Derrida’s fundamental point is one of difference, this ‘ontology’ does not undermine the further points Deleuze then makes about materiality (even as he passes ‘through’language).

In an attempt to cast aside the legacy of the linguistic turn that has being weighing philosophy down, De Landa’s defence of Deleuze quotes a ‘leader’ of the movement away from formal logic and language to models and mathematical tools, stating:

The semantic view of theories makes language largely irrelevant to the subject. Of course, to present a theory, we must present it in and by language. That is a trivial point… In addition, both because of our own history – the history of philosophy of science which became intensely language-oriented during the first half of [the last century] – and because of its intrinsic important, we cannot ignore the language of science. But in a discussion of the structure of theories it can largely be ignored (Bas Van Fraassen cited in De Landa, 2013:223 –234).

Thus De Landa uses this quotes to gloss over and avoid the issue that language presents, going on to suggest that:

The reason for leaving language and logic behind and bringing back the differential calculus – and the geometric approach to is study, that is, state space diagrams – is that it is only by analysing actual models that we can explore the relation between theories and the laboratory phenomena they are designed to explain. In other words, we want to know why these models actually work, why they manage to capture the regularities in the behaviour of real systems, and the answer to these questions is not given by the logical structure of an axiomatic (De Landa, 2013:224).

Perhaps we may be able to permit an omission of the issue of language (even if it were necessary to do so), in order to make sense of projections and systems which work (as this appears to be De Landa’s argument). However, omitting the necessity to incorporate language, and the insights Derrida has made over its indecisiveness and its tendency to shift and change from moment to moment, speaker to reader, does not amount to a rejection of these arguments, merely a ‘setting aside’; in fact, by omitting these completely rather than setting them aside momentarily one looses the creativity and potentialities that his theory might bring. Trivial though Fraassen may think it, perhaps despite their differences, each thinker and theory may compliment the other when used together to create new concepts, particularly since neither theory negates the other (though it may at times ignore it).

Outlining two trajectories in contemporary French philosophy which emanate from the legacy of Heidegger, Smith undertakes a ‘propadeutic study, a kind of ‘vectorial’ analysis that seeks to diagram, in a general manner, the divergent directions Derrida and Deleuze have followed’ (2004:47), in which he identifies immanence and transcendence as the two schemas on which Deleuze and Derrida lie at opposing ends. Through an assessment of subjectivity, ontology and epistemology, Smith outlines how Deleuze’s philosophical position is one of immanence, whilst arguing that Derrida’s philosophy remains reliant on the transcendental. Smith’s study is a particularly interesting one to follow in order to chart their differences, since if it is correct, these two thinkers would appear to be opposed to one another at the most damning and critical of theoretical levels.

Situating his work at ‘the limit of philosophical discourse’(Derrida cited in Smith, 2004:49), Derrida’s deconstructive approach is applied to the core of metaphysics itself (in line with the Heideggerian task of ‘overcoming metaphysics’). Since there is no ‘outside’ to metaphysics, Derrida necessarily situates his attack as a Trojan horse within metaphysics itself. Since Heidegger’s task is an impossibility, Derrida (in his usual aporetic style) attempts a method whose ‘very impossibility… conditions the possibility of deconstructing the philosophical tradition from within’ (Smith, 2004:48). We once again see the notion of limits, aporias and im/possible im/possibility turned inwards towards some of the central questions of twentieth century philosophy. In fact, it is différance which concerns itself with this space of the ‘outside within’ (recalling again Deleuze’s fold):

There may be a difference still more unthought than the difference between Being and beings. We certainly can go further toward naming it in our language. Beyond Being and beings, this difference, ceaselessly differing from and deferring (itself), would trace (itself) (by itself) – this différance would be the first or last trace if one still could speak, here, of origin and end (Derrida, 1982:67).

It is in relation to, and citing this same quote (though not in full), that Smith then argues that Derrida’s theory is thoroughly imbued with, and reliant upon, the transcendental, since his notion of différance relies upon a ‘Beyond Being’. This clearly juxtaposes itself against both the Deleuzian announcement that he is a ‘pure metaphysician’ (Deleuze, 2007) and a ‘philosopher of immanence’, seemingly placing them at odds with one another. Smith’s reading, however, seems to skirt over the core of Derrida’s point, which upon closer inspection, appears to be even more closely connected to the Deleuzian position. Although this essay agrees with Smith’s conclusion that of the two approaches immanence is ‘the philosophy of the future’ (ibid:61), it does so through a refusal of the notion that Derrida is a philosopher of transcendence, thus exposing a more profound similarity than Smith acknowledges, an approach which thus casts aside the damning critique he makes of Derrida’s supposed recourse to the transcendental:

From the viewpoint of immanence… transcendence represents my slavery and impotence reduced to its lowest point: the absolute demand to do the absolutely impossible is nothing other than the concept of impotence raised to infinity (ibid:62-63).

As with his position on metaphysics, Derrida’s reading of the history of philosophy utilises the deconstructive approach to open texts up to new readings and interpretations. Smith sees this act of reconstruction as a movement from the transcendental (‘Beyond Being’);

[W]ithin the immanent and manifest movements of traditional philosophical concept and their ‘binary oppositions’, a later and transcendent movement of différance that is never present as such in the text but constantly serves to disrupt and destabilize it (ibid:52).

In opposition to this ‘reading’ of Derrida, I propose instead that these other meanings are always contained immanently within the text, though not always actualised. Borrowing from Deleuze’s notion of the virtual, it can instead be argued that Derrida’s text always already immanently contains these other meanings as potentialities (and/or tendencies). The fact that these have been thus far unactualised or unrealised does not diminish their realness or their immanence. Thus rather than seeing Deleuze as a philosopher of immanence and Derrida a philosopher of transcendence, I propose that they are both better bracketed under Deleuze’s own term – transcendental empiricism – or better still – speculative realism. Thus, it is through recourse to Deleuzian theory that Derrida may be spared from the grave predictions stated above by Smith.

Throughout Derrida’s oeuvre he alludes to notions of the ‘pure’ or ‘absolute’ which lie on the limit as the possible impossibility. Smith asserts that since ‘we never encounter the pure or the absolute in our experience’ (ibid:57), that they hold an important relation to Ideas in the Kantian sense, which again Smith argues relies on transcendence. This is precisely however, where the notion of ‘friendship’ comes to the rescue in the constructed friendship between Derrida and Deleuze, since we might describe this fleeting moment as an experience of the pure or absolute (a material intensity rather than an Idea). Derrida’s later work (2001B; 2001C; Derrida and Dufourmantelle, 2000) suggests that the ‘pure event’, rather than being something one never experiences (e.g. a transcendent Idea), it is in fact something experienced – ‘but barely’ (Derrida and Roudinesco, 2004:52). Rather than being actually impossible (and hence coming from the outside), this event is currently impossible, yet can become possible if just for a moment (as the horizon of the horizon escapes into the distance). This is also why it remains tied to the notion of the limit, in a mathematical sense, since taken to the infinite a solution is possible; it is that possibility, or rather, impossible possibility, which structures all possible solutions (as Derrida suggests); this limit is a real solution rather than a transcendental idea – despite whether it can be properly ‘grasped’ or not. To borrow De Landa’s defence of Deleuze for a moment, despite Smith’s contestations, mathematical models built around limits do work regardless of whether Smith refers to their solutions as ‘Ideas’or not – as they do with Derrida also.

Similarly, Smith makes a slight misreading of Deleuze too, stating:

Deleuze, for his part, defines his philosophy, not as a search for the conditions of possible experience, but rather the conditions of real experience. Such is the formula of immanence (Smith, 2004:58).

This is precisely where the subtle shift in Deleuze’s terminology comes into focus, since he positions himself at times less as a philosopher of immanence and more of a philosopher of ‘transcendental empiricism’. The entire notion of Deleuze’s virtual is framed by the structure space of possible experience (as De Landa notes), and it only through this that Deleuze is able to give any meaning to the notion of ‘real experience’. Hence, similarly to Derrida, Deleuze’s account opens up current permeations and states of reality, to the ‘transcendental’, as a movement from the (real) virtual. It seems that Smith (and other detractors) may be stuck then in a semantic battle over precisely how to define immanence and transcendence; this is a battle which occurs when the real has been opened up to an Other than is currently ungraspable, unknown up until the moment it arrives (the virtual).

Having refuted these differences which would have reached to the core of a joined programme, we have once again returned Derrida to the realm of transcendental empiricism. As such, this essay now moves on to consider their further similarities, returning later to this experience of the impossible as the central feature of a friendship between Deleuze and Derrida.

Deleuze and Derrida: A Friendship

One of the first indicators that a profound friendship between these two thinkers may be created, more profound still that the relationship of mutual respect they harboured towards one another, comes from their shared influences and heritage. It was through their shared resistance to the academic dogmas within the French tradition and their subsequent source of inspiration, that they ended up on paths not too dissimilar to each other. At the time in France, ‘the three H’s’ - Hegel, Husserl and Heidegger - were rigorously taught as a new orthodoxy in philosophy, and each carved his own path away from this phenomenological canon through the route Nietzsche provided (Smith, 2013:16). It was their ‘insistence on examining reading strategies’ arrived at through their shared experiences within the French system that presents ‘one of the clearest affinities’ between them (Patton and Protevi, 2004:3).

Their mutual distrust of this orthodoxy led them both to problematize the notion of common sense, which aroused an interest in nonsense as a defiant moment. Deleuze adopts such an approach in both Difference and Repetition (2001A [1968]) and The Logic of Sense (1990 [1969]), in which common sense refers not just to the common senses (in relation to faculties) but established philosophical dogmas and truisms. Similarly, when talking about the problem of the decision (as always necessarily a moment of madness) Derrida states: ‘would one have to show hospitality to the impossible itself – that is, to what the good sense of all philosophy can only exclude as madness or nonsense: a passive decision, an originarily affected decision?’ (2005A:68, italics in original). It is also within this aporia of decision that Derrida asserts that ‘a theory of the subject is incapable of accounting for the slightest decision’(ibid).

This route then inevitably led to a shared interest in difference and repetition. In establishing an ontology of difference, Deleuze positioned difference as a force, a differential relation, and as residing in an independent and autonomous reality – a materiality of difference (2001A). Derrida, on the other hand, though working within the domain of language and meaning, also demonstrated that any ungraspable notion of difference lay as the only ‘true’origin:

The trace is in fact the absolute origin of sense in general. Which amounts to saying once again that there is no absolute origin of sense in general. The trace is the difference which opens appearance and signification. Articulating the living upon the nonliving in general, origin of all repetition, origin of ideality, the trace is not more ideal than real, not more intelligible than sensible, not more a transparent signification than an opaque energy and no concept of metaphysics can describe it (Derrida, 1997 [1967]:65, italics in original).

If one were to expand Derrida’s notion of the ‘text’ out drastically to include all forms of expression – e.g. in the sense that a rock expresses its character – then we would end up back at an ontology of difference à la Deleuze. Such an ontology, which leads both Derrida and Deleuze to reject a conventional and coherent notion of the subject, leaves open the possibility of a subjectivity to come (if it can successfully be called subjectivity at all); the possibility of a ‘change’ and ‘becoming’ which awaits l’avenir.

In acknowledging the implications of difference (to both the subject and object who would be dismembered up to an infinitely small limit – though not without meanings which exist on the limit of a strata), Deleuze and Derrida both refuse a simplistic notion of a diametrically opposed inside and outside; Deleuze’s conception of ‘le pli [the fold]’ allows him to put forward an alternative account of the production of subjectivity, which removes itself from the ‘simple interiority and exteriority (appearance and essence, or surface and depth)’ (O’Sullivan, 2005:103), in which the outside is folded in upon itself, the first pli occurs as the phenomenon of thought itself and the second as this thought (of the outside) doubles back on itself to create a more complex topology or relation – that of subjectivity. The fold contains remarkable similarities to Derrida’s own dissolution of the supposed boundaries between the inside and the outside.

Derrida attempted to expand what might be considered a text, though perhaps this text never meets the area of pure thought that Deleuze attempts to grapple with (hence their arguably irreconcilable difference), it may however be expanded to include those texts within the interior of our own thoughts, which structure thought and allow it to be ‘said’.

If this is where one might construct a friendship between the two thinkers, or trace a ‘zigzag line’ from one to the other, then what might be the role of friendship itself within all this? If subjectivity itself is a fold of thought of the outside, then perhaps friendship is ‘the fold’ of Deleuze’s ‘pensée à deux’, or the fold of Derrida’s lost subject (in friendship), experienced in a manner similar to subjectivity (grasped as subjectivity is grasped); chasing a horizon; the moment at which it is grasped it begins immediately to shift; as Winterson’s ‘self’ does – it vanishes through a door which itself disappears the moment one attempts to comprehend or experience it – it is an experience, but barely – friendship is always already ‘disappearing at once’.

As both Derrida and Deleuze established the historicity of subjectivity, particulars and truth (rather than explaining them via recourse to the transcendental), they necessarily acknowledged the tendency of movement and change within systems, encompassing a vitality and vitalism resurrected through their reading of Nietzsche, and in the case of Deleuze through his turn towards theorists such as Spinoza and Bergson. For Derrida, a text always changes and shifts, with those reading it, the world around it, the meanings contained within it and how these rise to the surface at different times and in different contexts. Thus, Derrida continually awaits a politics to come – a new world. Deleuze’s notion of becoming not only injects philosophy with an infinite amount of potential energy, it also opens the possibility of a thought or thinking to come. Taken together they leave open the sphere of possibilities available to thought, and a future yet to be imagined, yet which remains immanently possible, existing as a horizon of a horizon. As Simon O’Sullivan states, Deleuze leaves open a ‘beyond’, a to ‘become world’ (2012:202), whose potentiality is immanent (just as Derrida’s is). Thus both their bodies of work construct reality as something exciting, with which we can be creative and with which to resist current permutations of power (by creating lines of flight from/to the virtual); for Deleuze it is ‘the difference between the virtual and the actual [which] requires that the process of actualisation be a creation’ (Hardt 1993:18). As Patton suggests, it is this (creative) orientation towards the future that unites their work, as they share ‘a commitment to the permanent possibility of movement beyond present limits to our individual and collective capacities’(2004:27).

Patton goes on to suggest that their mutual orientation towards the future contains a creative approach to truth, and it is this which unites the two thinkers, he suggests that deconstruction ‘is invention or it is nothing at all’ (Derrida cited in Patton, 2004:16). Again, rather than being a transcendent approach to truth (in contract to an immanent Deleuze as Smith (2004) argues), Deleuze locates a similar movement: ‘because truth is not to be achieved, formed, or reproduced; it has to be created. There is no other truth than the creation of the New: creativity, emergence’ (Deleuze, 1989:146 – 147).

In order to further expose their similarities I would now like to return to the notion of friendship as a body without organs as discussed in the second chapter. This notion of friendship as a practice of a new mode of immanently becoming, escapes reterritorialisation from the ‘subject’ and ‘subjectivity’ which in turn allows it to escape being recaptured by capital also. As Deleuze makes clear in The Logic of Sense, by deploying the notion of nonsense (and comparing this to Zen Buddhism), each moment or event contains an ‘impossibility’ within it, in the sense that the event is split between two impossible movements (e.g. becoming larger and smaller at the same time, thus eluding common sense through the senses). Deleuze states that it is

the simultaneity of a becoming whose characteristic is to elude the present. Insofar as it eludes the present, becoming does not tolerate the separation or the distinction of before and after, or of past and future. It pertains to the essence of becoming to move and to pull in both directions at once (1990B:1).

Though some such as Lawlor (2004) have used this as a moment to distance Deleuze and Derrida, I would again like to propose the opposite. Rightly observing that ‘the ‘simul’ of the simul-acrum is always double’, Lawlor observes that the ‘simularcra go in both directions at once (becomes more and less at the same time)’ (2004:68-69). This leads Lawlor to posit that Deleuze proposes a system of ‘duality’, which Lawlor then contrasts with a supposed Derridean ‘unity’. Though Lawlor clearly rejects Smith’s (2004) position outlined earlier, stating that ‘it is not the case that Derrida is the philosopher of pure transcendence and Deleuze the philosopher of pure immanence’ (2004:67), he nevertheless endeavours equally to find a difference where there may be none.

By too closely relating Derrida’s argument to a notion of ‘form’ (within repetition rather than event), Lawlor supposes that ‘the relation between form and formless… is a relation of mediate unity (resemblance)’ (ibid:81). Since Derrida puts resemblance on the ‘inside’ (of both the word and event) (1988; Derrida and Roudinesco, 2004), and utilises the simulacrum as ‘doubled’ between presence and non-presence it is thus ‘defined neither by being of becoming’ (Lawlor, 2004:69), leading Lawlor to situate Derrida instead as a philosopher of unity.

However, this binary opposition and distinction between the two philosophers is made far too hastily, since the impossibility of the ‘pure’ event is again precisely what Derrida is referring to in his work on hospitality, the gift, forgiveness, and importantly here, friendship (2001A; 2001B; 2001C; 2005A; Derrida and Dufourmantelle, 2000). It is within friendship that we see Derrida is able to admit the materiality of this event, thus also transcending the critique of his work which claims he evades materiality through the elevation of the role of language. This impossibility of the pure event (at its limit) relates to the Deleuzian notion of nonsense contained within the event (since the ‘pure event’also at its limit escapes ‘sense’at least as construed within language).

It has been the task of this essay to show that a concept of friendship may be constructed through an assemblage of their work, which works as a Body without Organs, or as a moment to glimpse a future to come, to transform matter into new modes of becoming, in order to resist, in particular, the individuation, atomisation and administration of late modernity and neoliberal capitalism.

Rather than leading to a rejection of friendship (if one maintains the subject) as commentators such as Goh (2011) suggest, Derrida’s account of friendship when taken alongside Deleuze might instead be brought to bear upon the subject itself, foretelling its necessary destruction given that friendship now necessarily entails the move to new forms of subjectivation which cannot be compared to more classical theories of the subject. The extension of Deleuze’s work which O’Sullivan carries out, shows precisely that the ‘speculative turn’ (a corollary that virtuality and becoming entail), a label which we have seen can also be attached to Derrida, necessarily lacks a subject; ‘to a certain extent, the category of the subject is a necessary exclusion that determines this speculative turn’ (2012:203). Perhaps then the subject that is destroyed in Derrida’s account of friendship actually allows friendship to move beyond subjectivity itself, to actualise and create the new (virtual) possibilities for thought and modes of becoming.

In their shared rejection of dialectics (both its account of subjectivity, its distinction between the finite and infinite and its moment of unity), both Deleuze and Derrida are concerned with arriving at an ontology of difference, in one way or another. For Derrida it is différance that provokes us to ‘think a writing… that absolutely upsets all dialectics, all theology, all teleology, all ontology’ (1982:67). Although this seems then to be a rejection of ontology, it is instead a rejection of any ontology other than différance. The deconstructive approach also offers a fragmentation and splintering of both subject and object which capitulates resolution and unity:

What is proper in culture is not to be identical to itself. Not to not have an identity, but not to be able to identify itself, to be able to say ‘me’ or ‘we’; to be able to take the form of a subject only in the non-identity to itself or, if you prefer, only in their difference with itself (Derrida, 1992B:9-11).

Similarly Deleuze’s ontology of difference fundamentally rejects identity, representation and essence. The similarity in their rejection of Hegel through a notion of difference (which finds no place in dialectics), assures the compatibility of their projects. As Derrida suggests in his eulogy to Deleuze, his experience reading Deleuze provoked a:

flustering, really flustering, experience of a closeness or of a nearly total affinity concerning the “theses,” if we can use this word, across very obvious distance, in what I would call – lacking any better term – the “gesture,” the “strategy,” the “manner” of writing, of speaking, of reading perhaps. As regards these “theses” – but the word doesn’t fit – notably the one concerning an irreducible difference in opposition to dialectical opposition, a difference “more profound” than a contradiction (Difference and Repetition), a difference in the joyously repeated affirmation (“yes, yes”), a taking into account of the simulacrum (2001A:192–193).

Going further still than a difference ‘more profound’ than that of contradiction, both Deleuze and Derrida locate an original ‘difference’ in relation to thought and a notion of subjectivity which revels in a reconsideration of the relation between the finite and the infinite (inside and outside). This reconsideration is one that Deleuze certainly performs (O’Sullivan, 2012) and that Derrida can be forced to perform (after all, a text is made to dance), and which allows friendship to hold a particularly provocative stance towards ‘the subject’. When Derrida states that ‘knowing will never mean, for a finite being, being known, nor loving being loved’ (2005A:11), this only holds if there can be no overlap between ‘finite’ beings; it assumes that all finite beings are themselves defined as discreet categories in the mathematical sense (in fact, it is precisely in relation to this point that Deleuze departs from Badiou’s (2005) attempts to think the subject). However, as we have seen with friendship, it is possible to construct a concept in which this is not necessarily the case. If there are connections that span multiple ‘subjects’, and connections which challenge the entire notion of the subject, then perhaps knowing and loving can mean to be known and to be loved. If friendship is in itself a Body without Organs that operates across two planes (of beings) to construct a third singularity – friendship (as opposed to a BwO being simply a new way to define subjectivity within ‘one body’) then the finite-infinite relation is again resisted (in friendship, loving means to be loved and knowing means to know).

Conclusion

One cannot help but see the intersections and overlaps between Derrida and Deleuze’s work as something which they were each acutely aware of. As Bearn (2000) points out, though they rarely commented on each other’s work, when they did do so, each saw the potentiality contained within the Other:

When they do [comment], they are rarely critical, and where critical at all, they are careful to frame their criticism not as a rejection of the other’s work, but as the tempering of a compliment (Bearn, 2000:442).

There is a sense that perhaps, through a notion of friendship, there was an even greater awareness of the same singular point contained within each body of work, which leaps across their differences in preparing the world to come. Both Derrida and Deleuze tirelessly defended what may arrive or become, but is not yet known. Speaking after Deleuze’s death on the subject of the friendship between them, Derrida suggests that

Deleuze undoubtedly still remains, despite so many dissimilarities, the one among those of my “generation” to whom I have always judged myself to be the closest (2001A:193).

By remaining open to what may become, each allowed for greater fluidity, motion, change and becoming which seeped into their respective works (and joined ‘work’ also), opening their oeuvres up to a sea of creative potentiality. Derrida’s tireless invocation of à-venir (to come), is a ‘rethinking of the political and of politics beyond all current concepts…the thought of an opening onto a future that is not a future present’ (Cheah and Guerlac, 2009:14). Similarly, Deleuze’s affirmation of becoming as a creative movement which sketches a diagonal line between the actual and the virtual, opens up Deleuze’s concepts to the virtual possibilities latent within them. Both Derrida and Deleuze’s work already contains within it the potentiality of a friendship which transcends the possible limitations of thought, to new permutations which exist on the horizon, as a way to think differently, to become, and to not have to do it alone.

The pure experience of friendship opens a unique possibility for both theorists. Rather than jettisoning any notion of friendship, as Deleuze did and as several commentators on Derrida have done (Goh, 2011; Lambert, 2008), it is a false notion of subjectivity which has been constructed through power and discourse in a system of capital which needs to be rejected; ‘we need to redefine subjectivity in order to save the experience of love’ (Protevi, 2004:186). A notion of friendship can then work as both a concept (in the philosophical sense) and as a body without organs (in the material and practical sense), to challenge and shape subjectivity by creating new lines of flight and opening up new possibilities from an unknown virtual, in a movement towards another possible world, or a world to come. Despite their differences in style and their respective focus’ (materiality for Deleuze and language for Derrida), their intersection or friendship evokes an experience of impossibility, in which the work of both theorists collides and colludes to produce a new route out capitalist individualism.

Friendship operates as a fleeting experience of the impossible (a stolen glance to another possible world), which rejects previous finite-infinite delineations and creates a third space sketched across what has previously been described as two bodies, two subjects, and two arenas of thought (two subjectivities). It is not just a rejection of these delineations, but a freeing which encompasses a creative production:

Love is freeing bodies from the organism and subject, allowing their triggers and patterns to interact and form new maps (new longitudes and latitudes) that allow new types of flows and hence new affects. When bodies join in the mutual experimental deterritorialisation that is love, we find Deleuze and Guattari’s most adventurous concept: the living, changing, multiplying virtual, the unfolding of the place on consistency. Love is complexity producing novelty, the very process of life (Protevi, 2004:191).

Since the time of the Greeks, and the ‘discovery of subjectivity’, a preoccupation with the subject has come to dominate Western philosophy, in turn filtering and distilling down into various arrangements of culture and politics, whose permutations have shifted and turned over centuries. Despite the changes in the modes of subjectivation – from the subject in Ancient Greece, to the subject of power/discourse in the 1970s outlined by Foucault (1977, 1998), to those subjects within societies of control outlined later by Deleuze, (1997) – the singular, bounded, coherent subject has remained a central pillar of a Western social and political arrangements, a notion which continues to structure our relation to ‘ourselves’, each ‘other’ and the ‘world’. A collective reflection on the structure and Image of thought, rooted in an experience, politics and ethics of friendship, has yet to be a collectivised experience that reaches to the core of our political, social and cultural experience. Though the details can not be understood up until the moment it arrives, such a collective reflection (on thought and language – a reflection greater than any ‘subject’), may be as profound as the historic discoveries of/shifts in ‘subjectivity’. Perhaps, then, far from being in its twilight hour, it is in fact friendship which holds the key to this collective reflection, which can move us beyond the individual upon which capital relies. Perhaps it is within the unactualised potentiality of friendship, that those necessary reflections and changes to come – l'avenir and ‘a becoming’ which encompasses inevitable changes in both the Image and the Subject as we know it – are contained.

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