Let's say, for today, that there are two forms of friendship, one inside the other, one outside the other. The first: affinity, conviviality. Not reciprocity, only the redoubled enjoyment of the world, redoubled delight. We like the same things, we hate the same things; there is no ideological separation. Let the great things of the day take care of themselves; we are here; this is our privacy, our retreat. The pub every night after work. We pass around our ales, 'taste this'. We entertain at each other's houses, and burn CDs for each other, and whole days pass in each others company. Joy: life can be simple. Joy: shut the world away.
Then the second, much more difficult to invoke. Friendship without terms, or whose terms cannot be thought as is measured by a life closed in upon itself. No interiority - or rather, friendship for the other - for the one who draws you from yourself - already brings you up against the limit of what you are.
The limit? This is a thought of finitude, and of finite friendship. Where you are death is not, and where death is you are not. Very well, but when the other is dying? When the other dies before you? There is death, in person. There is a dying that crosses over and demands that you, too, run up against your death. But death presents nothing to run up against; there is no limit, or rather, the limit becomes infinite, a play of prohibition (you will not know death) and transgression (death is here, where you are not). An infinite spiral, the limit turned inside and out and back again.
But the other is not always dying (or rather, it is not always a question of the limit of death). Unless dying can be thought in another sense. This becomes difficult. A dying, now, that is the refusal of negation, of the measure of negation. Neither of us is the master, neither is the slave; that dialectic is suspended - halted at the point in which I become aware that the other shatters my egotism. I am not who I am; the other is also within me. The outside inside, but an outside with which I can never have done. There will be no fight to the death. He is here, there where I am. Or that 'where' is exposed, or turned inside out. Who am I, that lives outside himself? Who, whom the outside has reached before there was an inside?
The early Levinas (first half of Totality and Infinity) will claim this is due to the presence of the other: a presence in terms of which the relation to him must be thought. The later one, and perhaps Blanchot too (in a different way), will argue that it is in terms of the relation itself that the other must be thought. Levinas will not call it friendship, but Blanchot does (as he always did). Now friendship names that relation in which the other reaches me before I reach myself. He is there, within me. The outside inside. The other in whom the strangeness of everything, the whole world, is given. The strangest one.
Note that friendship is unilateral on this conception. Note too - and this is more difficult, more confusing - that it is drawn to a variety of 'objects'. To the other person, it is true, but also to the oeuvre, and to the animal. How confusing! No question that this muddies the second notion of friendship - that there is a third way in which friendship can be understood. Friendship for the oeuvre, for the animal - but only by way of the second friendship, that is, for the other. Friendship is first of all for the human other. Then the third friendship comes after the second one.
But let us put that thought aside. Note too that though friendship is unilaterial, it can also be returned. That is, I can become other for the friend; each of us can become other in turn; we take turns, or rather, these turns are taken. No reciprocity, note that - nothing is exchanged, or rather, it is the incommensurable that is at issue each time. Burning up exchange, and the general equivalent of exchange, that is, the common - shared interests, shared ideologies - is the doubly unilateral exchange of friendship.
The incommensurable, each time. Reaching me from - where? From the friend. The friend who is the other. And is he aware of it, the friend? Does he know what he has given to me (but the giving is not his)? This is possible. I can know what I mean for the friend. I can let giving occur, and perhaps there is a kind of joy in that. And I can even know this giving is a double of the gift which gives itself through me to the other. Through me? By way of me, and not of what I am - this person, with this attitudes - but of what I am when I am no one in particular.
Blanchot will write of his friendship with Bataille in these terms. The play of thought, he calls it. Thought, each time, is at issue, and thought as friendship. Thought as friendship. But then there are two types of thought, too; the first models what is to be thought in terms of the concept. There must be a grasp, a grasping. The second, in terms of the impossibility of grasping. A gift occurs, a giving, but it cannot be seized. A gift that withdraws itself in its giving. Or a gift that, when giving, does so to the 'no one' who cannot seize it.
Difficult thought! Friendship and thought are the names for a relation. That relation is at the heart of Blanchot's thought. A relation, as he says, that is without relation - which is to say, cannot be understood through the terms it relates. A relation, then, from which terms arise - terms constructed as interdictions (you will step no further) that are to be transgressed (you can step beyond).
Relation without relation. The influence of Heidegger is all too clear, but let me put that aside for the moment. Blanchot read Being and Time alongside Levinas, when both were students at Strasbourg. They immediately knew its importance. There could be no going back to a pre-Heideggerian philosophy. But the difference between being and beings (a difference Heidegger would have been reluctant to call a relation, that fallen, Latinate word) was to be rethought, along with Dasein.
To be rethought: this is what occupied Blanchot and Levinas from the later 1930s onwards. And wasn't this task, this rethinking, at the heart of their friendship? Wasn't it in terms of what Blanchot called friendship that the difference in question would be thought, and as early as Thomas the Obscure? Everything begins in that novel, I know that now. Everything is there that would later open in his thought, and in his friendship for thought. There would be no turn, and no deviation, only the steady unfolding of the consequences of what had been thought through that novel, and through the writing of that novel.
Two kinds of friendship (let us put aside the third, which is parasitical on the second friendship): or should one talk of friendship and its other? For friendship (the first sense) is only a contraction of the second; and the second is only an exposition of the first. Friendship, then, 'contains' its other, if one can speak of containing the outside inside. Contains it - by allowing the inside to turn itself inside out, to exposed, given.
And what of the chance of a redoubled friendship - of a friendship that continually returns you to the 'other' friendship? Such was the relationship Blanchot described with Bataille. Such, no doubt, was also at issue with Levinas. But let us think, too, of that little text 'Encounters', where Blanchot will also write of his encounters with Char, with Antelme, and the other text, 'For Friendship', where he will write of Mascolo. And recall that none of them saw him after his illness in the early 1970s: that he wrote to his friends that he was retiring from the world.
Jabes remembers his entire friendship for Blanchot was epistolatory. Short letters, in a fine hand, letters more like poems, would reach him every now and again. When he asked to meet Blanchot, he was rebuffed, as Blanchot would rebuff so many others. These letters are gradually beginning to be released. In the Kozovoi correspondence, we find a Blanchot of great tenderness. In his letters to Antelme's wife, Monique, we witness the decline of a fine hand with old age. Then, silence for many years. He could no longer write. But he continued to speak on the phone. To Derrida, at least once or twice a year.
I do not recount these facts for the sake of anecdote, but only to meditate, as I write, on the demands of the 'other' friendship, to which Blanchot dedicated his life. The 'other' friendship - or the 'other' relation, or the 'other night', or literature (and perhaps one should write of the 'other' literature): these are names for the same, names for what was discovered from 1936 onwards, when Thomas the Obscure gradually came together.
1936: but one shouldn't pass over in silence what Blanchot also wrote in those years, running up to the war. A political journalism that belonged to the day, he remembers in The Step Not Beyond, just as his fiction belonged to the night. One day that right-wing journalism stopped. And when he again made a political intervention, returning to Paris from his tiny house in the South, it was on the side of the left. The night (the 'other' night) had crossed over into the day: is that what happened?
Certainly it was in the name of friendship (a friendship of refusal) that Blanchot called for action on the part of those protesting against de Gaulle's unconstitutional return to power in 1958. Friendship - the 'other' friendship - which does not hide itself from the public, from the events of the day. His friendship with Jean Paulhan faltered over a disagreement de Gaulle (the events of May 13th, Blanchot will write). Then the 'other' friendship can have a charge that is political, or at least communal, being linked, as Blanchot said in his review of Mascolo's book in 1953, to another communism, to another kind of communism.
Abrupt conclusion: politics and ethics belong to the heart of Blanchot's work and his life. Better: the political, the ethical are names for the stakes of the 'other' relation, of whatever we call it, whether communism or friendship. Second conclusion: none of this matters unless it can be thought in our own terms, and in our own idiom. Thought - and lived (but then the 'other' thought is always lived).