Friendship Among Others

„Spürst du ihn nicht, den Zauber deiner Einsamkeit?" (Pseudo-Descartes in Vom Schnee 23)

Like everyone else, I’ve been trying to understand the psychosis of socialized loneliness. Some of it seems to stem from a confusion over the nature of friendship. The Western notion of friendship implies an analogy of sorts. Friendship is at its most meaningful at the death of one of its parties, a point where friendship itself is “consummated,” its lealty and sameness sealed and affirmed. Hence the received wisdom that tradition as a concept in the West is at core a (male) homosexual one, the shared bounty of the co-descendants and co-emulators of Adam. A few years back I read all these books on friendship, which in part reconstructs all this, with interest, and while I found their arguments crystalline, I never found them particularly useful for life. I didn’t find any of it particularly applicable to my experiences (in a phenomenological way of speaking). As problematic as the whole construction is/was – and it felt like a truism to me when I learned it all, I have never succeeded in thinking friendship otherwise, i.e. among others. But I think that has changed.

What I think particularly needs explanation is this: I have sometimes found that I stay friends with people despite phenomenologically finding the friendship to be really a nonrelation, or rather a wrongly decided relation, where the things they do and say imply that whatever “friendship” exists between us is not between two selves, but some kind of projection of genres. (We might have racist, ethnonationalist, sexist, or gendered confusions or just incompatible interests, inclinations, and habits.) Obviously some friendships are transactional, but one prefers to think that one has “real friends” – and thus the paradigm. I remember being struck by how in German one says eine Freundschaft schließen (to close a friendship, i.e. to make a friend), as if friendship was a deal to close (eine Abkommen schließen), with terms to negotiate. These “wrongly decided” friendships are the results of some mucked up negotiations.

Then again, it is not always true that I keep these friendships that are “wrongly decided”. Sometimes I just cut people off. What, then, keeps some of these “wrongly decided” friendships alive and others not? The answer seems to be a latent investment in the projections on which the friendship is decided (i.e. there is a predetermined desire to be friends with the person, grounded in some mediation). One of the features of friendship seems to be that one must wish the best for the friend, or at least not wish ill upon them. This seems to imply, if one imagines desire as a kind of going somewhere, not necessarily a shared cosmos, but something like a cosmic seriality: shared positionality in the face of experience. But that must not be the full truth, for how then would people stay friends when contexts change? They often don’t, but sometimes they do: thus the phenomenon of the “old friend”.

What is at stake is something like: how does desire work in friendships? And I assert its role is this: friendization is willed, the result of a desire to see people as in the same position as you. Some of it seem to come down to this: nothing, and no one, is similar or dissimilar to another, but that we will it so. Before any other appetition, we need an interval in which the similar and the different can be separated. (Or perhaps this is itself an abstraction to sustain will’s universality -- who knows.)

Julia Serano and Kate Manne’s fantastic recent work on sexualization, gaslighting, and fatphobia have been so inspiring that I have come to recognize this as a problem that can be addressed theoretically, and straight on. And it’s simple: friendization (which is to say, friendship as a form of interpellation) and sexualization are part and parcel of the same process: the process of understand a person to be both a part of a whole and a whole of a part. Friendization, no less than sexualization, rely on schemata that, often problematically, reinforce symbolic totalities. Friendship is, at end, an interpellation that we must think about.

What then, is at stake in being friends with someone even when it’s depressing? It seems to be the desire to continue with something, a context perhaps. Some way to keep a memory alive. Something like mourning, theorists of friendship say. Cue Tracy K. Smith: “dark matter is like the space between people / when what holds them together isn’t exactly love” (Life on Mars 36)

The sexualization paradigm makes it possible to identify the dark matter created by “it’s not exactly love because … it’s just sex”. Friendization, then, creates the dark matter with “it’s not exactly love because… it’s just friendship”. Notably, this distinction is somewhat inverted in Adrienne Rich, who sees the problem of (hetero)sexualization as problematic because it limits woman-to-woman energy flows. Rich’s critique of heterosexism is a variation of the critique of sexualization, one that Serano certainly builds on. Faced with compulsory (hetero-)sexualization, Rich proposed friendships, relationships, and connections between women as a powerful form of resistance. Note that part of the claim here is that because of heterosexism, boundaries between woman-to-woman friendships and relationships ought to be relaxed since this distinction is policed by compulsory heterosexuality.

We might extend her critique of (hetero-)sexualization as among the “societal forcers which wrench women’s emotional and erotic energies away from themselves” to “friendship” as a doctrine that takes as its basis the articulation of sameness, which wrench our energies away from people different from us. But now that sound positively strange. So what with compulsory friendization? In this view, there’s a mode in which we are always looking to be friends with everyone else, so we’re always looking for the same people. But we should be looking to love them, too.

But it should have been obvious that Enkidu and Laura are not totally separate. They ought to be understood together.