“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.
“…the “political” has come to be viewed exclusively as a sign of the philosophical and ethical exhaustion of religion. Our conception of the “political” or “ethical” is in many ways hopelessly circumscribed by the secular, rational calculations which underscore the movement of modern European thought - from Europe “out” into the (post)colonial world; (…) predicated upon a [Kantian autonomous] subject who is constitutively transcendental, self-sufficient, unified, and as such invulnerable to both desire (…) and prayer (…).
[a certain stream in Derrida] nags relentlessly at the contradictions inherent in Kant’s extradition of religion from the realm of ethics and justice. It does so to posit a certain type of metaphysical experience (Derrida calls this “fiduciary” faith) as a profound and utopian address to the other.”
- Leela Gandhi, Affective Communities: Anticolonial Thought, Fin-de-Siècle Radicalism, and the Politics of Friendship, Duke University Press, 2006, p.116-117
