not the motorcycle diaries

“Friendship is never a given in the present; it belongs to the experience of waiting, of promise, or of commitment. Its discourse is that of prayer and at issue there is that which responsibility opens to the future. (…) this minimal community … this preliminary consent without which you would not understand me … speaking the same language or praying for translation within the horizon of the same language, even were it so to manifest a disagreement … we would not be together … if a sort of friendship had not already been sealed before any other contract: a friendship prior to friendship, an ineffaceable, fundamental and bottomless friendship, the one which draws its breath in the sharing of a language (past or to come) and in the being-together that any allocution supposes.”

- Jacques Derrida, The Politics of Friendship, The Journal of Philosophy, 1988 pp. 636.

He has died, leaving a life in seeming stasis.

His body’s it-ness: weight, tactility, laboured breath - seems to transfer onto the bodies of all those with whom he lived. (Friendship is mourning).

His body is felt in the weight of grief (stop the clocks, put out the stars), in the regular rushes of familiarity: things we see, say, do, that are of him and our connection to him (for I am not gone).

To re-member is to re-configure our bodies to accommodate loss, and slowly; more in the order of phantom limbs than of prostheses …

I have started writing a chapter around the themes of friendship and solidarity and thought I would procrastoresearch a little this afternoon. As I really should have known, friendship and solidarity are also favourite themes of Erich Honecker, the late Pope, and Luke Skywalker. Oh, and Stalin.