The Law of Friendship and Its Social Grammatology

The lived experience of thinking matter finds its existential limit in Jacques Derrida’s Law of Friendship (Lof), which dominates the grammatology of the social with the stern disregard of a mathematical rule governing a field of potential differences and differentiations as these unfold determinately yet not without the intervention of the random. The Lof dictates the promise of a fatally indeterminate disappearance lodged at the heart of the social, fraternal bond, though, and as such comes at one point or another to mark its operands with the stigma of survivorship, as only one of each pair we label “friends” will outlive the other, necessitating everything from the writing of an epitaph to working with and on mourning to create meaning in the wake of the vastation created by death’s wide open spaces. Since even philosophy falls under the jurisdiction of love, especially if we trace its history back to Symposium or at minimum take its etymology seriously, and is in essence a conversation between and among friends who on the best day are equals, it is imperative to take the Lof seriously and examine its material consequences as these impact the thought and behavior of those who must endure absence as biological and social fact bound up inextricably with human facticity. Not everyone will take on the future project of the lost friend, since it demands a radical, voluntary vulnerability and even a willingness to participate in the joint fantasy of an intersubjectivity all involved and invoked parties know is fated to expire, yet those who do feel up to the task arrive at a strange point beyond all strategies of reason where philosophy and poetry blend and to engage the great zero of mortality is to gaze deeply and intently into the blank eye of eternity without melancholy or nostalgia but with the courage of an outsider artist working exotic material into an aesthetic whole for an audience ever on the brink of appearing