FOREWORD: FRIENDSHIP, UNAUTHORIZED AVITAL RONELL Avital Ronell

I have wanted to get a close- up, to confirm an incomparable alliance. Maybe show up for her, if only as a measure of the postal logic to which her writing bears witness. I could enact the stalls of arrival, tracking the uncharted conver- gence of a destiny and its destination. Show up without properly manifesting, develop an itinerary that stays depropriative— at once steady in its nearness and prudently off range. Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe has taught us to think in terms of depropriation, which entails a form of rigorous hesitation when as- suming responsibility for the work or thought of another, an ally or ancestor, or unknown straggler of writing. I would be capable, I tell myself, of refraining from putting stakes down as one does when claiming a territory. To the extent that I am at all “capable”—willed- to- power on any level of existence, able to ac- company and say and squeak, like my cousin Josefine, Queen of the Mausvolk. But that’s another story of certifiable kinship, another depropriating route; I shall desist from exploring my literary roots to follow a different cut of desti- nation. Postal logic indicates that we might not make it, that some other form of address, inadvertent and remote, might overtake the travel plan that I had in mind. Nonetheless, I wanted to show up for her, take the call by accompany- ing her writing, at least part of the way. Not sure what in fact propelled me, I would do my best, “faire mon impossible,” as I sometimes tell myself. But why, in this instance and to this address?

1 Maybe we were meant to be friends. Yet, so much militated against such an extravagance: the hypothesis that we were meant to be friends. Language, phil- osophical habits and markers, existentially pitched checkpoints were stacked against us. On what basis could I possibly befriend Michal B.—according to what ledger of determinations, approved contingencies, contractual loopholes, or transferential coordinates? The blocked passage to friendship remains a di-

vii viii AVITAL RONELL lemma for those constituted, if only in passing, as women. The restrictive cov- enant is a rigorous part of the order of things. When you’re a girl, friendship doesn’t just happen; you have to be willing to go against all sorts of grains and traditionally set restrictions, the blowback of cynical postulations. Still, no flex of muscled lucidity will help you make the grade as friend, for the situation is not a matter of some accidental lockout. Our metaphysical heritage has rigorously demanded the embargo on the female clasp of friendship. Despite revolutionary breakthrough stances or carefully attended displace- ments, one still remains tethered to a grating heritage that defines, oppresses, structures, feeds, regulates, or plumps any attempt at reconfigured personhood, setting up the rules and regs, metaphysically speaking, that make politically- tinged aspects of relatedness an affair of men. Metaphysics, our homeroom language and shared existential springboard, puts a ban on friendship among women. The stakes are undoubtedly high, for the motif of friendship ensures the modeling of all sorts of vital ethical and political dispositions, grounding our sense of justice. As Derrida has argued, friendship serves as the blueprint for political and amorous cleaves. Women, for the most part, have been assigned to the historical sidelines, even though they prove adept at traumatically intrusive break- ins and manage to achieve a modicum of social rewrites. One thinks of Antigone, of Kleist’s feminine figurines that shoot out counter- memory to block historical narratives of entitlement; one continues to be struck by the howls of one- woman–lone- warrior types like Valerie Solanas; one continues to stress over the seething deflations of Ingeborg Bachmann and the ongoing peel- down of Sylvia Plath. (I have more names in mind; I love enumeration and memorial- izing remembrance— I can go overboard with my lists, but this is not the place.) So. How to get around this embarrassment and still make some sort of legiti- mate outreach program primed on the protocols of friendship stick? My share of Penis- neid is wrapped up in withheld friendship, an attachment or dispo- sition, an inclination of being-in- the- world declared off-limits to women. Of course male designees yammer staggeringly, from Aristotle to our day, about the nearly impossible attainment of friendship, but that plaint operates on an entirely other level and register of constraint and taboo. Maybe I was called up by a different politics of friendship, a different grid or writing practice that pulls one close to another’s distress. I search out the skies daily for smoke signals, often discreet and sophisticated or technologically up- graded. I am always on the lookout for signaling systems, no matter how remote or deferred, no matter how misdirected or suddenly they appear on my desk. I FRIENDSHIP, UNAUTHORIZED ix am not the only one waiting anxiously at the ready to sign for a designated— or stray— envoi. I for my part may be the warp of a defective GPS, for I cannot imag- ine that my function as address has been taken all that seriously. Still, things, no matter how deflected or dead letter boxed, do have a way of showing up at my door or on my desk (the door is law for Celan, the desk for Kafka: these are not contingent architectural motifs). I have little to offer, and less that I can do. At most, I can provide a reading. But is that so derisory? For so many of the lumi- nous writers that command my moves and immobility, reading sets the stage for friendship’s sweep, for the amicable rejoinder, establishing the levers that pull in another Dasein. I first heard of Michal Ben- Naftali from Marguerite Derrida one afternoon in Ris- Orangis, when we were hanging out and Jacques was taking lunch in Paris with his Hebrew translator. Since that initiatory encounter— a rumor, a discreet shadow enfolded in the Aufgabe from which Walter Benjamin whipped us (well, me) into a hysterical frenzy— I have been following Ben- Naftali’s trajectory, won- dering, among other things and destinations, about the vectors defining our intellectual kinship and the conditions of an a priori fellowship, quietly staging the “sight unseen” kind of embrace that I was prepared to offer. Or, digging out of a paleonymic rut, let us say that I probed the premises for establishing a rela- tionality, whether gendered or not, maybe even scouring our shared traditions in search of solid amity, a kind of grrlship, since “fellowship” sounds peculiar, if not altogether void. In any case, I have felt, from day one, responsible to and for Michal Ben- Naftali. Lately, though, the gentle disposition has turned into a streak of fearfulness, for I have become anxious about initializing her important text, upsetting its carefully laid tracks and ecosystems with my inescapable trip- ups prompted by the historical panic attacks that make language hard to come by, self- undermining and capable of upturning the most serene trajectories of thought. Already in the early paragraphs I flail about for a bolstering idiom, a way to designate “fellowship” among, let us say, women— or more crunched still, among women authors, philosophers in the feminine, and the stock of con- ceptual incompatibilities bequeathed to Michal and me. The inevitable slip-up, the stammer and stall, is not entirely my fault when I try to give expression to an inclination on my part to befriend Michal Ben- Naftali. You already know that, on the whole, philosophy squeezes out friendship among women, even merely so- called and difficultly coded women. I am on repetition compulsion; but this bears repeating, calling out, obsessing with, lamenting. There’s simply no call for friendship among women in the meta- x AVITAL RONELL physical dialup— at most, grrls were accorded some provisional and retaliatory alliances, identificatory contrivances, or other busts in the consolidation of Mit- sein. For Hegel, woman not only famously stood as the irony of the community, but she figured also as its enemy. Still, friendship can host adversity; friendship among enemies was not accommodated, however, as a particular style or option in philosophical rosters—at least not before the alliance of Montaigne and Nietz- sche was closed, or before Werner Herzog’s boundary- breaking film, Mein bester Feind (My Best Enemy) or the notion of “frenemy” was coined relatively recently. We know from other well-documented philosophical tendencies that friend- ship can spin easily enough into enmity, or even that enmity is the intensifica- tion of friendship, as when Blake writes, “Be my enemy for friendship’s sake.” I don’t think that Hegel, who was in it to win it, was dialectically angling for the capture of powerful affect, for raising the stakes of friendship by turning women into standout enemies, though. When you scroll down the philosophical cor- ridor of determinations, becoming friends—the interlocution or supplement of narcissistic annexation that this may imply—is strictly a man’s affair. We inherited this relentless state of things, remain inscribed by its persistence, no matter how removed from the injurious logic of metaphysical say- so one might hope by now to be. Under the circumstances, what was I to do? Inventing complicities, I started tracking a fantasy friendship, always in the making. I have a fertile imagination and can make all sorts of improbables happen. Like the emotionally fragile be- ings that one occasionally comes across, I can embrace across the distance any number of best and only and absolutely singular friends. I am always in ear- nest and elfishly intense. Still, I try not to be a psycho about it— about the mak- ing and keeping and responsibly tending to the custodianship of friendship, whether real or make- believe. As a Nietzschean, I do not scare away easily from the virtues of fiction, from masks, and play, and the dance of Dis- tanz— the sepa- rations and parting of ways that make nearness at all possible. One does not bag a friend; rather, one approaches from a distance: maintaining position, one tries not to violate the air space of the other. In this case, though, with Michal, to invoke a Shakespearean way of squatting in language’s felicities, I am very likely sharing the heir space where one tries very hard not to collide or punc- ture the flight plan of the other. In Shakespeare “air” and “heir” keep each other going, or knock each other out. The responsibility of finding temporary resi- dency in another’s work and highly cathected air/heir space is enormous, nearly unnegotiable— especially if you are coded as a girl and must take into account all FRIENDSHIP, UNAUTHORIZED xi the problems of legitimacy and the history of catfights that this traditionally im- plies. Not that men aren’t parricidal, fratricidal, genocidal— don’t get me started.

Michal and I spring from and cover Derridean expanses. Does that give friend- ship a sororal spin? A lesbo- maso- pedic advantage? A scholarly edge, perhaps?

2 Among scholars, hanging onto a friend is laughably difficult, nearly impossible. It is not easy to make friends in the first place, not when one is tethered to the book, bound by its exigencies, overwritten by dead zones, held in existen- tial lockdown day in day out. Let us get back to basics, think this whole thing through before I saddle the work before us with a notice of friendship, an un- avoidably violating approach. Does the work even want me around, welcome my framing practices or mediating pretense? Have I been summoned, or like K. of The Castle, do I show up in order to impose a faux legitimacy, drumming up a title— be it that of land surveyor or signatory, purveyor of a critical introduc- tion. Who called me to occupy this place? And even if one thinks one has been called, is it not the height of arrogance to take the ostensible call? Perhaps every text needs a friend; yet, I should not assume that this one has been forlorn or left abandoned. The question of whether a friend is even wanted, and if so, whether a friend is wanted dead or alive—supposing such determinations can be made at all—remains an open one, especially in our age of undead socializa- tion. Nowadays you are haunted even if the other proves to be more or less alive! As for scholars, they notoriously spin on a solitary axis, despite the steadiness of their gathering rituals when they book flights and attend conferences, sit on panels, evaluate incoming manuscripts, and offer the occasional keynote—all of which implies, in the end, a passion for relatedness within the precincts of non- relation. Friendship is a hard nut to crack when everyone is sitting in solitary, conferring with Nietzschean shadows in the aftermath of what Derrida has said that everyone else has said about the constitutive glitches in having or being a friend. How much dependency gets uploaded into the zones of friendship? If you want to keep a friend, assuming such things are possible, you have to make a number of concessions, besides scheduling the narcissistic time- share. Let us give this some further consideration. When you get up close and per- sonal, decide not to run away and manage to hang in there, really liking them, the resolve to stave off the cannibalistic libido can indicate one such concession, xii AVITAL RONELL which for some Daseins is a tall order. All of this gets decidedly complicated when one considers the difficulties, tracked by Montaigne, Emerson, Blanchot, and now Michal Ben-Naftali, of knowing the friend. Emerson levers the friend as a figure for the unknown, a kind of dead brother— oh, but this runs us into a thicket of anxiety.1 Let me drive philia in another direction, in an effort to get the inclination right. The process of introjection indicates some violence; from the looks of it, those in the process of becoming friends must stave off many sorts of transferential addresses and currents coming at them from all sides, with their strong sense of Dis- tanz. I understand that pluralizing the singular friend brings trouble, for how many friends is one allotted? Multiplying friendship into a near- horde is problematic, according to Aristotle. If you are overpopulated with friends, you have no legitimate claim to friendship. But how many is too much? Asks Derrida. There are some downsides to this offer of friendship, in addition to the emer- gence it proffers of bright moments. Friendship opens up timelines, putting you within earshot of finitude’s atomic clock. Capable of shifting intensities and barometric pressure, friendship refines skills associated with the organiza- tion of limits and stop- clocks. For Nietzsche, the friend was the future, non- contemporaneous, a promissory note. For others, the friend offers different mo- dalities, thwarts, and comforts, of non- presence. Even if, as Derrida has taught, quoting a long lineage of friendly agitators, there is no friend. But wait. In order for the friendless announcement to cohere, one will have turned toward friends to scope the vacated space of friendship: “O my friends!” Turning away and turning toward make up part of the same movement of friendship to which one inescapably bears a relation, not excluding such times as when the friend is quietly dismissed or rigorously unavailable, ever cutting away from a given call- out. Even the littlest of people make friends, move in and out of early stages of intimacy and play, know the staggering experience of break up. Some of us, shy and reticent, are still frozen in time, quietly playing with dolls, our pretend- friends. Am I able to have a friend, one wonders? As for me, I tend to get at- tached and put together a make-believe family. At least, I appear to stick to the tropologies of husbands and wives, brothers and sisters. I have matured since the days of miniature tea parties with my dolls, when I could coddle a selected stand- in for all proximate beings, a stuffed animal. (I never really played with dolls, but that’s another matter. They were real, even then, and in some ways still are so.) At one point, I must have set out to find more fleshy friendships, though I can see Nietzsche’s point about the non- contemporaneity of the other, the way he alerts us to the inescapable disappear- FRIENDSHIP, UNAUTHORIZED xiii ance, the dropped call, of friendship: one should expect a locator malfunction when it comes to fixing the Gesprächspartner, the species of friend built up around the interlocutor as inner dream team, the friend as fantasy, as fiction of address and tireless reader of one’s exploits, inner recesses, persistent disarticu- lations.

Let’s face it. On the outskirts of academic endeavor one is commonly on one’s own. I am provisionally counting out the specular colloquy and private horde of cowriters, well- established dictators that populate one’s solitude, the offshore friendship account, the secret store of cheerleaders, those who show up when you can’t go on, you must go on. Closer to the core of university life, friendship scores some points here and there, but tends quickly to snag and fold, perhaps as is to be expected in any theater of work or in the shadow of competitive exer- tion. Still, one needs allies, craves a kinship network—whether disruptive and improbable or reliably bolstering, familiar— and wants to think of oneself as ca- pable of making friends. At least let me be able to make friends. For Bataille, reading constitutes the sovereign act of friendship. Emerson follows other but similarly run protocols to requite friendship with reading. The performativity of making friends, or the injunction to fake-until- you- make friendship, in itself leaves one insecure and feeling basically alone, unprotected— the affective Grundstruktur of any workstation in the university. In the fledgling stages of becoming- intellectual (I use shorthand; “intellectual” does not cut it, keeps you in the rut of modernist paleonymy, stuck with obso- lesced concepts and habits, but what’s a grrl to do?)— priming the intellectual program, some of us cast as a certain type: a bit of an outcast, a somewhat defi- ant but mostly vulnerable misfit. Defiance was not meant to style one’s original stance; some of us were painfully earnest baby scholars, dedicated, conditioned for every sort of servitude, understanding that doing time, whether in graduate school or as part of a teaching body, amounted to acts— or, rather, passivities— of cultish subjection. The solitude was not icily absolute. In the old days, one formed aggregates and quasi- gangs along the way. One could be menacing to others— that’s a re- lationship in itself. One certainly could not afford to practice extreme forms of social isolation. Are you kidding? One needed to move in and out of sectors of the group psychology dialup. One could regroup, fall apart, regroup, change the menu, shift ground, regroup. Before going into scholarly lockdown, I, for my part, was able to form a primal horde with that friend or this teacher, but that’s about it, and this spare social diet, with only some add-ons, seemed to suf- xiv AVITAL RONELL fice for some of us in our salad days as stand- alone students of deconstruction. Academia was not exactly a nurturing haven for the sassy yet anxious, horribly serious young scholar, already set for sleeplessness and off-the- chart intensities. Brimming with Kantian enthusiasm and our sick/healthy humor, we were not entirely appreciated (and I, let me be clear about this, was consistently depre- ciated even though I wore tight dresses and sparkly rhinestones, always trying to look my best as I delivered papers and listened to my teachers without once retouching my lipstick during seminar). Some of my friendships, I admit, were hitchhikers on the death- drive. They frazzled my nerves and wore me down, hitting me in the sensitive parts of my Geworfenheit. Others were vital to my growth. Still others remain to this day incalculable, inenarrable; yet, I am convinced they have saved my life, such as it is or was. Still, the need for friendship, whether intellectually called up or close to the vest, unruly or stealthy, rich and cheerful, feels like it may require some genealogical purging, for this need may signal some part of a steady weakening, a long- term or mere bout of existential fatigue, unsovereignty. I can understand if Michal chooses to repel this offer of friendship, if her work bounces me off its walls, or if Paul North plays Türhüter, the Kafkan se- curity guard, to my effort to get through the first portal. There is every reason for them to reject this bid and its intrusive blueprint. But could it be the case that I need them? And so I go after the work, its dead-or- alive author, its pro- tective custodian and overseer. What does that say about me, I wonder? As a practicing paranoid lectrice— what Kathy Acker might call a “Hannibal Lectrice” after the deranged cannibalistic reader of minds and texts, the Incorporator par excellence— I read up on the hypothetical options available to me. When they are not plainly out to get me, these texts offer instructions about my case, for they are only meant for me— nurfürdichbestimmt, again following up on the Kafkan security- doorkeeper function, who tells you, at the threshold, that you are its ex- ercise of an apostrophic ethics: you were awaited and inscribed—this opening, only aimed at you, its singular address. I’m in it, deep. Finding oneself in need of friends is often delineated in Shakespeare as the default position of something like psychic stability, and the needy are ever on the way to meeting the same destiny as Hamlet’s BFFs, sent to their death—as Freud reminds us, despite Hamlet’s supposed paralysis: despite his legendary indecisiveness and world- historical stall, Prince Hamlet still sends his friends to hell. Blowing off friendship, he powers up and goes into action, on a killing spree. Horatio, another cut of friendship, is preserved in order to write up Ham- let, assuring his epitaph, ensepulchering him in narrative remembrance. FRIENDSHIP, UNAUTHORIZED xv It could well be that each friend is responsible for surges in writing— or, more resolutely offered, for flagging the relation to writing that threatens to undermine us all. If it weren’t for this threat, and we were not faced continually with an unstoppable fear of freak-out, the store of feints that writing announces, who would bother writing— I mean who would bother to write? The friend in Kafka’s Judgment stands and deflates with writing’s destination, fixed as a pin- pointed axis that can be collapsed by a paternal flex of muscle. The famous “friend in Russia” to whom George corresponds, and from whom he squeezes an address, is on Father’s payroll. Any level of complaint or mere description, any prompt tossed in the direction of another has been intercepted by the father in Kafka, who compromises his- son- the- writer by severing the imaginary remove of friendship, even cutting out the enticements of an undeniably disappointing friendship. Russia, in Kafka, appears to function as the address of non- address, somewhere near the undetectable Castle- territory of his last and uncompleted novel. In some ways, writing fills out the blanks of a world- historical grievance, pre- paring the brief on a complaint that does not always manage to locate its ad- dressee, as is the case with yet another text of Kafka, his Letter to Father. I can- not be sure that Michal’s work subscribes to this description— that she enrolls her intervention in a history of the plaint, even as she tracks and triggers the itineraries of affect— in Hebrew, “affect” and “emotion” share for the most part the same articulation, are not differentiated distinctly, which may explain some standoffs and directions taken or averted on different discursive planes. Is there a complaint lodged at the heart of this book— something that cries out urgently to be rectified or reconfigured? I think so, though the inroads to the “grieving subject” are subtle, retiring, and measured. I would situate this writing as part of the Heideggerian Schreiben/Shrei, the cri/écrit or close to the Nietzschean slice of assertion wherein a relentless series of complaints are launched like so many smart missiles at our metaphysical tradition. Thinking— for Heidegger no longer philosophizes— unfolds in the neighborhood where a plaintiff ’s cry has been nei- ther subdued nor tagged out. Some of the Heideggerian transmitters admittedly have been knocked down in the meantime, in no small part due to the affective foreclosures of his still unscrolling text. The disturbed world called out by Hei- degger, in a work admittedly shaky though fiercely thought- provoking, collapses in ways that are pertinent to how we map and contour problem areas and the language that continues to protect them. What Heidegger saw as a destiny un- dergoes investigation and controlled turbulence in the rerouting proposed by Derrida and the deracinating grid set down by his vast work on Heidegger’s eva- xvi AVITAL RONELL sive maneuvers and targeted underhandedness. But if Heidegger were merely underhanded or dismissible, we would not have to be watching his every move, the wrong turns his often lumbering yet essential work takes. This timely con- text is why, among other reasons, it becomes necessary to read the disruptive itineraries traced by Ben-Naftali’s considerations of Derrida’s Post Card, which takes aim at the Heideggerian conflations of destinal statement, and institutes a crucial “distinerring” of his key terms of attunement and address. By means of his apostrophic ethics, Derrida indicates the way to a necessary and critical inter- ruption of Heideggerian gathering and landing patterns, also taken to account by Lévinas. The disseminative, nomadic spread of Derridian expanses and their tele- outposts press against the volkish commitments of gathering- motifs under- scored by the Heideggerian text. Michal Ben- Naftali does not produce familiar discursive runs or collate con- ventional academic dossiers. She takes liberties; she takes pains; she digs up dirt on missing concepts; she redirects a biblical icon. She strikes out in the direction of minoritized traces while sticking with the big guns of critical theory. She approaches her work with an idiomatic tempo and temperament, diverging here and there from the Einstellung or attitude of normed scholarly argumenta- tion. Her plaint strikes some unfamiliar notes, in a way that makes us question past appropriations of parallel review. For while her tonal modulations are un- doubtedly new, her sense of inherited meaning and historical conservationism remains firmly entrenched in the protocols of tradition, offering poignant her- meneutic spinoffs of literary innovation and solidly set philosophemes. Yet the plaint she launches has to do with a particular tone that Ben-Naftali brings to the table, tuning her work to historical and philosophical fissure and a certain proto- feminist verve. Sometimes the thinking woman’s complaint is a matter of tone, notoriously difficult to fix or stabilize for the purpose of conceptual runs and reliable determinations. Derrida ran up against the limit-case of tone in philosophy when tapping different registers of meaning in Kant’s work. The tonal quality of Ben- Naftali’s investigations indicates a mark of urgency without strident affect, a respectful intensity compelled by the texts and themes under review. If there is a teleological term to the book, it is set in terms of failure— a determination that keeps the work clean, unrelentingly on track, sober, and humble. The voice that speaks to us of its critical directives is, in many ways, an anguished one, seeking the right tonal articulation within the constraints of necessary failure. If she were self- assured, in full complicity with the tenets of reasonable argumentation, the work would have fallen short of its tensed exer- tion and stated intention: to capture the consistent lurches and collapses of FRIENDSHIP, UNAUTHORIZED xvii failure. At this time, let me pass the mic, and start her off as Michal questions the very pressures under which she will venture to address us. Taking her cue from Derrida’s rigorous reluctance to speak for the other, to make definitive claims on behalf of the other for whom one advocates— or presumes to introduce— Michal Ben- Naftali outlines the binding terms of her dilemma, a fateful fecundity:

Derrida, however, is convinced that the failure to write about the other is a condition for the success of writing— a conviction that is not merely cognitive but in fact, and first of all, ethical. Since failure is given, one must write, or maybe even more so: there is a mode that is more appropriate than others. Can I find this mode, if only by approxima- tion, in order to identify in advance with the impending failure? The scroll safeguards your privacy, your difference, your secrets, and articulates the limits of my memory, those narrow limits of relationship, which outline precisely and without pity the limits and spaces of writing. I try to contain you in it, in me, as far as my hand reaches, in vain, I try to speak to you [. . .]. This page intentionally left blank