Achievements of Politics of Friendship: Derrida’s Upcoming Community

Abstract

The problem with the disappearance of absolute sovereignty from Bodin to Schmitt, as Derrida sees it in the act of his late (ethical-political) deconstruction, is that there is no longer a sufficient reason for any effectiveness of representing the Other. Reasons are reducible to this or that form of violence. Everything must be dismantled and disassembled. What remains of sovereignty becomes the contingency and singularity of the space between power and freedom. In this space, Derrida begins with the view of the Other and unconditional hospitality as a deconstruction of previous metaphysical politics of hospitality. The Other must be emancipated from the perspective of the subject’s metaphysics and its inherent violence. In the discourse of politics of friendship lies the ground for democracy to come as a final soteriological solution for other headings of history. 

Keywords: politics of friendship, upcoming community, Derrida, deconstruction of sovereignty, violence, Other

1. Deconstruction of Sovereignty

What Lévinas has taken from Heidegger and endeavored to “overcome” by ethically thinking as a starting point for the critique of metaphysics as an ontology, Derrida continued in an articulated and even more radical sense. In the analysis of ethics of hospitality and guest policy concerning Lévinas settings we often encountered Derrida’s critical interpretation of central concepts of post-metaphysical condition ‒ foreigners, refugees, and asylum seekers in the discourse of receiving the Other as a guest in “my” home and the emergence of a new one perspective for the subjectivity of the subject. One of the constant motives we encounter from the early works of Derrida is the corpus of the modern theory of state and law, until the 1990s which marked books like Spectres of Marx, The Politics of Friendship, and The Beast and the Sovereign. The notion of sovereignty refers to the logic of the metaphysical establishment of the rule of the subject in philosophy and the humanities. The main intention of Jean Bodin in political thinking ‒ justification of the rule of monarchies based on the absolute power of the kingdom as a source of popular sovereignty ‒ was also the task of Descartes in the ontological-philosophical sense. The question of the two bodies of divine and popular sovereignty (theology and politics) had its metaphysical origin in the Cartesian duality of mental and bodily substance (res cogitans and res extensa). The opinion of the subject in the statement cogito ergo sum establishes the power of the supremacy of the mind over the body so that the separation between them becomes a matter of the functioning of the whole building of metaphysical concepts such as “infinity”, “being”, “substance”, “idea”. That gap represents far-reaching consequences for the European formation of political identity from culture as such. Sovereignty denotes the autonomy of the mind and the heteronomy of the body. So, it is logical to assume that Derrida must reckon with the legacy of this metaphysics of rationality and occasionalism from Malebranche to Rousseau. The main reason is that the subject of self-establishment denotes the power of the modern age when the rule of the mind appears as enlightening systematic madness of absolutism. In contemporary French philosophy, the critique of the Enlightenment was most radically carried out by Michel Foucault. (Foucault 1984, 2-50, Paić 2013, 181-211)

It is interesting that from there one can even genealogically reconstruct history before and after the French Revolution as an event of radical cut with linear history. From Descartes to Hegel the creation of the absolute subject becomes a matter of thinking process which tries to achieve a peak of modern metaphysics. Sovereignty does not mean freedom by the act of constituting the external world of objects (nature in the sense of natura naturans and natura naturata) starting from the act of foundation of mindful substance. It rules the body even after its disappearance. How is that possible? Logos in the tradition of Greek-Jewish onto-theology is always inscribed in the body by transcending it, and not the other way around. In the gap or rift between God and man (mind and body), the emergence of modern anthropology was already determined in Kant by the necessity to find a consensus between the fundamental world of the Law (noumenon) and the empirical world of facts (phenomenon). Derrida’s deconstruction of the metaphysics of subjectivity aimed to establish just that place “in-between “, that empty meeting place between the two. The moment when the act creates the new thought and action that arises with modern sovereignty is already recognized from its structural or ontological violence. That is why in the brilliant analysis of Lévinas’ ethics of the Other in the essay “Violence and Metaphysics” included in the collection of essays entitled Writing and Difference (L’ecriture et difference) from 1967 Derrida could say that what belongs to the structure of thinking subject we might claim as “totalitarianism of the same“. (Derrida 1978, 91)

The concepts of cogito, subjectivity, sovereignty, a nation-state, and modern Europe as the cosmopolitan order of mind Derrida tried to deconstruct. Suppose we want to clarify the controversy that is so abused in contemporary discourse not only in the social sciences and humanities. In that case, it is worth first recalling what Derrida himself self-ironically said about it in the book Positions. At one point he noted that he was dealing with the translation of the key concept of destruction from Heidegger’s Being and Time (Sein und Zeit) in French. It is well-known that Heidegger’s intention before turning in 1930 focused on the “destruction of traditional ontology“, and Derrida had insurmountable difficulties in his translation. What this term refers to in German cannot be the same as in French, where it has the explicit meaning of destruction and annihilation. So, he opted for what would be just like destruction, but what would be more appropriate to Heidegger’s thinking.  When, therefore, he chose the word deconstruction despite destruction, the whole horizon of new meanings appeared to him, and thus the possibility of an internal “critique” of Heidegger. We think from language, and language denotes a riddle of the trace of that event, which has the possibility of changing the essence of Being. The rest belongs to the history of the post-metaphysics of Otherness (alterity) because the Other and difference direct the history of thought. In addition, deconstruction means disassembly and dismantling with the intention of permanent rebuilding.  (Derrida 1982)

When the age of modern sovereignty of the people loses its power, the subject of the representation of the Other in all existing systems of thought and reality disappears, from philosophy, science, art, culture, and politics. But it would be naive to conclude that in this way the Other became free and sovereign in its heteronomy of action”-subject“. Instead of the “totalitarianism of the Same”, the possibility of “the totalitarianism of the Other” arises.  In the global order of planetary technology concerning “Holy wars” in the name of God and the final judgment of divine violence, today we can see the worst form of cynicism. If the Other is irreducible, in which name to fight against politicization of the purpose of racial-national identity?

The answer might be paradoxical and aporetic: in the name of the Same, but substantially different. The other, therefore, must be taken not as another name for the subject without his power to represent what is truth and what is freedom, equality, and justice. This only means that the new universality no longer comes from the source as the foundation (arché), but that it is essentially un-grounded (an-arché). That is why Lévinas had to compare his ethics from the conditionally speaking “ontological anarchy” to shake the self-deceived and the power of the subject who appropriates the world as “my” will and idea, to paraphrase Schopenhauer. However, violence in the name of the Other cannot be at the same time violence of the Other. It’s not that, even when it is ethically justified as the only means to fight against the sinister injustice of the world. Unlike the entire assemblage of ideas of Western history, only one cannot be deconstructed ꟷ the idea of justice.

          The question of what remains of sovereignty today in the age of the rule of transnational corporate capitalism can be answered in this way: all and nothing! The concept of post-imperial sovereignty should encompass a different role and function of states, as well as the notion of political people derived from their jurisdiction (citizenship). What remains is and cannot be the sovereignty. The reason lies in the fact that in the post-national constellation of the global order, (Habermas 1998), we no longer communicate with politics as a liberal consensus of democratic power structures. Instead, the neoliberal and corporate machine in global capitalism politics becomes crisis management with dangerous consequences for today’s Europe, such as the refugee crisis. (Derrida 2002a) We’ve seen that one way to change perspective in philosophy after the end of metaphysics, and that means in the 20th century after Heidegger, attempted to perform this understanding of the ethical from the horizon of human compassion for the suffering of people. Derrida marked the step towards the ethics of the Other with Lévinas’ decision to turn from any future theory of the subject from the Cartesian logic of power. In his late thinking of the politics of friendship, the last word of his philosophy is found. In both cases, there is an attempt to find a way of overcoming Heidegger’s path of thinking. All categories that apply by Lévinas and Derrida in one way or another are the creation of ethics and the politics of deconstruction. This remains even when ethics for the global refugee order are strictly separated from the politics of hospitality.

What insights do destruction/deconstruction (Heidegger and Derrida) offer regarding the late ethical-political turn? Nothing but to say farewell to the metaphysical theories of the subject and political agendas in the modern legal notion of sovereignty. It must be radically re-examined once more. But now no longer starting from the idea of ​​the foundation and grounding of the mind that rules over reality in the discourse of absolute science of Hegel’s paradigm, but from the infinite demand for establishment of that which was in the metaphysical history, however, present and thematized, but only to establish unlimited (logocentric and imperial) rule of the West with the idea of ​​integrating the Other into strange and uncanny “Culture”.

 “The deconstruction of the concept of unconditional sovereignty is doubtless necessary and underway, for this is the heritage of a barely secularized theology. In the most visible case of the supposed sovereignty of nation-states, but also elsewhere (for it is at home, and indispensable, everywhere, in the concepts of the subject, citizen, freedom, responsibility, the people, etc.), the value of sovereignty is today in thorough decomposition“. (Derrida 2002b, 207)

The problem with the disappearance of absolute sovereignty from Bodin to Schmitt, as Derrida sees it in the act of his late (ethical-political) deconstruction, is that there is no longer a sufficient reason for any effectiveness of representing the Other. What remains of sovereignty becomes the contingency and singularity of the space between power and freedom. In this space, Derrida begins with the view of the Other and unconditional hospitality as a deconstruction of past politics of hospitality. The Other must be emancipated from the perspective of the subject’s metaphysics and its inherent violence.  Put in another way, it is necessary to free oneself from the matrix of that culture which presents itself as universal human ideas of freedom, and as the demarcation of “us” from them.” Politics without sovereignty seems synonymous with Derrida’s impossible claim to messianic without messianism or religion.

2. Hospitality and Law

In the book, Adieu á Emmanuel Lévinas Derrida emphasizes something we would call the axiom of modern politics and its associated philosophy of law. It’s about Kant’s view of the law of hospitality. Namely, to someone who is a foreigner in our nation-state because he is not recognized as its citizen, the right to a dignified life must be granted under the cosmopolitan law of hospitality. How to guarantee this seems a challenging task.  The policy must be reconsidered, considering the conditions that govern it, as it concerns the rights and obligations of citizens. Hospitality represents a particular right of the state to care for and supervise the lives of its citizens for the benefit of all so as not to encroach beyond the limits of the liberal-democratic structure of the state. Along with the inevitable addition, Kant was a classic “Republican”, not a modern “liberal”. Unlike that, Derrida opens a possible move in a different direction without a turn to the relationship between cosmopolitan law in “the interest of the mind”. Kant’s postulate of eternal peace among nations and states and the right of states to limit hospitalization to a temporary residence and what is today called asylum policy as a refuge from persecution for political reasons of suspension of human rights and democracy in dictatorial political orders gives a new perspective of thinking. Namely, Kant’s ethics is based on mental foundations. (Derrida 2001a) . Precisely because of that in the interpretation of Lévinas’ proximity to Kant and at the same time a turn away from his theory of the autonomous action of the subject as a presupposition of ethics, Derrida hypothesizes two kinds of hospitality:

              (1) philosophically or ontologically as a transcendental possibility and the ethical turn of the relationship in the real world

              (2) empirically causation and psychological motivations.

The former presupposes an ethical foundation from the horizon of responsibility for the Other as a neighbour. At the same time, the latter cannot be grounded in anything simply because it is beyond the boundaries of mental action. The classical opposition between reason and passion in political action is brought to light here in its bare truth. What follows from this should be clear if we keep in mind what is going on nowadays. European nation-states are trying to solve the “Refugee crisis” by following the “law of the heart” or” the interest of reason.” It is, of course, the middle way to what Lévinas considered his vocation, and that is to work on the “holiness of the saint” which has the features of the proximity of ethical-political turn and “religion”.While Lévinas ethically precedes any attempt to politically establish a community in the form of a “David or Caesar state”, the problem seems very difficult. Derrida starts from the assumption that two forms of hospitality ethics also presuppose two forms of hospitality policy. There is no doubt that the distinction between absolute or unconditional hospitality and relative or conditioned hospitality is seemingly akin to the distinction between “sacred” and “secular”, ideal and real, and vice versa. This duality, however, cannot be effective without something that lies between or even beyond metaphysical distinction.

Therefore, the question of ethics as a policy of hospitality denotes the “religious” issue of man’s responsibility as an individual against God. It means that the last instance of the answer is the only one human conscience. To avoid such a bad solution to the dispute between the two over the establishment and execution of an ethical-political turn Derrida must show much more decisively where to look for the place of the last deconstruction in general. So, it is the place of the upcoming community or democracy to come as an endless demand for justice. From that, all other fundamental notions of politics in Western history are derived from the Greeks, Romans, Jews, and the modern nation-state to the cosmopolitan ideal of global secularism (globalization) ─ freedom, equality and fraternity. Let’s say in advance:  the latter becomes the form or a kind of quasi-transcendental assumption of democracy at the global level only after the radical deconstruction of its contents. Based on the philosophical issue of the Other as a foreigner, a refugee, and an asylum seeker becomes the question of the “other heading” of the thinking of almost vanished solidarity between different people in their irreducibility. Derrida calls it by the philosophical tradition of Plato and Aristotle “sublime“ in word friendship (amitia, philia). Before embarking on an analysis of how and why this ancient notion of human relations in Greece constitutes the “essence” of philosophy in the community (polis) and the “essence” of politics in the cosmopolitan creation of a “different world” globally, some paradoxes need to be considered and the aporia of the ethics hospitality as a politics of hospitality. If the problem with “religion” is that it denotes a “relationship without a relationship” by which people connect in communion with what cannot be the primary issue of their freedom, equality and justice, then Derrida can distinguish religion from philosophy. He does this by saying elsewhere, as part of the philosophical dialogue on the “return of religion” to modern societies of the global world conducted on Capri in 1994:

” … the messianic, or messianicity without messianism. This would be the opening to the future or to the coming of the other as the advent of justice, but without horizon of expectation and without prophetic prefiguration. The coming of the other can only emerge as a singular event when no anticipation sees it coming when the other and death – and radical evil – can come as a surprise at any moment. Possibilities that both open and can always interrupt history, or at least the ordinary course of history. […] The messianic exposes itself to absolute surprise and, even if it always takes the phenomenal form of peace or of justice … This messianic dimension does not depend upon any messianism, it follows no determinate revelation, it belongs properly to no Abrahamic religion “(Derrida 1998, 17-18)

             Why does Derrida, in his almost quasi-religious narration of the upcoming (l’ avenir), avoid explicitly saying that it is a religion from Abrahamic times to the present day, in uninterrupted continuity? Is it only for unknown reasons of some Levinasian inspiration in which, as we have seen, the greatest “madness” of the ethical perspective of the reversal of metaphysics arises from the fact that the place of God is empty? If for Derrida religion represents always just an “answer, not a question,” then it might be obvious that this represents a conflict between thought and belief, philosophy and theology as the science of faith.  For Heidegger, the future appears in the primordial dimension of the temporality of Being. To that extent, his thinking of events (Ereignis) is anything but messianism and eschatology. The future cannot be derived for him from the “present” as some other version of the “nunc stans” (eternal presence) by Aristotle to Hegel. The event “is” going in post-metaphysical circuit openness. But there are no more ontological differences between “Being” and “being”, “God” and “man”. Instead, in the late Heidegger, it becomes a question of the Fourth (Geviert) of heaven and earth, gods and mortals. Reconciliation between what was in the primordial (arché) and what will come in the time to come requires a fundamental turn of the relationship to the “present” as the presence of the Being itself (ousia). From the events of the event itself arises a call to change the present state. This simply means that Heidegger demands the radical destruction of the modern dimension of time as “actuality” that arises from the annihilation of the Being itself and its transition from mystery to the rational throwing of thought as calculation, planning, and construction. The technical destiny of the history of metaphysics determines our “future ” The reason lies in the fact that enframing (Gestell) denotes the essence of technology. In this way, it crucially shapes all our thoughts and feelings, all these or those spiritual exercises of existence itself. Religion in the planetary age of the technosphere is no exception. (Heidegger 2003)

              The future that Derrida is talking about, on the other hand, has features of uncertainty, surprise, and unexpectedness. It is quite clear that in this sequence of what is contrary to the rational order of modernity with its cult of straightforward progress‒ certainty, hope, and expectation ‒ the opinion defined from the beginning by the Greeks, and especially by the Jews, by the notion of “finality” cannot remain intact to salvation, and final purpose of history. Derrida must deconstruct the eschatology, soteriology, and messianism of history. When religion becomes freed from its necessary messianicity without messianism, it may be possible for faith to become faith in the Other as ethically and politically irreducible to anything but one’s own “holiness of life.” It is an event that allows the world to be more than the framework of the technological construction of life itself. When people suffer, religion is certainly not flourishing, as might be thought. Nor does ethics enjoy a temporary imperative to act against alleviating suffering. In interpreting Adieu à Emmanuel Lévinas, we, therefore, encounter the thought that Derrida continues in other writings and lectures of the 1990s with the same themes as cosmopolitanism, the dignity of the citizen, the question of refuge, the ethics of hospitality, and the politics of friendship. What seems particularly interesting here, however, is that Derrida, in understanding the contingent and singular “essence” of human dignity, touches on the Third as an instance of society and the state in the political sense, and God in an ethical sense of unconditionality in saving others. The paradox is that the Third (God and his substitutes in worldly affairs) “protects us against the vertigo of ethical violence itself.”(Derrida 1997, 66)

              Without the “monolingualism of the Other”(Derrida 1998a) Derrida in discussing the biblical and contemporary examples of hospitality also attempted to interpret Lévinas, who in the books reflected In the Age of Nations (A l’heure de nations) and Beyond vers (L’Au-dela de Vers) dealing with the interpretation of Talmud concerning the notion of welcome. The key point of his analysis is where he uses the term for the Torah – “refugee city”:

“Lévinas directs his interpretation towards the synonymy of the three concepts – brotherhood, humanity, and hospitality – that define the experience of the Torah and the messianic time even before or outside Sinai… What marks itself could be called structural a priori messianism. It is not historical messianism, but that which belongs to history without a special and empirically determinable embodiment. No disclosure or dating of the disclosure. ” (Derrida 1997, 121-122)

 What Lévinas calls “refugee cities” denotes a refuge for a space of true holiness. Welcoming the Other from the primarily ethical-humanitarian act of taking responsibility for his bare life cannot cross the boundaries of time and space: the temporary nature of the refuge and the limited opportunities for the reception of the migrant population. “Refugee cities” are located on the outskirts of cities, in the areas of abandoned barracks, citadels, fortresses, bunkers, and abandoned housing. This is not about individual care and “foster care” of refugee families. Derrida, therefore, distinguishes two ways of welcoming and receiving the Other into the new space of changed nation-state sovereignty: unconditional or ethical hospitality and conditional or political hospitality. In a philosophical sense when it comes to the fundamental statements of historical monotheistic religions such as Judaism, Christianity, and Islam taking care of vulnerable people who had to leave their homes by force or trouble due to wars, terror, despair, misery, and climate disasters mark a step from discursive to A “messianic politics” on which any possible Realpolitik can be further built. At the key point of discussion in Adieu á Emmanuel Lévinas, the point of transition from ethics to politics is shown. It should be immediately emphasized that this does not mean the suspension and neutralization of ethics in the political discourse of the existing “laws of hospitality”. On the contrary, it would be impossible to imagine that any “messianic politics” could exist without an ethical correction of its pragmatic goals and purposes:

„ …if the alternative between the State of Caesar and the State of David is an alternative between a politics and a beyond of the political, or an alternative between two politics, or, finally, an alternative among others, where one could not exclude the hypothesis of a State that would be neither Caesar’s nor David’s, neither Rome nor Israel nor Athens…. “(Derrida 1999b, 74)

This commentary by Derrida to Lévinas’ attitude towards modern Zionism and criticism of the decision that excludes the Other in the name of the historical-messianic (religious-political) right of Jews to their country, something far-reaching is striking for Europe’s current policy. Messianic politics, regardless of the goals and the so-called sacred right of the people to their state, is already substantially late concerning what seems to be the task of modernity. Nation-states with their fundamental canon of rights and population regulation represent an outdated age of disciplinary biopolitics. It could still be kept alive while the system of European relations between states designates the illusion of strictly controlled imperialism towards the Third World. The genocide formally began with the persecution of Armenians in the desert afterWorld War I and the brutal Turkish extermination of these people in the name of the fundamental ideal of European politics by Thomas de Torquemada in late 15th-century Spain, when the remaining Moors and Jews were expelled. It means racially and religiously purified from the last traces of Islam and Judaism. The true beginning of the genocide happened when Belgian King Leopold II perished in Congo more than a million and a half people of black skin in the name of “civilization progress” and the capitalist modernization of Europe. Rubber and copper were, therefore, more valuable than the lives of “savages”. The beginning of the Euro-Western devastation of Africa represents the highest stage of the cruelty of colonialism, the consequences of which are not mitigated even today by the “soft” methods of neoliberal capitalism. The problem arises when, from the ashes of the First World War, totalitarian ideologies and movements such as fascism, Nazism, and Stalinism emerged with the idea of a total state and unconditional mobilization of technology in the brutal “cleansing” of the geopolitical space occupied population of other nation-states, ethnic and religious groups in Europe and its colonies.

3. Messianic politics

In the light of Lévinas’ “messianic politics”, which is a more ethically motivated attempt at an alternative between Zionism and liberal humanitarianism for those nations affected by the devastation and hardships of global insecurity, and a less likely scenario for an already existing European order of interest, the deficit of this widely proclaimed “otherness” cannot be ruled out. Why? Derrida offered the answer to that question, but in the same “messianic tone”. The alternative could be seen as a farewell to the entire history of Western metaphysics. The symbolic places of that history are at the same time the topology of the end of the history of nation-states and the notion of sovereignty. Athens was the cradle of democracy, Rome was the center of the republican empire, and Jerusalem was the capital of Zionist Israel, the bonds of religious particularism and the liberal formation of a democratic order, are all stations on the path to what is the true “goal” and “purpose” of history as an endless “messianic task” of the democracy to come. The alternative, therefore, cannot be achieved from the idea of ​​the “end of history,” but must have this very idea as to its “other headings.” History that has been left without its subject (the people in the universal sense of the demos) and without its “being” (the idea of ​​eternal peace in the cosmopolitan order of values) must be redirected to another path. There is no doubt that the whole set of ethical-political turns in Lévinas and Derrida is a reckoning with Kant and his ideas about the “laws of hospitality”(Bankovsky 2005, 156-170)

But while Kant introduced the regulatory term effects of the mind as a meaningful nature which is, of course, good because the direction is always the ultimate goal of freedom and justice in the world postulated by God to the moral law and practical action man aligned like watches with the church the tower at Königsberg, Lévinas and Derrida remains after Auschwitz and the collapse of communism in Europe and the world in 1989 nothing but the homelessness of the people (Unheimlichkeit). Kant has been thinking within the borders of “common sense.” Lévinas and Derrida, on the other hand, transgress those boundaries.  Instead of the necessity of the autonomy of freedom and the rigour of the categorical imperative of man, we are confronted with the case of the posthuman condition of life production in networked societies of control. Chaos and entropy rule at all levels of reality. The fundamental ethical driver cannot be longer any hospitality out of an obligation of conscience before God, but a break with a feeling of utter indifference towards the Other, which is “not my problem.” Suppose compassion becomes the beginning of ethical responsibility to change the state of things. In that case, breaking with indifference to the Other represents an act of active resistance at the level of individual conscience and collective responsibility. It should be borne in mind here that the alternative to “messianic politics” outside the space of historical influence of Athens, Rome, and Jerusalem is no way of finding a new city on Earth that could be the center of a post-imperial cosmopolitan mission. To Derrida, this was clear from the very structure of the historical movement as well as from his paradoxes and aporia of messianicity without messianism.” There are no more great cities of history as cities of great ideas that have shaped that history into a sense of the living presence of the people, their ethnic-religious reducibility to themselves, and their selfish interests. Greco-Judaism without Rome, although largely removed from the horizon of opinion thanks to Heidegger, cannot be comparable to modernity. Heidegger, however, corrected his straightforward aversion to the thought heritage of Roman philosophy as rhetoric and politics, saying that the sources of the idea of ​​Europe in the political sense were inherited by Roman republicanism. (Heidegger 1998) A citizen of Rome becomes a citizen of the world within the borders of the political universality of the Empire. Thus, the Roman is found more in the Christian than it may seem at first glance. The proof is St. Paul and his ethical-political messianism which presupposes an internal change (metabolé) of the whole Roman set of rights and assumptions of human dignity (dignitas and humanitas). (Agamben 2006) 

          In De l’hospitalité, Derrida constantly talks about the “two orders of the law of hospitality”, referring to Kant and his reflections on the temporary residence status of the “guest” in another nation-state (the so-called right to residency). (Derrida 1997b) It becomes evident that not only the definition of rights is changing, but also multiculturalism and interculturalism as leading paradigms of ethical-political issues in the world today. What is the relationship between the concepts of hospitality (hospitalité) and friendship (amitié)? For Derrida, it should be evident that these are primarily “non-political” terms, but also “non-ethical”. How is that possible?  Many theorists of the political with undisguised pathos will point to the possibility that “postmodern pragmatism” paradoxically merges with the ethics of communicative rationality, such as the almost impossible encounter of the opinions of Richard Rorty and Jürgen Habermas. The classical philosophy of politics from Plato and Aristotle to their successors in the 20th century, with the paradigmatic figure of Leo Strauss, determines politics by purposeful action. By the idea of ​​good, justice, and equality, history is progressing towards its goal. The essence of the political in the difference between politics can be deduced by saying that it is a matter of the groundlessness of freedom as an arché. But this freedom is already in conflict with Ethical Law. This is especially true if the act appears to subject freedom to the higher interest of the community. Antigone’s case in Sophocles’ tragedy shows the request for the universality of freedom. But not before the Law (communities). Instead, the truth is revealed before the ordinary face of universal justice. It is a case of questioning the boundary between freedom and power.  If politics represents the power to establish what lies outside the scope of the political, it serves something outside its autonomy, such as economic interest, cultural good, scientific progress, or religious dogma. Its desecration and reduction of other interests are outside the ” interest of the mind”, as Kant would say. It is a betrayal of the principle ‒ the end of the political in general. The most radical thinking in the 20th century is established by Carl Schmitt in the use of the concept of political. (Schmitt 1932).

            In Derrida’s last major work, a kind of “grammar” of ethical-political turn, written in a series of lectures entitled Politiques de l’amitié from 1994, the reckoning with Schmitt becomes an attempt to establish a completely different irreducibility. It is no longer a question of a political-to-politics dispute as a real policy of the forces and interests of power of transnational corporate capitalism and its structural changes in the 1990s when the liberal democratic order slipped into the rule of oligarchic elites instead of “people”. (Derrida 1994) This is, on the other hand, what Schmitt assumes in this drama of realization as a catechon ofpolitical theology.  (Derrida 2005)

              In the case of Kant’s consideration of the “law of hospitality”  Derrida derives a kind farewell from Lévinas and his ethics of hospitality. Kant justified a moral rigorism categorical imperative and Levinas’s compassion elevated to the level of a hostage responsibility of the entity for the benefit of the Other nothing more than two ways of facing a fundamental aporia of the problem of foreigners, refugees, and asylum seekers. It is about the following. The stranger represents the figure of the beginning of the uncanny turn of ontology into ethics. The reason lies in the fact that it is disturbed by its non-rootedness in the “blood and soil” of the nation-state. From these figures arises statelessness. It is statelessness from refugee status to what is today called in France sans papiers or in English stateless people.  (Badiou 1998) The reason for this impossibility of establishing any ethics outside the “logic of deconstruction” is that the Other cannot be guaranteed the same legal rights as a guest and a foreigner within the prevailing nation-state model. Admittedly, Europe presents itself as a cosmopolitan ideal. But it is a “fortress” of European citizens who leave their devotion to the civil religion of patriotism on the abandoned doorstep. Ethnicity and nationality in all ways of political recognition prevail over the universality of “Europeanness”. It has already aporias. Namely, ethics is becoming a consolation, and hospitality policy is limited to quotas for immigrants to European developed countries. At the same time, the need for labour becomes a condition for the possibility of any further hospitalization. In this, there is no contradiction between capitalism and democracy, as the adherents of the dialectic in the new guise think. Despite this, Derrida shows that it is an aporia that comes from the space between the ruling Realpolitik and the real state. So, it constantly requires a change of strategy toward the problem of the disintegration of sovereignty in all aspects of that process. Of far-reaching significance for the future, it seems to be a way of compensating for its power. The violence that follows is precisely what happens when hospitality becomes an issue of the concrete ethics and politics of liberal democracies today. On the one hand, there is conditional hospitality for migrants (quota policy), and on the other, unconditional denial of the right to asylum, and thus denial of ethics of hospitality in the name of defending the fundamental cultural values ​​of Europe against the invasion of Islamism and terrorism. What is recognized from the possible turn of Europe towards xenophobia, racism, and neo-fascism in the discourse of the metapolitical struggle for “European culture” becomes an issue of the sustainability of European ideals of cosmopolitan order without an unambiguous European common policy. 

4. Friendship as Politics or Democracy to Come

So, what is to be done? Derrida’s answer to Lenin’s question is clear: to think radically differently in the wake of the “other headings.” If neither a cold head nor a boiling heart is the right solution for the true politics of democracy to come, what is left? Reading Derrida’s roadmaps of different thinking and opening his path into the unknown on the same track, it might be necessary to say: there is nothing left! Neither the mind nor passions, whatever a relationship-based performance set to head to his feet and vice versa, from Nietzsche to Deleuze or from Kant to Levinas continues, cannot give us anything more than “great politics” and “utopia” for what comes as an unprecedented event in history. If nothing remains of the entire metaphysical heritage of the Greeks, Rome, the Christian Middle Ages, the Enlightenment, and modernity, and all this is woven differently into Derrida’s Greek-Jewish thought and life orientation, then what remains of what does not remain salvific coming out of the aporia of foundation and at the same time fidelity to the so-called cultural identity of Europe in the formation of the upcoming community. More than nothing and less than something that was and exists now with its shards leaves painful scars on the body, comes from friendship as politics. And it must, of course, be open in a multitude of headings and must be multiplied. What is the policy at stake here? Let’s stop here. Politics without democracy makes no sense. This is the axiom from which everything else derives. Since democracy should be based on the freedom of all and the political equality of peoples as demos, not ethnos, then it is obvious how the metaphysical framework holds this image from ancient times to the global image of the end of the nation-state. The sovereignty must make the breakthrough of the Other. And that, in turn, means that the frame cannot be removed from the image because that would make the image itself lose its meaning. The framework in a metaphorical sense represents the idea of ​​ justice for the upcoming community (l’avenir). Therefore, democracy denotes a promise, repetition, and fundamental concept of Derrida’s “early philosophy” (différance). (Derrida 1978)

              Derrida accepted Lévinas’ idea of ​​the unconditional power of the absolute and irreducible Other as the “Big Third” (God?) whose place is empty in this world. The metaphysical event of transcendence in the encounter with the face of the Others changes history. The change relates to teleological exposure to the grace and disfavour of the idea of ​​freedom and equality of democracy. It is well known that in Greece, women, slaves, and foreigners without a homeland (Xenos) were excluded from the community. What becomes the main reason for the deconstruction of democracy as the basis of the best communities, is that the human mind is constructed despite its deficit in the desecration when the rule goes into the hands of minorities (oligarchy) or deviant in the accumulation of power Orwellian said “more equal than equal” (meritocracy), is exclusivity rule based on nature from which inequality follows. The modern model of the nation-state of the Anglo-Saxon way of the establishment of community, when the difference is no longer determined by reference not “will” nature, but paradoxically on the “essence” of the culture from which they then excluded all those who do not belong to “my” culture cannot hold the truth in the cosmopolitan world order. These are the two historically constructed paradigms of democratic exclusivity. The former is based on nature and the latter on culture. Finally, after the disintegration of the idea of ​​modern sovereignty in the late 20th century with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the totalitarian order of real socialism, what was left of the historical legacy of metaphysics is to redefine the notion of “nation” rule without fiction. How was that even possible?  Without the people as subjects above the national level, no longer just in Europe, but the world, democracy remains without actual legitimacy. (Beardsworth 1996, 46-96)

 With the will of the democracy to come, Derrida has had to clarify with the same as upset Gilles and Deleuze and Felix and Guattari. In one place of the book, What Is Philosophy? (Qu est-ce que la philosophie?) from 1991, they explicitly say, not without a utopian overtone in the footsteps of Marx and the social utopian, that in the current order of global capitalism what is lacking represents a “new country and people.” (Deleuze and Guattari 1994) Where else will we find the “ground” and “subject” for the further madness of this linear history? Does all this still make any sense? To begin with, it should be necessary to redefine the “essence” of friendship by building on the experience of the thought destiny of the Greeks:

“This concept of democracy is confirmed in the Eudemian Ethics (1236 ab): it is a politics of friendship founded on an anthropocentric – one could say humanist – concept. To man alone, in so far as he is neither animal nor god, is appointed the primary and highest friendship, that from which all the others receive their name, as it were, even if they are not simply its homonyms or synonyms, even if they are not its species, and even if they do not relate to this primary sense in a simply equivocal or univocal way. This friendship in the primary sense (e prote phil{a), which is also the highest, if not the universal, sense, is that of friendship founded upon virtue (di’areten). It is reserved man, since it implies this faculty of decision, of deliberation or reflective choice (proafresis, bouleusis) which appertains to neither animals nor to God. A system link will be easily recognized here between this properly human faculty (neither animal nor divine) of deliberation or calculation, on the one hand, and on the other, the concepts of law (nomos), convention (suntheke), or community (koinon{a) which, as we noted above, are implied in friendship as well as in democracy, and which, furthermore, bind together, in their very essence, friendship and democracy. There is no friendship, at least in this primary sense, with animals or with gods. There is no friendship, either, between animals or gods. No more so than democracy, fraternity, law, community, or politicsʺ (Derrida 2005c, 198)

In place of the ancient virtue of prudence (phronesis) without which there is no ethics in Aristotle’s sense, comes “universal brotherhood”. People as quantitatively and qualitatively different are no longer shackled by nature as a culture since the restriction of nature as a presupposition of the originality of Greek democracy is the reason for its exclusivity towards Others. In the Anglo-Saxon model, the universality of the citizen is limited to modern European and American cultures. Hence the question of the irreducibility of Other from the American Civil War in the 19th century to the present day becomes an issue in the realization of the ideals of Greek-American democracy on the soil of the modern empire. Friendship in the Greeks had no other function than to establish primary solidarity based on understanding and feelings for the community. And when the situation is stable between “internal” friends, then it seems reasonable to expect that there is a possibility of a hypothetical “universal friendship” in the upcoming period of world democracy in a cosmopolitan state. However, it is clear to Derrida that there is a “tragic” irreconcilability between the irreducibility of the Other and the “community of friends”. Who are figure friends in modern times of loss of identity, when the refugees and asylum seekers change containment and limitations of “friendship” in the logic of nature (the Greeks) and culture (Anglo-Saxon modernity)? Can anyone be a friend to Others without deconstruction abstract forms of “universal brotherhood” as the achievements of the French Revolution? The question presupposes a distinction between two forms of “friendship” and two forms of “solidarity”. Of course, it is Kant’s distinction between unconditional hospitality and conditional laws of hospitality.

              The first form of “friendship” is philosophical or ontological and appears strictly assigned to members of the mental generality as a community that creates a universal culture of Scripture. Derrida is therefore referring to Plato, who has chosen the Greek word, which is also derived from the notion of a Being and a community of culture based on the idea of goodness, justice, freedom, and equality of all citizens. The Greek term for a sublime culture built on the foundations of philosophical insight into the essence of man within the limits of human and inhuman nature is ─ paideia. (Maurer 1970) We know that paideia designates a condition of the possibility of any different friendship because it connects the separated by Scripture (grammé) as a trace of literacy and mental “solidarity”. Its opposite is all that the Greeks, and after them explicitly the Romans, called barbarism. Friendship cannot be possible without hostility. And that, paradoxically and aporetically, causes friendship within the political community of equals and free to rise to democratic virtue even above prudence because it comes from a sense of mystical connection between similar people. The second form of friendship is one based on an empirical understanding of community out of the “interest of the body.” To that extent, it makes a matter of individual affects and interests. Instead of transcendental paideia, the heteronomy of cultures is at work.  

          If for Derrida unconditional hospitality denotes a regulatory idea, then the following should be kept in mind. Violence and hostility in political quarrels between parties, states, and cultures will be no less intense than in the time of breaking with the logic of the banality of everyday life. So, it would be naive to think otherwise. But if that ineradicable feeling of ethical compassion for the sufferings of the Other “serves” something at all, then it seems uncanny. We have seen that it is precisely this Unheimlichkeit that denotes a kind of condition for the possibility of ethics in the contemporary world. In an age without the power of nation-state sovereignty, it seems as if everything is being moved and relocated to the space of networked societies that are no longer human-too-human. Although Derrida ultimately demanded that thinking open the possibility of a new re-humanization of theworld on entirely different grounds, it must not be forgotten that his “categories” from the period of the early deconstruction of Western metaphysics were of highly hybrid origin. They represented a connection between philosophy and linguistics, semiotics and cybernetics, systems theory, and information sciences. The problem we are dealing with here, however, cannot be from the issue of the inhuman as a contemporary techno-scientific construction of the event of the singularity of worlds. It is, on the contrary, a question of the singularity and contingency of the Other as an alien, a refugee, and an asylum seeker in a foreign land or a world of absolute homelessness. Because the political for Derrida must rise above the unconditionality of ethical violence by establishing the non-reciprocity of political violence in the form of suspending and neutralizing the hegemonic force of “totalitarianism of the Same,” as we saw in his analysis of Lévinas in “Violence and Metaphysics” in Writing and Difference (L’ecriture et la différence) from 1967, can one find a way to the same suspension and neutralization of violence in the name of the Other? In this Derrida follows the line of the political from Schmitt to Hannah Arendt. Everything else would be missed. If democracy presupposes a community of friends, then it is essentially opposed to the possibility that the logic of self-love and profit of capitalism in the neoliberal understanding of the aim and purposes of history becomes the signpost of democratic rule of the world. Why? Simply because it is clear to Derrida that the “people” as the subject of the creation of modern national sovereignty has been left without its unfounded foundation. We can argue that this is nothing but the freedom to decide on the meaning of history as the exploitation of the Other. Of course, no longer in the form of primordial nature. Now the rule of contingent and singular culture has become effective. When freedom of decision-making is reduced to elections between the parties offered in the election race of parliamentary democracies, a gap arises between the subject and the substance of the democracy to come. Already in the time of Greek democracy, Aristotle determined what was created by the possibility of rule based on wealth, corruption of virtues, and intrigues of a minority that rises above the people (demos) and sovereignly rules in its name. It is, of course, about the rule of the oligarchy. In the global order, it becomes the rule, not the exception. (Rancière 1995, 1998) As previously stated, we can say that the ethical-political turn in Derrida’s thought appears as a reaction to the existing order of the oligarchy in the age of globalization. It is the end of the modern subject. This has the effect of making a radically different understanding of the world beyond the logic of capitalist globalization when the rule of oligarchy becomes a different constitution of “the Earth”. No less and no more, we find this at the very beginning of Derrida’s reckoning with Schmitt’s notion of the political as a necessary polemical relationship between friend and enemy in a permanent “state of exception”:

“Consequently, depoliticization, the ‘without politics’ which is not necessarily the ‘withdrawal of the political’ could characterize a world which would no longer be a world, a ‘world without politics’, reduced to a ‘terrestrial globe’ abandoned by its friends as well as its enemies; in sum, a dehumanized desert. And this is indeed what Schmitt says – we shall quote him again. But he could say exactly the opposite (and he will say it later, willy-nilly). In both cases, the ‘possibility’ of combat remains the arbiter: ‘A world in which the possibility (die Moglichkeit) of war is utterly (without a remainder: restlos) eliminated, a completely pacified globe, would be a world without the distinction of friend and enemy and hence a world without politics.” (Derrida 2005c, 130)

Therefore, the politics of the “other headings” denotes the messianic politics of the upcoming age. To that extent, it is always and necessarily utopian. This makes a crucial difference between Lévinas and Derrida, on the one hand, and Rawls as a liberal philosopher of “fairness” community-bassed on the idea of an overlapping consensus of particular interest groups and omnipotent common sense. (Rawls 1971) However, the replacement of the concepts of freedom and justice does not mean that what is for the Greeks beginning of the policy, and for Jews’ goal of ethics is fundamentally determined by the difference resulting from the distinction between philosophy as logos and religion as a sense of what is fair in his infinite wisdom. Neither philosophy nor religion is in complete opposition when we deconstruct the form and content of their “promises.” Undoubtedly, a friendship cannot be limited by the borders of the nation-state, corporation, or kinship on the topic of “brotherly and sisterly blood”. It is no longer a matter of ethnic-genetic fiction of origin and attachment to the tribal structure of the genus. Like freedom, it cannot be founded. Therefore, his “nature” is just as in Lévinas’ ethics of unconditional hospitality towards the Other, the irreducible and contingent ‒ an-arché. The non-reciprocity and asymmetry of friendship against the logic of the interests of capitalist organized exchange of goods between market participants suspend and neutralize the power of capital over the excess and scandal of the uncanny event in the contemporary world. This event becomes a break from the continuity of history. With it comes the new that is older than the old: to share with an unknown man of different cultures the “same” that connects us as human beings.  Speaking in the tradition of metaphysics, the subject of community identification can no be longer the center of interest of power. Derrida finds support for this in Michel de Montaigne. Friendship might be considered a “sovereign and noble” sense of solidarity with equality based on beauty and goodness of heart. (Derrida 2005, 178).

              What does a syntagm with which Derrida completed his testament to the ethical-political deconstruction of Western metaphysics — the politics of friendship? A friend is never one. One should be measured with the One, and one is absolute. It is love, in contrast to justice, that cannot be shared. In addition, it might be a singular event of bestowing that “metaphysical transcendence” with which the world becomes different because only then does it take on the features of the same. Derrida did not deconstruct ethics beyond ethics in Lévinas’ sense. But he had to depart Levinas’ rigorous anti-Kantian compassion for the Other. He did so for the simple reason of freeing himself from the temptation of passively understood responsibility that blocks the radical politics of messianicity without messianism. In the whole operation of abandoning ethics and politics as a name for devotion to the essence of the modern representation of the Other ─ from human rights to cultural differences ─ what seemed inevitable was the abandonment of empty signifiers. The notion of sovereignty surpassed all others. It referred to the subject of ethics (the human one) and the subject of politics (the people as demos). But behind the scenes hid a faceless mask, the impersonality of both man and people. And without these two notions, democracy remains an empty narrative of freedom, equality, justice, and brotherhood. It was necessary, therefore, to deconstruct the last fictions of universality. Because man is always this or that man, black or white, man or woman, and the people are always ethnically marked no matter what bestows legitimacy ─ religion or culture, a common kinship of community remains also in nowadays. The singularity and contingency of ethical feeling and political action do not mean, however, that the “third” in the event of a change, when the Other as a foreigner, refugee, and asylum seeker opens new possibilities in the network of post-imperial sovereignty, becomes only a hybrid union of the two. Living together and sharing universal values might transgress all events that cause cultures to become so closed and untouchable to Others.

Epilogue

              In a shocking testimony about the refugee and from her own experience of fleeing Nazi Germany along with other Jewish intellectuals, Hannah Arendt states that the one to whom the name refers does not like to be signified in that way. Despite this, “refugees” in America after the Second World War have addressed themselves as “newcomers” or “immigrants”. (Arendt 1994,110) No one wants to be marked and stigmatized. And not even for humanitarian reasons, by belonging to a group that has lost its home and thus its identity. Everyone wants only one thing: to be recognized as “I” and not as the Other. Although everyone is different from everyone else, they become increasingly alienated and a stranger to themselves. The secret of humanity is hidden in that confession. A man reduced to a number and a function ceases to be human. Freedom opens existential possibilities without a foundation. From this unfoundedness springs the power of disobedience, even when life has become a collective drama of losing the “I” by reducing it to belonging to those who are different from the “innate “. Let us not forget that innateness as a natal option indicates the origin of the word nation (natio) from which arises a modern state. To be uprooted and to search for the “other headings” of history after this linear one in the sign of “progress” and “development” disintegrated into fragments. However, it still rushes into the madness of the uncontrolled future, means to admit that what remains of philosophy today has long been written in the very beginning. Philosophy, like human life on this Earth, designates the last trace of human dignity, no matter where it came from or where it went. In eternity, the path is the same as a mission under the stars. Perhaps the best evidence of this is the definition from the era of German Romanticism, the land of thinkers and poets, signed by Novalis.  What might philosophy be, other than the aspiration for the homeland and the desire for return, even if it was only the last illusion? Novalis, therefore, says:

Philosophy is homesickness, an urge to be at home everywhere.

        Being at home everywhere? It seems like an aspiration that opens the door to the upcoming times. In the uncertainty and suddenness of an event completely different from this indifference, in the constant course of it, history takes place after its end. There wasn’t much time left. One should live it with dignity and sacrifice his or her security for the salvation of the soul. It is a matter of Novalis’ wish for his homeland and striving to be at home everywhere. But not alone, but rather in communion with the Other as my friend.

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