ephraim dimanche
Friendship (In Fragments) How is it possible to speak of friendship? A question which is a mutation of Blanchot’s question in l’Amitie, his eulogy to his great friend Georges Bataille: How is it possible to speak of the friend? Twinned questions which will introduce for us the recurring problem of the general and the particular, between the part and the whole. But we will work our way back to Blanchot’s fundamental question, which is a founding ethical question—one which concerns the violence done to friendship in speaking of it, and whether our speech has any recourse to nonviolent representations of friendship. We have to pose the question such that it presupposes that it is possible to speak about friendship, both in the register of a cluster of singularities, constellations of friendship-events; and also in the register of some generality that would allow us to speak about friendship as a concept with totalizing coherence. To that end, I have attempted to honour both friendship through close readings of theory and poetry; and the friends themselves through depictions of the scenes of friendship in an intercut piece entitled Friendship Fugue. To speak of friendship, or to give it strict ethical delimitations, is to erase the friend in that speech. It is tentatively that I approach friendship through the form of the fragmentary. Couched within this form are scenes of friendship: not theories but tentative queries into the nature of friendship, woven out of descriptions of encounters with the friend. Friendship, or the mode of friendship of which we will speak, is irruptive; it breaks the continuity of a relation without recuperating the discontinuity under a new continuity, which would smooth the relationship out again. The project, as it stands, is restless and incomplete, spreading outward in several directions—toward love, ethics, responsibility—and not committing to any one view upon friendship. If this is telling, it is telling of my own inconsistencies where friendship-relations are concerned: always chasing novelty and difference, unable to reach a
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