The provocations of enduring friendship.

• Author: Scott, Joan W.

If you do a Google search for "Judith Butler" and "friendship," not much comes up. Mostly there are links to acknowledgments in her many books where she thanks those who have given support, advice, criticism ... friendship. In fact, the title of this paper comes from one of those acknowledgments-in Antigone's Claim--and it is offered to me. For those of us who have experienced it, Butler is a phenomenal friend; her keen insight, her intense concern, and her generosity are unprecedented and treasured. To be a friend of Judith Butler is to know the joys of a special kind of connection. This is not about the superficial relationship connoted by "friends with benefits," or Facebook friends, or "Friends of Bill," or some other celebrity figure--it's about recognition and emotional sustenance, a shared practice that changes each of us and that is increasingly rare these days.

Yet friendship is largely absent from the theoretical explorations Butler has pursued these many years. She's taught us to think differently about sexuality and identity, the body in its psychic materiality, the family and its connections to symbolic and imaginary processes, and politics as an operation of power. But friendship--that ineffable relationship that lies somewhere between families and sexuality and that often serves as an alternative model for politics, is strikingly absent--or certainly not central--in the thinking she has pursued. In this short set of provocations, I want to suggest that the ingredients for the theorizing of friendship are already present in the Butler corpus. Indeed that friendship lies at the crossroads of her many different engagements--with psychoanalysis, with the social history of families, with politics, and with philosophy itself. Derrida's comment in his Politics of Friendship, in a reference to Heidegger, might well serve as the epigraph for this paper:

The question "what is friendship?" but also "who is the friend (both or either sex)?" is nothing but the question "what is philosophy?" (1) Of course, friendship is there by implication in Butler's discussions of the self and its constitutive others. One can almost imagine that it's a friend she's talking about in this passage from Giving an Account of Oneself.

What is striking about such extremes of self-beratement is the grandiose notion of the transparent "I" that is presupposed as the ethical ideal. This is hardly a belief in which self-acceptance (a humility about one's constitutive limitations) or generosity (a disposition toward the limits of others) might find room to flourish. Surely there are moments of repetition and opacity and anguish, which usually compel a journey to the analyst, or if not to the analyst, to someone --an addressee--who might receive the story and, in receiving it, alter it some. The other represents the prospect that the story might be given back in new form, that fragments might be linked in some way, that some part of opacity might be brought to light. The other witnesses and registers what cannot be narrated, functioning as one who might discern a narrative thread, though mainly as one whose practice of listening enacts a receptive relation to the self that the self, in its dire straits of self-beratement, cannot offer itself. (2) She refers to this person, the alternative to an analyst, abstractly as an "addressee," making no distinction among the various receptive "someone's" upon whom any accounting of one's self depends.

Is there a way to distinguish friends among the "others" who grant us recognition? Is there a relationship that might be designated friendship between sexual congress and collegial intercourse, between familial loyalty and societal ascription? What kind of identification is at work? Are friends those who most resemble us or does difference build the bond? Is it distance or proximity or something in between that enables the relationship? Do we possess friends the way we do lovers or is it precisely the lack of possession that makes friendship possible? What kind of attraction draws us to those who become our friends?

Freud is suggestive, but not fully clear about this, in his definition of the capacious libido. "Libido is an expression taken from the theory of the emotions" he tells us, that has to do with the instinctual energy called love. It extends beyond "sexual love with sexual union as its aim" to include love for others: "parents and children, friendship and love for humanity in general, and also devotion to concrete objects and to abstract ideas." (3) All of these loves involve "the sublimation of the sexual instincts" and for that reason, Freud continues, "have a great functional advantage over those which are uninhibited. Since they are not capable of really complete satisfaction, they are especially adapted to create permanent ties...." (4) Friendship is classed as an "aim-inhibited sexual impulse," grouped with "affectionate relations between parents and children (which...