Translated from the Catalan into English by Julie Wark
A bond of free laws
Friendship is the emotional bond that exists between people who are not united by other relationships — family, workplace, neighborly, nationality, and others — or subject to any of their purposes. Although it can be part of any of these spheres, none of them justifies or motivates its existence. Institutions of membership do not embrace or explain friendship but they may be conditioned by it, and even subject to its interference. Why do we become someone’s friend? What, beyond needs, aims, and other forms of exchange, makes us become friends?
Friendship is a strange relationship, one that is so strange that it has not produced its own institution or legal status. There is no place where you can go to enrol, register, or sign up to be a friend. For friends, there are no contracts to sign. Friendship is the only stable social relationship for which « paperwork » has not been invented. Friendship, then, is a bond that does not exist in writing even though it has generated a great deal of writing, in letters, dedications, congratulations, funeral speeches, stories, novels, films, messages, social networks, and so on. It is also the core motif of a great philosophical tradition that goes back to the earliest classical treatises and that, with fluctuations along the way, has endured to the present day.
The array of possible friendships may not have an institution and the corresponding legal obligations but it does have an extensive set of rules, among them customs, social norms, ways of greeting and behavior, codes, and systems of expectations. The way we engage in friendship at each time and in each place says a lot about us, about what we are like as individuals, but also about the societies we live in. Moreover, the ways in which we want to be friends could clash with what is acceptable in those societies, and they could also raise questions about matters that are not envisaged in their codes of behavior.
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