Let us assume that friendship consists mainly in a flow. Friends are those who engage in a conversation that has always already begun and that never ceases, no matter what they may talk about and how often the conversation may be interrupted. Even when the conversation appears to be repetitive or dwindle as a result of continuous digressions, there remains something effortless about it. If understood in this sense, friendship is a relationship of radical egalitarianism. Friends are indifferent to the medium that carries them, or that makes their conversation flow, namely language, at least for as long as it carries them with equal strength and promotes an unrestricted freedom that they shall not find elsewhere. Friends do not care about language especially.

Yet at the same time the flow can come to a stop that prevents it from re-establishing itself. In this case, the interruption may not be external to the flow’s unfathomable drive. Such an interruption – there may be several of them – is what seems to prompt Nathalie Sarraute to write a play called Pour un oui ou pour un non, or, in English, For No Good Reason. In this play, radical egalitarianism gives way to power games. Two friends find themselves struggling with one another. Suddenly, they embody different and incompatible positions, the position of an active and the position of a contemplative life. Each position fights for supremacy over the other. In the end, one of the friends says: “I have always known that there can be no conciliation in our case. No subsiding and no remission. It is a merciless fight. A fight for live and death. Even for survival. There is no choice. Either you or I.”

Friendship is not Intersubjective

In the course of this fight, language becomes all-important. For the conversation now circles around a relationship whose manipulative nature has come to the fore in a specific usage of words. One of the two friends charges the other with having made certain revelatory pauses and having employed certain telling emphases. Was this friendship ever carried by language? One could conclude from the conversation in the play that friendship must lack self-consciousness. When it begins to thematise itself, to ask whether a relationship of power underlies and disavows it, the flow has been interrupted and the friends have been thrown back upon themselves, each caught up in his own game. To a third party, to a party whose position one of the friends can adopt so as to ridicule the other friend’s suspicions, nothing is more insignificant than the linguistic detail to which the suspicious and hurt friend, the friend who has withdrawn, is said to have paid excessive attention, turning it into a sign of betrayal and rupture.

Friendship is not an objective or intersubjective realm, or is not a realm in any sense, but is the unfolding of an intimacy without externality. Such intimacy prohibits triangulations and instrumentalisations. Friendship – we will come back to this point – does not exist for others, for third parties. Friends are so intimately and unconsciously bound up with language that, on the one hand, it hardly means anything to them, while, on the other hand, it proves to be infinitely meaningful. It functions as a resource of meaning for the friends who commit to power games and cease to be friends. In friendship, the difference between language as a medium and language as a tool becomes decisive. Friends do not communicate, they simply go with the flow, hold themselves in a medium that transports them, regardless of the important things they may say to each other. When they do communicate and use language as a tool, they have bidden farewell to their friendship, or they have been abandoned by it – by language.