Zone’
Everyday Analysis
the power of the woman in the first part of this formulation is obviously spurious. It is rather a violence against her, the violence of imposing responsibility, which in the philosopher Jacques Derrida’s sense of the term means the obligation to provide a response. The ‘woman who friend-zones’ is under obligation to provide a response to a male desire which, if the ‘nice guy’ himself is to be believed, has not even been articulated in the first place.
Christianity) assenting to the enemy within your friend: the part of him or her that scandalises everything you think you stand for. In contemplating friendship as a sorry substitute for love with a woman who is thought of as both tyrant and slave, the ‘nice guy’ has failed to grasp Nietzsche’s point that such power-inflected thinking is incompatible with friendship. Whatever one can find in the ‘friend zone,’ one cannot find that. In Derrida’s words, friendship means being ‘generous enough (to) know how to give In The Politics of Friendship, Derrida considenough to the other. To attain to this infinite ers Nietzsche’s ostensibly sexist remark that gift, failing which there is no friendship, one a woman as ‘a tyrant and a slave… is not yet must know how to give to the enemy.’ Until capable of true friendship: she knows only he is generous enough to approach the womlove.’ For Nietzsche, friendship is destructivean not as a tyrant and slave, but in the true ly democratising, equalising. It means capituNietzschean sense as an enemy, the nice guy lating to the most heterogeneous disavowed would do well to remember Nietzsche’s other recesses of oneself and of one’s friend, and solicitation (itself a rejoinder to the charge of (in a move Derrida points out is unexpectedly his sexism): ‘tell me, you men, which of you is reminiscent of the more radical edges of yet capable of friendship? 15