UMBR(a): Technology (2012): 5975.

Five Hundred Million Friends:

The Pharmacology of Friendship

Bernard Stiegler

For Augustin and Elsa Stiegler,

George Collins, Antoine Dulaure, and Alain Giffard

By July 2010, five hundred million friends had registered on the Facebook network, if
Wikipedia and Le Monde are to be believed. But what does this term mean here, friends
[amis]? To what type of relation does it refer, and how do digital relational technologies
implemented by social networks affect the relation known as friendship? How do these
socio-technologies interfere with the psychotechnologies that characterize the mass
attentional forms of analogue technologies and the culture industry?
Confronting such questions requires that I ask not only the question of friendship, but
also the question of community, the community woven through all the relations between
psychic individuals, who tend to participate in a process of collective individuation, of which
friendship is but a single example. What relations if any are maintained between
friendship and community? I shall begin by approaching the question of community.

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In Communitas, Roberto Esposito thinks community in terms of a delinquere that constitutes

an originary lack,1 evoking not only Maurice Blanchots great friend Georges Bataille,
insofar as he thinks The community of those who do not have a community2 as the sharing
of a defect in or deficiency of (un dfaut de) community, but also what Lacan, commenting on
Freuds An Outline of Psycho-Analysis, calls das Ding.3 But Esposito also characterizes this
lack and this is a radical displacement as a deficiency (or default) of originary origin.
He writes initially that communitas is the totality of persons united not by a
property but precisely by an obligation or a debt; not by an addition [pi] but by a
subtraction [meno]: by a lack, a limit that is configured as an onus,4 but later he clarifies
this description by adding the following:
All of the stories that tell of the founding crime, the collective crime, the ritual
assassination, the sacrificial victim featured in the history of civilization dont do
anything else except evoke metaphorically the delinquere that keeps us together, in
the technical sense of to lack and to be wanting; the breach, the trauma, the
lacuna out of which we originate. Not the Origin but its absence, its withdrawal. It is
the originary munus that constitutes us and makes us destitute [nous constitue et nous
destitute] in our mortal finiteness.5
There is in every communitas the debt and the default of a founding offence that evidently
must be related back to Prometheus6 and that, as Jean-Pierre Vernant shows, constitutes the
myth specific to the political form of community:
The existence of a sacrificial rite among men, which completely separates them from
the gods in order to unite them, is based on the correlative presence in the divine
realm of a being who combines in his person two opposing figures: the rebel,
chastised and rebuked; and the benefactor, the civilizer, at last unbound from his
chains, welcomed and redeemed.7
Esposito presents lack as defect, deficiency, or default (dfaut), as in the myth of Prometheus,
and as technicity, a facticity that is a pharmacology, that is, the techno-logic of a radical and
irreducible ambiguity on account of which what is proper to a human being is always
already turning into its impropriety and self-expropriation, and that which constitutes also
proves to be that which immediately destitutes (or deposes).
If this involves more than just lack it is because defect or default is also what can and
must become what we need. I shall return to this point below with regard to the myth of
modernity, that is, the Freudian myth in which the murder of the primal father not only founds
but also destroys the fraternity of brothers. In this myth the murder weapon is a pharmakon
(remedy, poison, and scapegoat) that both constitutes and deposes this delinquere of the
origin of community the pharmacology of those who do not have a community.

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Friends and friendship (as the flesh and conjunctivity of that molecularity that
occupies Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus),8 in all their forms and friends are
essentially multiple, perhaps even the multitude par excellence are cares through which the
primordial wound or ancient crime (lantique vexation) of Persephone, to which Socrates
refers in Meno (the palaiou pentheos mortals pay for in return for their defect),9 becomes
necessity itself, even beauty itself, that is, that which we obviously need.

Preparing this text has been difficult. There are certainly reasons for this: fatigue, lassitude,
and the weight of an epoch under which I sometimes feel I am collapsing. I sometimes also
feel a sense of deep unease (profond malaise) when I discover the point at which it becomes
difficult to think about friendship, to catch hold of or zero in on it, particularly when I reflect
on the numerous friendships that have nourished me, when I get the sense that they are fading
away, or when I get the impression that the times are not merely unfavorable but essentially
hostile to friendship. These times are terribly unfriendly; it is as if we are returning to an age
of radical enmity, insofar as it is no longer adversaries, within the community, who confront
one another, but actual enemies, who do so nearly to the point of annihilating each other in
the abyss of the default of community.
I have attributed this situation to a crisis of libidinal economy, a thesis I have been
developing for some time elsewhere;10 hence, I shall not return to it here. But my remarks
should be understood in this context. In preparing this article I have reread a number of texts I
believed I knew well, texts that appear now in a new, singularly enigmatic light. I have also
read a number of new texts that have forced me to deviate from my intended trajectory. This
has all taken place in the context of the totally unprecedented and immediately overwhelming
reality of the industrial fabrication of friends, the industrialization of the way of making
friends, in reference to which I have elaborated my investigations.
It is only possible to industrialize the way of making friends because, in fact, friends
are something one makes: Do you want to become my friend? asks a little girl or a little
boy. This making (facture) at the origin of friendship must be analyzed and investigated.
The industrialization and automatization of friendship or perhaps philia which is
taking place before our very eyes, soliciting us in a staggering way that has become a key
geopolitical issue, supporting utterly unprecedented political practices and seeming to open
new political horizons, is implemented through digital relational technologies that represent
the most advanced stage of grammatization, that is, the discretization of fluxes or flows.
These technologies should be understood as technologies of transindividuation.

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It is impossible to ignore this context, not only because, in July 2010, Facebook
became the third largest global community, according to Le Monde; or because, at the end of
last year, Wikileaks published a number of highly publicized diplomatic cables; but also
because Twitter apparently plays a significant role in the ongoing revolutions in the Arab
world. By July 2010, five hundred million Facebook users declared through a procedure
that must be examined more closely who their friends are and what links them. This
procedure is largely automatic; sending everyone in my address book an invitation to
become my friend is a technical function of messaging, a new epistolary system in a world
often wrongly understood to be post-humanist.11 As such, it is tempting to ask if social
networks lead to a proletarianization of the social relation by virtue of its automation. Here, as
always, one must remember that every pharmakon emerges from a process of grammatization
that is always open to both possibilities of proletarianization (the loss of knowledge in this
case, relational knowledge) and de-proletarianization (the reconstitution of knowledge).
But why does anybody do this? Why make such friends? In order to constitute
networks and, according to Howard Rheingold, acquire a reputation.12 Indeed, these social
networks bring about technologies of reputation. It is necessary to analyze the multiple
factors that have caused the exponential growth of these social networks. The strategies for
both the fabrication or manufacture of reputation and the implementation of such technologies
come largely from the economic world. But the success of this social reticulation, as a result
of those who have registered themselves as friends, creating a profile, and so on, no
doubt passes beyond the expansion of the network effect well-known to economists, from
the automation to the exploitation of the address book through a standpoint that aims to
compensate for the lack of social recognition and the relational misery or poverty induced
mainly by the destruction of the libidinal economy at the end of the consumerist twentieth
century.
By grammatizing social relations, these technologies of reputation industrialize,
automate, and make calculable what the Greeks called kleos, the historical modality of an
elementary structure of the libidinal economy, the desire for the others desire, and the
primary narcissism that this presupposes.

In a new French translation of books VIII and IX of Aristotles Nicomachean Ethics,

published in 2002, Jean Lauxerois maintains that [it] is not possible to translate philia as
amiti, an everyday word he replaces with amicalit (an archaic form Kostas Axelos uses in
Lettres un jeune penseur), 13 since philotes (the opposite of neikos, according to
Empedocles)14 is already the word for friendship: Philia means more than friendship as we
normally understand it: it names the manner by which any living being, human or animal,
human and animal, is necessarily linked to other living beings for as long as he is in the
world.15 Aristotle considers philia to be more and less than human, the link between all
forms of linkable: he then defines this as koinonia, community, which he places at the level
of a constituent principle, both individual and political, or all human life.16 The human
community, however, is that of a deficiency of linkage, a default of linkage, and a default as
the link that de-links (what Esposito calls delinquere):

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The word amicalit becomes here the name of the unthought that the Greek philia
contains within it, the secret of a relation to oneself and of a relation to the world that
is lodged in a deficiency of meaning of this word: somewhere in the fracture, says
Kostas Axelos.
We must therefore understand amicalit as [a] deficiency of linkage.17
In general, philia designates the link between humans or, more precisely, noetic souls, in
which the human, according to Aristotle, is merely one case.
This case should be understood to constitute, on the basis of Gilbert Simondons
work, a process of psychic and collective individuation. But it is necessary to add to
Simondons thesis that the process of psychic and collective individuation presupposes a
process of technical individuation,18 making individuation essentially pharmacological.

The process of psychic and collective individuation is a general form of philia that Jakob von
Uexkll examines in greater detail. He describes, for instance, one aspect of philia as the
fundamentally open possibility of adoption:
Gregarious jackdaws have around them their entire lives a companion with whom
they undertake all sorts of actions. Even if a jackdaw is brought up alone, it does not
go without the companion but, if it cannot find one of its own species, it takes on a
substitute companion, and, in fact, a new substitute companion can fill that gap for
each new activities. []
In its youth, the jackdaw [named] Tschock had [taken his master] as its
mother-companion. It followed him all over the place; it called to him when it wanted
to be fed. Once it had learned to get its own feed, it chose the maid as its companion
and performed the characteristic courtship dance in front of her. Later, it found a
young jackdaw which became its adoptive companion and which Tschock fed.
Whenever Tschock prepared for a longer flight, it attempted to persuade [its master]
to fly with it in typical jackdaw fashion, by flying straight up just behind its back.
When that did not work, it joined flying crows, who then became its flight
companions.19
Aristotle, Lauxerois writes, ascribes philia as much to animals of one species birds, for
example as to members of the same family, and to the relations that prevail in the coexistence between cities as in their internal cohesion.20 What, then, is specific to the philia of
those who can become friends, those affected by love, desire, and the deficiency or defect that
weaves them as das Ding, and who

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find themselves individuated psychically by being singularly affected? This is the question, in
Simondons terms, of the passage from vital to psychic and collective individuation.
In vital individuation, Simondon writes, organization can occur
either in each being, or through the organic relation that exists between different
beings. In the latter case, internal integration is doubled in the being by an external
integration: the group is the integrator. The only concrete reality is the vital unity,
which can in certain cases be reduced to a single being and which in other cases
corresponds to a very differentiated group of multiple beings.21
In a footnote Simondon describes the form of philia proper to termites: Termites, then,
construct the most complex edifices of the animal kingdom, despite the relative simplicity of
their nervous organization: they behave almost as a single organism, by working as a
group. 22 Instead of thinking the living individual, it is necessary to think the vital
individuation process, because
what one calls the individual in biology is in reality in some ways a sub-individual
more than an individual; in biology, it seems that the notion of individuality is
applicable to several stages, or according to different levels of successive inclusion.
[] [T]he unity of life would be the complete group, not the isolated individual.23
To conceive individuation in this way implies another conception of philia and what this
word strives to think. On the one hand, there is a living grouping, whether animal, vegetable
or cells that aggregate in a body, coral or colony of any kind, and herds, bands, animal pairs,
and so on; and, on the other, there is everything that could be considered vital individual, as
opposed to physical individuation, which includes, for example, the formation of crystals or
macromolecules.
Vital individuation is a conjunction of individuals that does not produce the
community of the deficiency of community; it is a liaison that is always conjunctive, with
no possibility of disjunction, other than a teratological disjunction or a disjunction provoked
from the outside. By contrast, psychic and collective individuation is both proper and
improper to the community of those who do not have a community; it always both exceeds
and is atrophied by technical individuation (the individuation of the beings we are, we try to
be, or that we believe we are when we try to achieve a common future, a future we want to be
friendly, or that we believe will be friendly). In other words, psychic and collective
individuation implies a process of alteration, a becoming-other in the face of the other and the
big Other in the condition of das Ding.

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Psychic and collective individuation is the individuation of singularities that are constituted
only in mutual recognition, a desire for desire (to put it in Alexandre Kojves terms), or a
kleos (to translate it into Greek); in other words, they are constituted only in systems of coindividuation that lead to a process of transindividuation and that presuppose a thousand
idealization processes.
That which Aristotle describes as noesis dianoia passing through the rules a dialectic encountered in dia-logos, through which a logos is forged is just such a coindividuation of dialogical interlocutors and dialecticians, tending to become a
transindividuation and forming circuits of transindividuation and idealities (the eid), the
disciplines and noetic constructions of which (grammar, geometry, ontology, zoology, and so
on) are cases.
Friends are noetic beings, and Plato proposes that noesis (that is, dianoia)
presupposes friendship. Noetic beings are friends insofar as they love and desire the same
thing, namely wisdom or noesis by entelechy.
If, however, this conception (which is a little too abstract and sublimated to the
extreme) were to extend to every kind of friend above all, to children who wish to make
friends and childhood friends who find themselves individuated and co-individuated in and
through their friendships then friendship appears to be the primordial and conditional cell
of co-individuation. Children need friends, and this is something every parent knows.
According to Simondon, there is no (psychic) individuation without collective
individuation, and I would add that amicable co-individuation and, in particular, childhood
friendship is the first step toward a collective individuation that metastabilizes a
transindividuation (the ideal community of geometers, for example, or the community of
citizens known as the people). This is why children need friends and not merely pals:
They can only become what they are they can only change by co-individuating
themselves with children their own age whom they like as only friends can, that is,
unconditionally.
Here, we encounter the philia specific to individuation in the default of origin in
which the community of those who do not have a community, the pharmacological
community, is constituted and deposed. I shall now undertake the task of assessing its literally
exorbitant price.

The philia of noetic beings capable of changing the default of their community constitutes a
libidinal economy. This default is das Ding. In The Freudian Arsenal, a short but rich text I
am, unfortunately, not able to analyze in detail here, Paul-Laurent Assoun investigates das
Ding by underscoring Freuds inattention to the fact that the murder of the father the crime,
offense, or delinquere on account of which the community of those who do not have a
community is formed and deformed is accomplished with a weapon, a significant detail
involving an aporetic default Freud does not seem to acknowledge.24

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How does the sons murderous transgression, this passage to the act, happen?
According to Freud, Some cultural advance, perhaps, command over some new weapon, had
given them a sense of superior strength.25 But why speak of a new weapon? Were not
primitive humans already armed before the murder? If not, was there a purely natural human
before the swerve of culture, that is, before technics, who had not yet killed his father?
There are, in effect, three possibilities:
(1) Either there is a purely natural, unarmed, and non-technical human, which does not
appear to be Freuds hypothesis, given that he speaks of a new weapon, rather than
the invention of a weapon; or,
(2) There is an armed humanity that is not yet parricidal; or,
(3) Nascent humanity is the invention of the weapon that is the parricide.
This last hypothesis is my own.
Instrumentality that is, pharmacology is the condition of the constitution of the
father (that is, the murder of the father, that is, the fantasy of the murder of the father). The
love of the mother presupposes a transitional object opening a transitional space that is
neither inside nor outside26 that should be understood as the primordial pharmakon of
infantile psychogenesis, preparing the repetition of this primordial scene of wrenching that is
the technicization of life, that is, the transgression of the law of the living and, thus, of the
parent. But I am only able to evoke this possibility here, which I have attempted to think
elsewhere as a doubly epokhal redoubling.27
The weapon or, more generally, the tool and the instrument, as the organ of work,
constitutes both the socializing sublimation of desire (the reality principle realizing the
pleasure principle)28 and the transgressive and explosive unchaining (dchanement) of the
law, as either depacification of the tool or instrument again becoming a weapon, and passing
from social relation to war, or as the becoming revolutionary of technics, destroying (more or
less temporarily) psychic and social systems and individuals. This is what we are living
through at this very moment as an economic war in which work, degraded to the point of
being mere employment, has again become the war effort and the state of exception, now
close to military conflict.
The law can be constituted only through its transgression, that is, by default, since it
is established only in the aprs-coup of murder as the thereafter of its primordial, separating
and, as such, sacred deposition (or destitution). The law of desire a single modality of
which is friendship, which is completely different from love, yet just as necessary (perhaps
even more necessary, since without it love is not possible) is the pharmacology of
sublimation, a condition of which is the weapon-becoming-tool, which is always susceptible
to regression.

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In all its forms, noetic philia capable of friendship is a libidinal economy (ascribed to
theos, the object of all desire in Aristotle). Blanchot defines friendship as a relation without
dependence.29 This non-dependence (which is also independence, although it concerns a
relation) makes it possible for friends to gather together in complete freedom (since friends
may be close but also distant, that is, at a distance) and thus constitutes the ideal community
par excellence and by default. But default (dfaut) should be understood here in another
sense of the word, namely without urges (pulsion), lust, or energy, and always erotological
and thanatological, that is, detachable and perverse. The libido of lovers binds and diverts
from its goal in view of the One, but it can be diverted only because it tends to return
ceaselessly towards its initial and initially drive-based (pulsionnel) object, that is, its nonsublimated or, worse, desublimated object. Desublimation constitutes the age of
disenchantment (dsamour), which is also the age of consumption and total atomization, an
age the nave believe to be characterized by individualism, 30 although, in fact, it is
characterized by little more than herdishness.31

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In contrast to love as that always potentially furiously intense relation, amicable

peace, the tranquility only a friend can bring if not grant us, remains intact in the face of
this constant regressive tendency; it can be like a shelter from the war of desire that is love
sexual love, idealized love, and the love of social idealities. But I must abandon this immense
question en route to my attempt to understand what type of ideality can be constituted as
something other than a diversion from the goal of the drive.
To assert this sort of innocence apropos of friendship is to expose oneself to irony
and accusations of navet or gullibility. All friendship masks homosexuality or
heterosexuality, we are told, and nothing really differs from love; for example, the friendship
of philosophers may be Platonic love, but, above all, it is love, Eros, erotology. I myself often
say to my wife, having met a man with whom I have become friends, I have fallen in love.
Such are the objections I have made to myself, and I believe, in truth, that friendship
is an altered face of love, be it homo- or heterosexual, however, complex its economy and
however buried and transformed the erotic energy that animates it may be. And yet the
happiness the company of friends brings me arises from this non-dependence that seems to
liberate friendship from its origin, which is perhaps its default of origin, namely love. As a
modality of desire, love springs from this originary default of origin that is armed life, that
is, a life with instruments and a life that is instrumentalizable.
But it is precisely through this originary default of origin, which is immediately and
irreducibly pharmacological, that friends and friendship can turn bad. Not only can friends
betray, misunderstand and annihilate each other, they can also, even if it is more banal, less
dramatic, and perhaps sadder, forget one another and this is no doubt more often than not
how friendships come to an end. (In this sense, the story of friendship is not a love story.)
More essentially, friends can form groups; they can socialize themselves and their
friendship, and they can even institutionalize their relation-without-dependence, making it
dependent, something that creates obligations and dependences. Two friends can create a
group of friends, such that the word friend tends to change its meaning, becoming the index
of a closed agreement between particular interests, which can also impose itself on those who
are not part of the group. They can also become angry at one another and mutually betray
each other.
Here, it would be necessary to examine Alain Badious loge de lamour and what he
has to say about the number two in relation to love. 32 Friendship is essentially dual,
cultivating a specific ex-timacy [extimit].33 When two becomes three, friends become a
social group of friends. What takes place between two is co-individuation, but what takes
between three is transindividuation: The third transforms the difference between the sun and
the dia (the play of which constitutes a relation, with or without dependence) into an
opposition; it installs a power and the drive that accompanies it.

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This fate according to which the ex-timacy of the in-timacy proper to friendship
becomes the exteriority or margins of the social extimate and intimate are names for a
thought of that which is neither inside nor outside, and also for that transitional object that,
like all technical objects, both constitutes and deposes (and, as such, according to Assoun, can
be constituted as a fetish) is not limited to more or less marginalized groups, even
delinquents, in relation to which one speaks of a gang or a network (so and so and his
friends), where friends means accomplices in a real or potential delinquency that threatens
the community.
The Mafia, too, is something like this, and death plays a major role: Within the
Mafia, which is an association of criminals founded on an affect that disaffects, friendships
are essential, including those that take the form of a relation without dependence, and they are
sealed with a pact to the death. A genuine friend is in life and in death, as one says in
common parlance and also in war. In the Mafia, however, this freedom is turned into
absolute dependence, so that a traitor is assassinated.
But even if studying the friendship of bandits or those who are outside the law should
prove to be fertile, it is not the type of deviance, as it is called, that I am interested in
examining in this introduction to the pharmacology of friendship. Instead, I am interested in a
derivative of or a deviation from this type of friendship, a corruption, a nearly inescapable
and necessary diversion of friendship, whatever the type. This diversion always makes of
friendship the initiation of a new process of collective individuation, the point of departure
for a new and long circuit of transindividuation, so that it is entered and inaugurated into the
relation-without-dependence established in friendship, although it always tends to revert to a
form of dependence as soon as, like all forms of individuation constituted in the libidinal
economy, it engenders the social, that is, what Aristotle refers to as philia.
I shall conclude this introduction by questioning the pharmacological fate of the
philotes that makes possible the default of origin that itself makes possible the relationwithout-dependence in which friendship, in its purest form, more often than not engenders the
philia at the heart of which proliferates the cliques, submissions, powers, cowardice, and
ignominy that inevitably accompanies it, which Blanchot calls literary history. I do so in
order to investigate the conditions that make it possible to rethink both friendship and the
ideal community it makes desirable, if not possible, in the epoch of relational technologies,
the epoch of the industrialization and automation of social relations, that is, in an affective
misery or poverty without name, which has become, for me, nearly unbearable. I believe this
is also the case for my friends, or for what remains of them, however atrophied and
exasperated (excds).

Here, it is necessary to return to the question of what exactly without dependence means.
That which Simondon calls the pre-individual is brought to its extremity by this nondependence, the sharing of which can individuate an individual, but only through a process of
co-individuating with other individuals

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or with another individual with whom he or she shares pre-individual funds. Individuation is
a process by which a pre-individual fund which harbors a potential Simondon refers to as
supersaturated, that is, a readiness to crystallize holding within it what in crystallography
is known as a germ, trans-forms and releases, within the milieu it forms, a figure of
individuation, that is, an individual.
Insofar as this form of individuation gives place to a philia capable of philotes, desire,
love, and the creation of a libidinal economy, it does not release a crystal from pre-individual
funds but a psychic individual immediately projected into a collective individual he or she is
not, but at the heart of which he or she is, in relation to which he or she is, and in tension with
which he or she becomes.
Friendship, at least as Blanchot has given us to think it, is the limit of such a
projection, since as a relation without dependence, it does not constitute a collective; instead,
it holds to a duality in which intimacy constitutes a specific and exceptional extimacy at the
limit of the social and at the limit of love, which perhaps constitutes the social as sublimation.
As a relation without dependence, friendship owes nothing to what philia bequeaths
to pre-individual funds (or, in the case of psycho-social individuals, transindividual funds).
To the extent that it plays a role for humans and animals, philia presupposes the sharing of a
common fund, whether genetic heredity or symbolic heritage. From this fund, the individual
individuates that is, becomes and forms him- or herself by trans-forming this fund,
realizing a potential. I should make it clear at this point that, since first reading his work, I
have opposed Simondons definition of the pre-individual in psychic and collective
individuation as a fact of nature: The subject being can be conceived as a system more or
less perfectly cohering in three successive phases of being: pre-individual, individuating, and
transindividual, these three partially but not completely corresponding to what is designated
in the concepts of nature, individual, spirituality.34 I believe the pre-individual phase is a
natural-ized transindividual phase, rather than simply natural; moreover, the transindividual
phase is the foundation of collective individuation, insofar as it consists in the elaboration of
meanings that presuppose the support of technicity: The technical object [] becomes the
support and the symbol of that relation to which we give the name transindividual.35 It has
never been clear to me why the pre-individual fund for the psychic or social individual, for
Simondon, is nature, even if he offers the qualification that this is the case partially but not
completely. 36 I have always maintained, on the contrary, that the pre-individual is the
transindividual inherited and naturalized as philia. It might be the case, however, that
Blanchot provides not only a better understanding of what Simondon says, but also a more
refined critique of what he means.
Friends are thus without dependence not only in the sense that they are free of all
urges and drive-based tension, but also in the sense that they genuinely have nothing in
common other than their default of community. Hence, the possibility for a friend to be more
distant, more remote, and increasingly different, and even the possibility that all friendship
proceeds primordially from such an extreme, if not infinite, difference, given the absence of
common funds. As such, friendship is an empty delinquere

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without positive content carrying the mark of primordial sacrifice, that is, the separation in
which the transitional object is at once the preparation and the early warning sign.
From this point of view, philotes, as a dual, intimate, and extimate relation, remains
free in regard to all cultural dependence and, as such, is nearly the opposite of philia (if
indeed it is the always familial and consanguineous familiarity of those so close they seem to
follow the relational modality that results in the robustness of the termites nest a prospect
that, with regard to community, haunts our friend Jacques Derrida).

It is to Bataille, in his absence, that Blanchot addresses himself in the final chapter of
LAmiti, a text I find, in certain regards, as astounding as The Origin of Geometry. There,
Husserl undoes his own path by totally reversing, pharmacologically, the phenomenological
point of view, to the extent that writing as both technical and empirical becomes the
condition of possibility of apodictic noesis.37 It is difficult not to be similarly taken aback
when Blanchot, having advanced what he calls the one affirmation: that everything must
fade and that we can remain loyal only so long as we watch over this fading movement,38
then adds, I know there are the books. The books remains, temporarily, even if their reading
must open us to the necessity of this disappearance into which they withdraw themselves. The
books themselves refer to an existence. This existence, because it is no loner a presence,
begins to be deployed in history, and in the worst of histories, literary history.39 To do
justice to the subtleties of Blanchots argument I would need to cite what follows at length,
but in the interest of concision I shall extract only the following passage:
As long as the one who is close to us exists and, with him, the thought in which he
affirms himself, his thought opens itself to us, but preserved in this very relation, and
what preserves it is not only the mobility of life (this would be very little), but the
unpredictability introduced into this thought by the strangeness of the end.40
This is what I tend to retain from reading the conclusion of LAmiti in all its strangeness.
And yet Blanchot, addressing himself to a friend or, to use an inelegant expression,
addressing the absence of his friend, now forever absent addresses his discourse in the
absence that opens the literary space that alone enables this encounter, the transitional space
of reading and writing.
This is what I also read in the following passage, in which Jean-Luc Nancy speaks of
texts as
the resistance the insistence of community[,] [] intercalated, alternating, shared
texts, like all texts, offering what belongs to no one and returns to everyone: the
community of writing, the writing of community.
Including one day I will try to articulate this, I must those who neither write nor
read and those who have noting in common. For in reality, there is no such person.41

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Here, it is also necessary to cite Peter Sloterdijk:

Books, as the poet Jean Paul once remarked, are thick letters to friends. []
[H]umanism [is] telecommunication in the medium of print to underwrite friendship.
That which has been known since the days of Cicero as humanitas is in the narrowest
and widest sense a consequence of literacy. That written philosophy has managed
from its beginning more than 2500 years ago until the present day to remain
communicable is a result of its capacity ot make friends through its texts.42
The encounter between Blanchot and Bataille occurs at such a scene of writing, which
Blanchot opens first in La Bte de Lascaux. In relation to Lascaux, it is necessary to read
Bataille:
When we enter the Cave of Lascaux, a strong feeling takes hold of us that we do not
have when standing before the glass cases displaying the first fossilized remains of
men or their stone instruments. It is this same feeling of presence of clear and
burning presence that works of art of all ages have always excited in us. However it
may seem, it is to friendship, to the gentleness [douceur] of friendship, that the beauty
in the works of man appeals. Is it not beauty we love? Is not friendship the passion,
the forever repeated question to which beauty alone is the only possible response?43

Roberto Esposito, Communitas: The Origin and Destiny of Community, trans.

Timothy Campbell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010). I thank my friend
Dork Zabunyan for drawing my attention to this valuable work.
2
Georges Bataille quoted in Maurice Blanchot, The Unavowable Community, trans.
Pierre Joris (Barrytown: Station Hill, 1988), 1.
3
See Sigmund Freud, An Outline of Psycho-Analysis, in The Standard Edition of the
Completely Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (hereafter S.E.), ed. and trans.
James Strachey et al. (London: Hogarth Press, 19531974), 23:139207; and Jacques
Lacan, Introduction to the Thing, in The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII: The
Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 19591960, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Dennis Porter
(New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1992), 1984.
4
Esposito, Communitas, 6.
5
Ibid., 8.
6
See, in particular, Bernard Stiegler, Prometheuss Liver and Already There, in
Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus, trans. Richard Beardsworth and
George Collins (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988), 185203 & 20438.
7
Jean-Pierre Vernant, At Mans Table: Hesiods Foundation Myth of Sacrifice, in
The Cuisine of Sacrifice among the Greeks, ed. Marcel Detienne and Jean-Pierre
Vernant, trans. Paula Wissing (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1986), 52.
8
See Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota
Press, 1987).
9
See Plato, Meno, in Plato: Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper, trans. G. M. A.
Grube (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1997), 81b. I plan to discuss this
passage in greater detail in Stiegler, La Technique et le Temps, 4: Symboles et
diaboles, ou la guerre des esprits (Paris: ditions Galile, forthcoming).

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10

See, for example, Stiegler, Within the Limits of Capitalism, Economizing Means
Taking Care, January 5, 2009, http://www.arsindustrialis.org/?q=node/2922; For a
New Critique of Political Economy, trans. Daniel Ross (Malden: Polity, 2010); Taking
Care of Youth and the Generations, trans. Stephen Barker (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2010); and This System Does Not Produce Pleasure Anymore:
An Interview with Bernard Stiegler, by Pieter Lemmens, in Krisis: Journal for
Contemporary Philosophy 1 (2011): 3342.
11
See Stiegler, Ce qui fait que la vie vaut la peine dtre vcue. De la pharmacologie
(Paris: ditions Flammarion, 2010). Here, I comment on the link Peter Sloterdijk
makes between the humanitas in Cicero, re-emergent in the Renaissance, and the
letter-writing community of those friends who are humanists.
12
See Howard Rheingold, The Evolution of Reputation, in Smart Mobs: The Next
Social Revolution (Cambridge: Basic Books, 2002), 11332.
13
See Kostas Axelos, Lettres un jeune penseur (Paris: Les ditions de Minuit,
1996).
14
See Empedocles, Empdocle, in Les Prsocratiques, ed. and trans. Jean-Paul
Dumont (Paris: ditions Gallimard, 1988), 317439.
15
Jean Lauxerois, postface, A titre amical, in Lamicalit: thique Nicomaque,
Livres VIII et IX, by Aristotle (Ivry-sur-Seine: ditions Propos, 2002), 84; authors
translation.
16
Ibid., 84; authors translation.
17
Ibid., 86, authors translation.
18
See, for example, Stiegler, De la misre symbolique 1. Lpoque hyperindustrielle
(Paris: ditions Galile, 2004), 106: What links the I with the we in this
individuation is a pre-individual milieu, which has positive conditions of effectivity,
related to what I have called the retentional apparatuses. These retentional apparatuses
are supported by the technical milieu, which is the condition of the meeting of the I
and the we: the individuation of the I and of we is equally the individuation of a
technical system (this is what Simondon, strangely, did not see). [Ed.]
19
Jakob von Uexkll, A Foray Into the Worlds of Animals and Humans; with A
Theory of Meaning, trans. Joseph D. ONeill (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2010), 111.
20
Lauxerois, A titre amical, in Lamicalit, 84; authors translation.
21
Gilbert Simondon, Lindividu et sa gense psycho-biologique (Paris: Presses
Universitaires de France, 1964), 138; authors translation
22
Ibid., footnote 1; authors translation.
23
Ibid., 139; authors translation.
24
See Paul-Laurent Assoun, The Freudian Arsenal, in this issue, 1323.
25
Freud, Totem and Taboo, in S.E. 13: 14142; emphasis added.
26
See Stiegler, Ce qui fait que la vie vaut la peine dtre vcue.
27
See Ibid. and The Orthographic Age and The Genesis of Disorientation, in
Technics and Time 2: Disorientation, trans. Stephen Barker (Stanford: Stanford
University press, 2008), 1264 & 6596.
28
See Jacques Derrida, The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, trans.
Alan Bass (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1987); and Stiegler,
Mcreance et discrdit 3. Lesprit perdu du capitalisme (Paris: ditions Galile,
2006).
29
Blanchot, Friendship, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 1997), 291.

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30

See Stiegler, To Love, to Love Me, to Love Us: From September 11 to April 21,
in Acting Out, trans. David Barison, Daniel Ross, and Patrick Crogan (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2009), 3782.
31
See Stiegler, La Tlcratie contre la dmocratie (Paris: ditions Flammarion,
2006).
32
See Alain Badiou with Nicolas Truong, loge de lamour (Paris: ditions
Flammarion, 2009)
33
See Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 139; Le Sminaire de Jacques Lacan,
Livre XVI: Dun Autre lautre, 19681969, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (Paris: ditions
du Seuil, 2006), 22425 & 249; and Jacques-Alain Miller, Extimit, in Lacanian
Theory of Discourse: Subject, Structure, and Society, trans. Franoise MassardierKenney, ed. Mark Bracher, Marshall W. Alcorn, Jr., Ronald J. Corthell, and Franoise
Massardier-Kenney (New York: New York University Press, 1994), 7487.
34
Simondon, LIndividuation psychique et collective (Paris: ditions Aubier, 1989),
205; authors translation.
35
Simondon, Du mode dexistence des objets techniques (Paris: ditions Aubier,
1989), 247; authors translation.
36
See Stiegler, Chute et elevation. Lapolitique de Simondon, in Revue
Philosophique de la France et de lEtranger 3 (2006): 32541.
37
See Edmund Husserl, The Origin of Geometry, in Edmund Husserls Origin of
Geometry: An Introduction, by Jacques Derrida, ed. David B. Allison, trans. John P.
Leavey, Jr. (Stony Brook: Nicolas Hays, Ltd., 1978), 15780.
38
Blanchot, Friendship, 289.
39
Ibid., 28990.
40
Ibid., 290.
41
Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community, ed. Peter Connor and trans. Peter
Connor, Lisa Garbus, Michael Holland, and Simona Sawhney (Minneapolis: The
University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 42.
42
Peter Sloterdijk, Rules for the Human Zoo: a response to the Letter on
Humanism, in Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 27.1 (2009): 12;
translation slightly modified. See also note 11 above.
43
Bataille, Prehistoric Painting: Lascaux; or, the Birth of Art, trans. Austryn
Wainhouse (Lausanne: Skira, 1955), 12; translation modified.

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