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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Friendship is therefore situated on an uncertain threshold between the social and the intimate, between the normative and the insubordinate, between what we can predict and what is inexplicable, between the acceptable and the frightening. It may not have its own institution but it can be found in all institutions. A couple can be the wellspring of a great friendship. Relatives can be friends. Classmates and colleagues can, on occasion, take the leap from companionship to friendship. The same can be said of neighbors, members of a sports team, and of expatriate and migrant groups, inter alia. Nothing and no one can decide where a friendship will spring from, and neither can they make it happen. Its mystery cohabits with everydayness and its appearance can be both comforting and disturbing. If some girls in a class, for example, are too chummy or if friendship becomes complicity among a group of workers, this is not always viewed favorably by the authorities concerned. Friendship introduces its own logic into relationships of belonging, and interferes with their strategies of obedience and subordination. Accordingly, there is no specific institution of friendship and, indeed, a good many institutions are designed not to favor it, or even to do away with it by submitting it to all sorts of disciplines (separation, rivalry, etc.) as well as suspicion (of sexual relations, favoritism, and even corruption).
Friends and enemies
The desire for an enemy, for apartheid, the phantasy of extermination, such irrepressible forces can be seen as shaping the basic line of fire, indeed the decisive struggle, at the beginning of this century.
Achille Mbembe1
Anthropological and political realism considers that enmity is at the beginning of everything and that friendship can only be a transitory pact among allies for reasons of defence. From Hobbes to Carl Schmitt, the principle of enmity has been a constant in modern political theory, as the underpinning of the state and its raison d’être.
The problem is that enmity is not only its rational founding principle but that it has become an everyday reality limiting the sense of any possible coexistence. Living among strangers means living among enemies. This is what Achille Mbembe, among others, maintains in his analysis of contemporary democracies and their war-based and colonial origins. Mbembe shows how the democratic language of pacification of societies is based on two principles. First, is the artificial separation or unbonding (déliaison) of a community of similar people (the deluded dream of a community without strangers) from the rest. The rest are not the different ones but the dangerous ones, which is to say enemies inasmuch as they pose a threat because they embody the phantom of extermination. Carl Schmitt described the concept of the « enemy » as an antagonism that is not circumstantial but fundamental. « [As] long as a people exists in the political sphere, this people must … determine by itself the distinction of friend and enemy. Therein resides the essence of its political existence. »2 Without this decision, there may be more or less violent exchanges between groups and individuals, as liberalism asserts, but there is no sovereignty and hence no politics either. The existence of the enemy is not a metaphor but the real possibility of being eliminated by another sovereign group. The enemy is not the result of discord or difference. It is the political incarnation of the possibility of not existing.
This brings us to the second principle of the society of enemies, as analysed by Achille Mbembe, which he sees as a planetary generalisation of Schmitt’s world: the permanent state of war, whether formal or declared, sustained through measures of permanent exceptionality. For Mbembe, the generalisation of war is the pharmakon (remedy, poison, scapegoat) of the global world that emerged from colonisation, the baneful circle of its death and life. Democracies, then, are circles of separation based on struggle against the enemy. Necropolitics, which organizes its power around the twofold possibility of dying for others or being exterminated by them, is the truth of globalised democracy. The difference between the present state of the world and the realities described by Hobbes and Schmitt is that the « traditional field of antagonisms has collapsed ». The separation between inside and outside, peace and war, people like us and the enemy, cannot be located on a single frontier, or in a single trait of identity. The separation is ubiquitous and, accordingly, war is too. The enemy is everywhere and everyone.
Who is a friend and how can a friend be recognised then? What meaning of friendship is possible in a society of enemies? Essentially, the possibilities boil down to three: negation, privatisation, and displacement. Negation is what can be deduced from Carl Schmitt’s position. For him, friendship is not a directly positive value and neither is it sought in itself. It is only given to the extent that an enemy endangers existence. Friends are people who face the threat of the same enemy. In this paradigm, friendship continues to be a good that is associated with peace and state security but, unlike the Greek and Roman concord, it is a good that is only desired and achieved under pressure. Going further than Schmitt, Mbembe shows that what really predominates in a society based on enmity is not so much hatred of the enemy but « desire for an enemy ». This desire is at the root of political life and is expressed as both hatred and need of the other. If one is to exist, the enemy is desired and needed, while also feared and hated.
Privatisation of friendship is related with the neoliberal drift of these same societies. This possibility may seem to contradict the first one but, in fact, they coexist and feed on each other. Against a background of war and generalised enmity as a political reality, relations of friendship are understood as the pre- or anti-political domain in which individuals manage their affective capital, either as a space of comfort and protection, or as an asset with which to reap benefits in their own lives. These are not only relations of utility or pleasure, as Aristotle would say, but they also serve to sustain a depoliticised life. This type of friendship does not confront an enemy, although it assumes an enemy, which it situates on another plane. It is no coincidence that the exhibitionist subject that is presently a denizen of social networks demonstrates a disconnection from the world by means of showing off contacts, relations, social capital, and a private happiness replete with friends.
Beyond denial and privatisation, the third possibility is the one that is explored in this book: a shift in perspective towards friendship as the passion of strangers. Neither the externality of the enemy, nor the privatised identity of the friend permits understanding of what is at the core of the experience of friendship: an affective bond with the other’s and one’s own strangeness. Friendship is a relationship without clear contours or places of its own because it is precisely this form of interest, love, and attraction for presences that will become part of our lives at the limits of our own worlds. The « us » in a friendship is not a proprietary us but expresses an intimacy that removes the sense of property.
In feminine plural
Women and their amicable relations with other women, and with men, have been the notable absentees of classical imaginaries of friendship and its possible exploits. Until very recently, representations of women’s friendship have almost always been filtered by what these relationships might mean from the perspective of the man and his status. Being-for-the-man is the filter that is applied to the lives of girls and women, especially when they construct their own spaces of affection and relationship. This gaze has two sides: the paternalistic and the distrustful. The paternalistic gaze situates women as segregated in a space of protection and sees their relationships of affection as something that a « woman without a man » needs to have with other women. Hence, we have the imaginary of the good female neighbors helping each other when their menfolk are away, the group of women friends who get together in the afternoon for a bit of fun, and who share hobbies when they have some time free from caregiving tasks, and the widowed or divorced women who hang out together because they are no longer in the market for the next heterosexual partner. In concert with this gaze, that of suspicion sees in female friendships the seeds of all sorts of sexual perversions, resistance, and deviations that make them dangerous for other women and for themselves. The suspicion of lesbianism, on the one hand, and the notion that women are cruel in their relationships with other women, while those among men are characterised by nobility and simplicity, on the other hand, are two cliches that have served to evoke abnormality in women’s friendship and passions.
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Accordingly, it is difficult to find, in stories of women’s emancipation and adventures that have recently irrupted in literature and films, any that have escaped the male imprint and especially its institutional and sexual violence. Thelma and Louise organise a weekend break from work and partners and must therefore go through the night-time ordeal of an attempted rape that sparks off their deadly journey. If friendship and adventure are two sides of the same exercise of freedom, understood as freedom shared at the limits of institutionalised worlds, in the case of women this can only be done by stretching the limits of what constitutes them, which is to say, their own bodies. Rape, literal or figurative, carried out or threatened, is what sets the limit on the woman’s body of any adventure she may have.
Although adventures in feminine plural are rarely narrated, this does not mean that there have been no women adventurers, pilgrims, travellers, explorers, scientists, and fighters. In fact, they have existed since the dawn of time. Even the notion of a primordial divide between male hunters and female gatherers — which for many people would explain a genetic difference between men and women that is still determinant — is presently being disproved in recent archaeological studies. Men go out and women look after the home. The outside world is masculine plural and inside is feminine plural. This is an ideological construction that also has its effects on the way friendship and the thresholds of possible relationships between men and women are understood. In the most ancient myths and stories, women who were « outside » the physical and mental walls of civilisation could only inhabit the radically different world that was reserved for them, as nymphs, or Amazons, or witches. In the male order, a woman who came and went, and especially with other women, was unimaginable. The immunological world of the patriarchy needs to trace the woman’s desires and ideas, the movements of her body and the company it keeps. Who could she have gone with? This is the terror that corrodes the order.
Who were the friends of the women hunters whose existence we are only now beginning to learn about? Who earned the trust of pilgrims or travellers like Egeria, the fourth-century woman from Galicia who wrote Itinerarium Egeriae, the first book of travels narrated by a woman? Who were the women allies of the early-eighteenth-century pirate Mary Read, and who were the female companions of the desert-wandering Englishwoman Hester Stanhope who, in the nineteenth century, ended her days in the south of what is now Lebanon. Like them, a great many women we know nothing about, anonymous women, have spent their lives exploring the limits and paying the consequences. Works by feminist historians have restored to us traces of many of them, and the publishing market’s interest in « women’s stories » has spread their testimonies. Their presence suffuses novels and films which, in itself, does have a positive effect, but the question remains: is there a change of meaning?
What is the actual merit of these « pioneers »? In fact, people often speak of their courage in daring to live lives and engage in activities reserved for men, and most importantly, talk about their solitude. They shone like beacons but, in the stories about them, they were also left alone, like beacons in the night. We know about their lovers, their interrupted loves, the comfortable lives they forsook, the mental breakdowns, and poverty-stricken old age of some of them, and about how they were misunderstood and rejected. Their merit still has overtones of martyrdom. It is too similar to the lives of the saints and women warriors, all alone in their tortured bodies. We are denied stories of their female and male friends, their companions in adventure, in struggle, and of their ideas and their desires. We have stories about women but none in the feminine plural that would tell us about other possible adventures and, above all, other possible meanings of adventure, other ways of exploring limits that do not solely consist in risking being wounded.
Translated with the support of a grant from the Institut Ramon Llull, Galàxia Gutenberg, 2025