Friendship Mihalis Mentinis

548887
research-article2014
TAP0010.1177/0959354314548887Theory & PsychologyMentinis
Article
Friendship: Towards a radical

grammar of relating
Theory & Psychology

2015, Vol. 25(1) 6379
The Author(s) 2014
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DOI: 10.1177/0959354314548887
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Mihalis Mentinis
Interdisciplinary Centre for Intercultural and Indigenous Studies, Pontificia Universidad Catlica de Chile
Abstract
The article discusses friendship as a centrifugal movement away from commonality, identity,
similarity, and sameness. In contradistinction to approaches that tend to look for the essence
of friendship and discuss it as a relationship that takes place in a chronotopic vacuum, the
argument presented here is based on a particular diagnostics which holds that the condition of
the contemporary subject and its relational fabric are largely centripetal in nature, and entangled
with discourses of the common, security, and trust as per the requirements of the contemporary
psycho-political demand for the production of shielded and encapsulated personhoods. Drawing
on Espositos notion of community not as a common property or a fusion of individuals, but,
rather, as constituted by lack and abstraction, and with reference to anthropological evidence on
the notion of friendship among the Mapuche indigenous population of Chile, the article attempts
to prefigure friendship as entailing the opening-up of the individual to the outside, a relational
experimentation, a radical grammar of relating that can resist the domination of centripetal
tendencies and the consequent impoverishment of the relational fabric.
Keywords
community, friendship, identity, immune individual, Mapuche, relational fabric
Defining the problem

Friendship has been approached from a number of perspectives and agendas, and, indeed,
there is considerable variation and dispute concerning its nature, its meaning, and the
forms it takes. The current article does not aim to produce yet another typology of friendship and delineate the characteristics and internal workings of each type, as is the case
with philosophical work ranging from Aristotles (trans. 2002) and Kants (1775
80/1991) tackling of the topic in The Nicomachean Ethics and The Lectures on Friendship
respectively, to contemporary theoretical discussions (e.g., Little, 2000; May, 2012). Nor
does this paper necessarily constitute an attempt to develop a theory of civic friendship
Corresponding author:
Mihalis Mentinis, Interdisciplinary Centre for Intercultural and Indigenous Studies, Dept. 203F, Gr.
Bustamante 250, Santiago, 7501284, Chile.
Email: m.mentinis@gmail.com
Downloaded from tap.sagepub.com at PONTIFICIA UNIVERSIDAD CATOLICA DE CHILE on July 21, 2016
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Theory & Psychology 25(1)
structured around the question of whether or not citizens can be friends, whether they can
achieve a sense of unity, lend aid, and support one another, or, in short, what McDonald
(2009) calls a metaphysics of friendship as the saving grace of social unity (p. 211).
My aim here is a different one: I want to discuss friendship, following, to a certain extent,
Derrida (1994/1997), as an act rather than a relationship or situation, that is, through
Foucault (1997) and Esposito (2010), as a risky radical opening up of the self, a process
of disidentification, a centrifugal movement away from what is proper, shared, similar,
or common (e.g., descent, history, race, interest, and so on), as a non-formalized form of
relating outside the grip of the legal system and established norms of relating, a properly
social and autonomous grammar of conduct.
Focusing on friendship as an act as opposed to a relationship or situation does not
intend to negate or simplify the ontological status of an act as a form of relating to someone, as a relation. Rather, and whilst also bearing in mind the limited space available, my
intention here is to prioritize that aspect of friendship that is related to the opening up of
the self, its disidentification, thus distinguishing it from the centripetal aspects of relationships or situations which are traditionally thought as being constitutive of identity
and the self. It is in this precise sense that I talk of friendship as an act, even though it is
undisputable that this opening up and undoing is performed in relation to someone. In
contrast to the prevailing tendency towards a positive approach to friendship as constitutive of the individual, whether it be discussed in terms of individuation in association
with the work of Simondon (Stiegler, 2013), as a Nietzschean inspired becoming who
we are (Nehamas, 2010), or in terms of Foucaults care of the self (Webb, 2003) or
otherwise, the current article adopts a negative approach conceptualizing friendship
not as an act of constitution but of individual undoing, as a loss of the subjects wholeness. Drawing on Roberto Espositos (2010) theoretical insights on community not as a
common possession and form of common belonging, but in terms of something that is
constituted through a leakage of subjectivity and through a reading of the ways in which
the Mapuche indigenous people of a specific community in Chile understand and form
friendships, the latter is discussed as a centrifugal process of disidentification that blurs
the borders of the self and actually produces community; community as a relation that
prevents the individual from achieving closure and full identity. Finally, following
Foucault (1997), friendship is discussed as an experimental, risk-taking act that breaks
with the paradigm of trust, safety, and security that structures the impoverished neoliberal relational fabric and prefigures new forms of relating to come.
Anthropological and historical work on the subject suggests that friendship does not
simply vary from culture to culture and epoch to epochthus having no stable essence
but most importantly, that its character is tightly linked to the prevailing conceptions of
personhood and community that a given culture holds (see Carrier, 1999; Desai &
Killick, 2010). This psychosocial context appears to be missing from contemporary discussions of friendship. More specifically, the bulk of existing literature tends to follow
two basic directions: either it ignores the context altogether and discusses friendship
simply as an interactional subjectivation processNehamas (2010) discussion of
friendship and his reading of Ridley Scotts 1991 film Thelma & Louise (Polk Gitlin &
Scott, 1991), is a paradigmatic example of this kind of contextless approach; or, the context is identified, almost exclusively, with the virtual space and virtual friendship which,
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in turn, leads to it being framed conservatively and often moralistically as of a lesser and
alienated quality compared to actual or ideal types (e.g., Cocking & Matthews,
2000; Frding & Peterson, 2012) However, if friendship has no essence, then any discussion of it needs to be contextualized, that is, properly situated and discussed in relation
to the condition of the contemporary subject and its relational fabric. Although an
extended analysis of this kind is outside the scope of this particular article, in what follows, I will provide a concise diagnostics that will form the basis of the subsequent discussion. It is assumed, as Cutterham argues, that friendship today exists in conflict with
capital, and that conflict has an unwritten history (2013, p. 38). The present paper can
be considered as a modest contribution to the writing of this history; it is not intended to
be prescriptive, rather it signals an attempt to open up space for reflecting on ourselves,
our identifications, and the way we relate to each other, and it is an account that vacillates
between what friendship is and what friendship ought to be.
A diagnostics of contemporary friendship

Cutterham (2013) argues that
for Capital friendship is a resource to be bought, packaged and sold, like everything else. In as
much as it cant be subordinated to that process, friendship is inimical to capital, and as such,
like everything else, it is under attack. (p. 41)
Under neoliberalism, then, friendship is impoverished and exploited for both the economic benefits it provides and the psycho-political effects it can bring about. In relation
to the former, it is useful to consider the ways in which friendship is often incorporated
into marketing strategies, such as the Mr. Kipling advertisements in the UK enjoining
people to celebrate their friendship through consumption, by tweeting a photo of themselves and their best friend to the companys website, after which they receive a discount
at certain stores in London. In relation to the latter, the transition from the we are all a
family to we are all friends here rhetoric and the concomitant promotion of a culture
of friendship in companies, is an illustrative example of how what is presented as fostering individuality, anti-authoritarianism, and apparently egalitarian relations, in actual
fact obfuscates the amplification of normative control and the reinforcement of control
circuits (Costa, 2012).
The reduction of friendship to friendliness represents another dimension of its subjection to psycho-political demands. The liberal tradition, for example, recast the fundamental political relationship as that between each individual man and the state itself.
Thus, self-interest eventually became more important than friendship for grasping social
reality. However, in order for the individual to be successful in the commercial economy
and maximize its profits, it was important that there was a rational friendly form of
behavior which, among other things, regulated conduct and produced feelings of security
and trust (Cutterham, 2013). Neoliberalism is no different in this respect. Whereas
friendship is becoming more and more impoverished and increasingly reduced to contacts, acquaintances, and networks of unknowns through the influence of social media,
generic friendliness emerges as the most important skill for finding employment, even
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for low-paid jobs. Given that friendliness does not come naturally within conditions of
exploitation, there is an increased psycho-political demand for people to learn, both the
skills of friendliness and how to express them in public. Self-help books, guides on selfimprovement, and sessions of all varieties (from seminars to therapeutic sessions) proliferate, with psy-experts offering practical advice on how to improve friendliness skills
through the reproduction of standardized phrases and behavior. Friendliness, we could
say then, is a central component of the general positive psychological kit, an endemic
part of neoliberal governmentality (Binkley, 2011).
An interesting aspect of the relationship between neoliberalism and friendship is
explored by Gregg (2007) in relation to social media. Gregg argues that with sites like
Myspacewhich emerged out of an entrepreneurial impetus and operated as a publicity
website for aspiring musiciansand specific professional networking sites like
LinkedIn, accepted friends, whether in recognition of a good profile or shared interests,
constitute a network of people that not only blurs any clear distinction between friend
and contact but, more importantly, brings together friendship with self-promotion and
job opportunities. For this reason, one is required to construct and promote a coherent
self, a unified and interesting identity that will be consumed by others depending on
their needs and tastes. As Gregg explains, in a relatively explicit way, these sites reveal
that in neoliberal societies friendship is labour in the sense that it involves constant
attention and cultivation, the rewards of which include improved standing and greater
opportunity (2007, p. 5). The reduction of friendship to logics of consumption and its
ensuing degradation from its subjection to a cost-benefit analysiswhich also characterizes other kinds of relationships (see Badiou, 2012; Illouz, 2008)has been explored
further by Todd May. Employing the Foucauldian concept of the figure, May (2012)
argues that the two dominant figures in neoliberalism, the entrepreneur and the consumer, are tightly linked to two disparate, albeit sometimes overlapping, forms of
friendship (also corresponding to the Aristotelian distinction between friendship of
utility and friendship of pleasure respectively). It follows without saying that, for the
entrepreneur, it is the subsequent profit to be gained by a particular relationship that
constitutes its justification, and if that profit can no longer be expected, then friendship
can and should be abandoned, before moving on and looking for other opportunities.
Similarly, consumerist friendships are about using others for pleasure and enjoyment.
Consumerist friendships partake of their particular pleasures, and no two consumerist
friendships are entirely alike. Like the aforementioned entrepreneurial kinds, consumerist friendships are easily replaced; if one friend no longer provides pleasure or is fun
to be with, then one simply drops them for others who are more entertaining. The logic
at play here is that people are bound predominantly by enjoyment, and when enjoyment
is no longer present relationships are terminated. Vernon (2010) identifies some similar
tendencies in relation to self-help culture. By teaching us to place ourselves at the center
of the universe, he explains, self-help books almost invariably reduce friends to bit-part
players in ones life story; friends cease to be other people and instead are regarded as a
resource for the multifarious needs one has: one friend to shop with, another friend to
cry with; another again to laugh with, and someone else to rebel with. Friends, in short,
as service providers (p. 243).
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Mays (2012) proposal in order to deal with the neoliberalization of friendship is a

deep friendship, one which negates utility and the predominant economic logic and in
so doing constitutes a site of resistance to the neoliberal relational fabric; it is a friendship based on other-regarding, affection, shared past and meaning, trust,
mutual self-development, and self-invention. However, and despite the fact that
Mays is one of the very few approaches to friendship to be grounded on an elaborated
diagnostics, and even though his discussion of the entrepreneurial and consumptive
friendship accurately captures and depicts dominant tendencies in the neoliberal relational fabric, his diagnostics is, ultimately, insufficient inasmuch as it fails to examine
the broader psychosocial constitution of the contemporary subject and its relational fabric, and most importantly for our discussion, the prevalence of centripetal tendencies of
personal as well as collective identity. Moreover, Mays theory of friendship eventually
also reproduces a strong centripetal tendency, defining the shared past and, vis--vis
Marilyn Friedman, shared interests and values as important grounds of friendship.
Thus, Mays conceptualization of friendship collapses into the paradigm of the common
and the shared, of trust and security, and, as such, emerges as a primarily inward looking
process, rather than an (experimental) opening up and disidentification. Furthermore, by
proposing of friendship as a model for building solidarity movements, May tends to
completely blur the difference between friendship and comradeship, something that
strengthens the centripetal tendency in his idea of friendship yet still, since comradeship
is a largely centripetal configuration.
In attempting to move beyond Mays diagnostics, it is important to see that the contemporary individual is not simply a homo economicus, as May seems to suggest, but also a
deeply psychologized, contained, encapsulated individual, one who is separated from others; immunized and bordered, depoliticized and preoccupied almost exclusively with its
own self-development and peace of mind (Dardot & Laval, 2014; De Vos, 2012; Esposito,
2010; Illouz, 2008; Parker, 2007; Rose, 1996; Silva, 2011, 2012). These tendencies cannot
be explained solely in economic terms. This kind of individual develops forms of relating
that are equally inward looking, largely centripetal, very often instrumental, and definitely
identitarian. Discourses of the same, of the shared, of the common, of collective
identity, and other associated discourses of safety and security dominate the relational
fabric: the common blood of family, the common past and habits of friends, the common
territory of the State, the common culture of the nation or ethnic group, the common genes
of race, the common brotherhood in Christ of the church, the common economic interests
of the plutocrats, the common ideas of a political organization, the common identity of this
or that group, and so on and so forth. An alternative understanding of friendship, then,
could be a way, both to counter the hegemony of centripetal tendencies in the relational
field, and through which to prefigure a new grammar of relating.
Despite the fact that friendship always begins as a centrifugal force away from the
common and the sharedfirst, as a movement away from the common blood, descent,
and culture of the familyit is continually confronted with centripetal social forces that
attempt to contain it and co-opt it. Consider, in this respect, how the language of family
attempts to co-opt friendship by incorporating it within its consanguineal system, the
evidence for which can be observed in the tendency to call close friends brothers, or
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the tendency of progressive parents to describe their relationship with their children as
one of friendshipa gesture which serves to incorporate the latter within the hierarchical
system that is the family. Thus, similarity, sameness, commonality, and identity have
been traditionally considered, implicitly or explicitly, as an endemic part of friendship
relationships of all kinds and under all situations. The widely held claim among many
conservative scholars, from the classic enthusiasts of industrial capitalism like Adam
Smith and David Hume to contemporary figures (e.g., Badhwar, 2008; Pahl, 2000; Quill,
2009) that the introduction of commerce in the 17th and 18th centuries was an important
factor that facilitated the formation of friendships, is an exemplar of this implicit assumption that the common is constitutive of friendship. For, indeed, commercial societies
constituted, and still do constitute, fertile ground for the formation of forms of friendship
based on shared interests. In fact, Adam Smith not only identified similarity of outlook
and behavior as fundamental preconditions of friendship, he also explicitly compared
market-friendships (based on common interests) with relationships built within the family (based on common descent): colleagues in office, partners in trade, call one another
brothers, and frequently feel towards one another as if they were really so (Quill, 2009,
p. 38). What Smiths conservative psychology did, in other words, was to register the
centripetal forces at work in relation to friendship, and subsume the latter within the
discourse of the family, of the consanguineal bond.
Nowhere is this passionate desire for similarity and sameness more readily observable
than in the world of social media. Lovink (2011) has coined the term echo chambers in
order to describe a condition whereby individuals live in isolation and avoid contact and
all forms of engagement with those who do not match their ideas and preferences. As he
argues, rather than foster new public engagements, online discussions tend to take place
within echo chambers where groups of like-minded individuals, consciously or not,
avoid debate with their cultural or political adversaries (p. 2). Similarly, Gregg (2007)
argues that, generally speaking, broadcasting oneself via social networking sites invariably means speaking to certain communities which only serves to perpetuate, and even
celebrate, homogeneous networks of similar social backgrounds, as well as constructing
community as security blanket. However, as Bishop has argued, it is not only within
the virtual realm that people tend to cluster together with others who share similar economic and political perspectives, and refuse to venture beyond the safety of what is
familiar; in fact, this is increasingly how people behave more generally: pockets of likeminded citizens have become so ideologically inbred that we dont know, cant understand and can barely conceive of those people who live just a few miles away (as
quoted in Quill, 2009, p. 41). he subsumption of friendship within the discourse of
like-mindedness, and its associated discourses of safety, security, and trust, thus can be
said to intersect with the psycho-political proclamations of generic psychotherapy concerning the building of self-defenses and the shielding of the person against the hostile
external world (see Mentinis, 2013). One is more and more enjoined, then, to seek refuge in the safety of the self and within the secure net or communities of like-minded
individuals, taking care to avoid contact with strangers and other unknowns who might
threaten his or her cognitive and affective stability and/or disturb his/her achieved calmness of mind and identity. What this amounts to above all is the consolidation of a
largely fragile isolated individual, who needs to protect his/her security and safety at all
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cost, an individual for whom friendship is nothing but a largely homogeneous centripetal
relationship that provides safety and security.
Theories on community and identity, from social identity theory in social psychology
(Tajfel & Turner, 1979) and community psychology (e.g., Krause, 2001), to communitarian philosophies (e.g., MacIntyre, 1981) and identity politics (e.g., Laclau & Mouffe,
1985) tend to theorize the interrelation between the two by focusing almost exclusively
on the centripetal tendencies of what is considered to be an indissoluble link. Partly in an
attempt to confront an abstract liberal individualism that disregards the role of the context, the aforementioned theories proposed a self constituted through its context and its
relationships, in turn, risking overdetermination and a concomitant overemphasis on a
centripetal understanding of identity and community. So-called identity politics can thus
be seen as a paradigmatic example of how emancipatory political practice collapses into
strong centripetal movements performed as enhanced identifications and entrenched
communities, whilst also serving as a way for camouflaged individualist agendas and
separatism to continue to flourish (see Hobsbawm, 1996; Martn Alcoff, n.d.; Rectenwald,
2013; Smith, 2008; for a more detailed discussion of the complexity of identity politics).
Moreover, despite the fact that most of the critiques of identity politics are of a Leftist
origin, one should not forget that class politics has also been strongly identitarian in the
past and, indeed, still continues to be so (see Rectenwald, 2013). That said, it is important
to develop theories concerning the disidentification of the individual and the dislocation
of community, and the discussion of friendship presented in this paper is meant as a modest contribution to this endeavor. Having said this, however, it is also important to stress
that some centripetal formations based on comradeship and solidarity are important
given the present historical conditions. Thus, the central issue at stake is not to replace
these kinds of relationships with friendship, but rather to maintain a tension between
centripetal formations like comradeship and centrifugal flows like friendship, in turn,
rescuing friendship from its absorption into centripetality.
There is a certain degree of illegality in friendship, an anarchic element one could
say, and as such it can be a force for experimentation and destabilization as it pertains to
persons and communities.
From immunity to community

The project of re-inventing friendship is tightly linked with the project of re-inventing
what it means to be a person and what it means to be in a community with others.
Encapsulated individuals configure relational formations and communities based upon
an understanding of the common and the shared as possessions and properties, formations and communities which draw their borders by means of exclusion. Consequently, a
different understanding of friendship is tightly linked with the project of building a different kind of community. Apropos Community, Roberto Esposito (2010) distances himself from traditional understandings of it as a property that joins individuals together,
an attribute that qualifies them as belonging to the same totality, or a substance that
is produced by their union. In contradistinction to what communitarian philosophies and
communicative ethics understand as a whole and fullness, he engages in an etymological analysis of the word community, concluding that it derives its meaning from
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the word munus, a word designating the gift one gives (not the gift one receives!) and
which is distinguished by its obligatory character. The obligatory character of munus,
Esposito explains, makes it a gift one gives because one must give, because one cannot
not give, can not keep for oneself, thus making it an act over which one has no mastery.
Thus, the munus, rather than being related to stability and possession (and therefore closure, self-containment, security, and safety), implies loss, subtraction, transfer. In this
way, community enjoys a categorical distance from any conception of property, as something that is collectively owned by a totality of individuals or by virtue of having a common identity. In other words, community is neither an entity, a collective subject, nor a
totality of subjects, it is a relation: the relation that makes the subjects no longer individual subjects because it closes them off from their identity with a line, which in traversing them, alters them. It is the with, the between, and the threshold where the subjects
meet in a point of contact that brings them into relation with others to the degree to which
it separates them from themselves.
The profound meaning of the word munus, then, serves to make it abundantly clear
that what the members of a community share, is nothing but an expropriation of their
essence; an expropriation that affects their condition of being subjects:
Community isnt joined to an addition but to a subtraction of subjectivity, by which I mean that
its members are no longer identical with themselves but are constitutively exposed to a
propensity that forces them to open their own individual boundaries in order to appear as what
is outside themselves. (Esposito, 2010, p. 138)
The modern individual, Esposito argues, in keeping with the diagnostics of the previous
section, thus emerges as an immunized (the word also derives its meaning from munus, as
the opposite of community) absolute individual, one that is bordered in such a way as to
keep it isolated, protected, and, at the same time, free and fearful of the obligation towards
the munus and the communitarian link that, ultimately, threatens its identity by exposing
it to the contagion of relationship with others. Community thus gradually assumes a particular representation of identity, fusion, and endogamy; the common as a relational void
is represented as the fullness of a common subject, and eventually the community, identified as people, territory, or essence, is walled in and separated from the outside. Thus,
community is saturated with communitarianism, local and functional interests, patriotism,
and a whole host of things that negate community as a relation of lack.
Even though Esposito does not discuss friendship in his work, it is my argument here
that friendship, as a centrifugal movement of disidentification, as an act of relating that
opens up the self, blurs its boundaries, and engenders a certain leakage of subjectivity, is
ultimately one of the forms through which we can break free from the shackles of identity and community as belonging and possession. In other words, if traditional notions of
community as based on territory, common culture, etc., are tightly linked to closed, centripetal identifications, then Espositos notion of community as a relation is predicated
upon the centrifugal, disidentifying movements of friendship. In this sense, friendship
can be considered the only properly social form of relating by virtue of its rejection of a
specific conceptualization of the common as property, as shared quality, as well as
through its refusal of centripetality and inwardness. Moreover, it does not pertain to the
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constitution and completion of the person, but, rather, to its very unmaking, its undoing,
the risky and threatening dissolution of its borders; as such, it is a simultaneously hospitable and hos-tile mode of relating. Friedmans (1993) feminist critique of communitarianism and the oppressive character of the many social roles and structures of
communities contains elements that are similar to my own argument; Friedman proposes
friendship as a means through which to escape obligatory membership of certain communities, and shift towards a model of community which usefully counterbalances the
family-neighborhood-nation complex favored by communitarians. Despite the fact that
her critical approach to communitarianism never arrives to the point of subverting our
understanding of community as a whole, as it is the case with Esposito for example, as
she tends to discuss friendship as a form of solidarity, emphasizing the importance of
shared values and interests for the formation of alternative communities, her account
nevertheless retains a strong centrifugal quality that dislocates community and allows the
individual to disidentify. Friendship is precisely one of the modes available to women
through which to negate the identity imposed on them by their communities (families,
nations, etc.) and look to other possibilities. As she argues, friendship, more so than
many other relationships, can provide social support for people who are idiosyncratic,
whose unconventional values and deviant life-styles make them victims of intolerance
(1993, p. 298). In this particular formulation, similar values, common interests, or trust
need not be a necessary condition for friendship and/or solidarity.
Indigenous social psychologies

The way that friendship is initiated among the Mapuche indigenous people of Chile
serves as a particularly useful example through which to elucidate some of these aforementioned ideas. The Mapuche understanding of friendship is, of course, tightly linked
to their conception of personhood and, more pertinently still, to the process of becoming
a che, a true person. As the anthropologist Magnus Course (2010) argues in relation to
the Mapuche community he studied, whilst it may be accepted that a person inherits
certain characteristics from his/her kinship, these characteristics, and kinship relationships in general, are insufficient in and of themselves for a person to be defined as a che.
For, to be a true person, or chengen in the language of the Mapuche, is neither something one inherits nor a permanent status that one obtains indefinitely either. On the
contrary, to be a true person requires ceaselessly demonstrating the requisite qualities of
autonomy and individuality, which, in turn, are demonstrated through the act of making
friendships as centrifugal movements away from the consanguine bonds and based on
common descent. It is expedient to remember how Derrida (1994/1997) was especially
suspicious of traditional theories of friendship, as they tended to remove the obstacle of
difference and instead emphasized similarity and commonality: why would a friend be
like a brother? he wrote, let us dream of a friendship which goes beyond this proximity
of the congeneric double, beyond parenthood Let us ask ourselves what would then
be the politics of such a beyond the principle of fraternity (p. viii).1
The ideas of autonomy, individuality, and intentionality, Course (2010) explains, are
properly indigenous ones, and consequently unrelated to the ways in which these ideas
are framed within Western individualistic ideology. As such, Mapuche centrifugal
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personhood neither entails the total subsumption of the individual within extreme forms
of sociality, nor can it be considered a form of calculative individualism. To make friendships is not viewed as a means to widen ones access to resources and profitability, it is
wholly unrelated to the need to have social contacts and a vast network of people as a
self-help strategy and/or as service providers, or as the source of pleasure and fun.
Phrased otherwise, a real person exists only as a constant centrifugal movement. At this
juncture, we can readily observe how the Mapuche indigenous psychology stands in
contradistinction to both Western mainstream (humanistic) psychological ideas of the
true person as a self-actualized unit, and the psychotherapeutic reinforcement of closure and immunization against what might threaten ones composure.
An interesting aspect in the formation of friendships among the Mapuche is the ritualized exchange of wine, which, according to Course (2010), is the paradigmatic activity
of both friendship and social exchange. Drinking groups, which are formed for no particular reason outside the houses of clandestine wine-sellers, represent specific instances
whereby the opening up of the self is ceremonially performed through the giving of
wine. Course explains that the wine is not shared but given by the donor to somebody else. For not only is there a clear linguistic distinction between the two verbs in the
Mapuche language, but there is also a difference in terms of the social semantics of the
two words: giving wine as an act of friendship, for example, is not related to sharing
with others or serving wine to gueststhis is demonstrated by the fact that it is only the
initial receiver towards whom the act of friendship is performed, and not the other participants, that ever thanks the donor. Can we not view this practice of the giving of
wine as a symbolic act of this leakage of subjectivity that involves the opening up of the
self and the process of disidentification involved in Friendship? The donor of the wine
quietly presents the unopened carton he has bought for a person of his choosing (who is
generally not a relative and to whom he performs the act of opening up) who, upon its
reception, will appear simultaneously shocked and delighted. The receiver drinks, and
then the glass is ritually passed between other members of the group; sociality mediated
through the act of friendship. The example of the Mapuche clarifies two important interrelated aspects of the present discussion. First, it demonstrates that centripetal relationships co-exist with centrifugal relational flows, with the constant disidentification of the
latter prioritized when it comes to the definition of personhood. It is a process that
could be seen, to use Cavareros words (2000), as a passage from what one is, which
is associated with membership and identity, to who one is, associated with disidentification (and Friendship). Second, the process of disidentification and dislocation of community (in this case primarily the family but also in terms of the village and ethnic group)
is performed through friendship. In other words, friendship is both that which facilitates
the movement away from the common and identity and a passage to who one is.
For this particular centrifugal conception of personhood death poses a serious ontological problem. As Course argues:
the webs of reciprocity through which persons have constituted themselves remain unfinished;
there are outstanding debts which must be cleared. This notion of debt is not confined to
material objects, but to the notion that sociality is itself a process of generalized exchange.
(2010, p. 164)
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In my reading of Courses account, this debt is the munus. It is not a material debt,
Course leaves no room for doubt in this respect, but the obligatory gift of subjectivity.
Moreover, the generalized exchange to which Course refers could be read as nothing less
than the mutual leakage of subjectivity that is constitutive of the Mapuche community.
Thus, the death of the physical body is not an adequate condition for the debt to be
removed, namely the obligation of munus to be cancelled and the person to be freed
from the realm of sociality. As a matter of fact, Course (2007) describes a funeral ritual
in which the responsibility falls upon both the family and the friends to remove the
deceased from the community, through recounting in public incidents of their lives with
him or her, and thus bringing narrative closure to the persons life by bringing to a halt
its dentripetal identitarian movements and its centrifugal disidentifications. After all, if
the true person is nothing but this incessant disidentification through the act of friendship, then the narrative closure performed by ones friends corresponds to nothing less
than death itself.
Towards a radical grammar of relating

In contrast to a Rancirian (Rancire, 1995/1999) model that sees in friendship a model
of solidarity, one which Friedman (1993) and May (2012) also explicitly adopt for that
matter, I would argue that it is important to maintain in relation to friendship an approach
closer to that of Derridas (1994/1997) model, that seeks to efface, or at least to smudge,
the borders between friendship and enmity. There appears to be a tendency amongst
theorists of friendship to bundle together and homogenize several configurations of the
relational fabric (solidarity, friendship, comradeship, etc.), in order to make them symmetrical, as it were. However, it is my argument in this article that forms of relating need
not be symmetrical and homologous. On the contrary, they can be asymmetrical, even
contradictory, and perform different functions. The centripetality of comradeship and its
norms based on trust, solidarity, cooperation, which has been and still is of tremendous
importance in radical politics, need not be packaged together with friendship, which
would be better understood as a radically centrifugal movement of disidentification and
towards the non-common, and, as such, freed from the paradigm of trust and security.
Perhaps the simultaneous existence of centripetal and centrifugal forms of relating, no
matter their apparent incompatibility, may be the only way to deal with the present historical situation: comradeship for our struggles and as a way to counterbalance the relativism lurking in friendship. And friendship, in turn, can help to soften the dogmatism
and closure so often endemic in militant forms of comradeship. One should stress at this
juncture that my discussion of friendship does not mean to imply that friends should not
share anything in common, that trust must be necessarily eradicated, or that cooperation
and solidarity should also be absent. What I mean to stress is, first, that friendship is a
centrifugal experimental act rather than a close configuration, a relationship, and second,
that conceptualizing it as an act shifts how we look at friendship so that it is transformed
into a radical form of relating that unhinges and disturbs the established rules of
relating.
If we are to truly envisage friendship as a radical grammar of relating, and thus break
from its relation to similarity, commonality, safety, and security, then it is important to
74
reclaim for it a spirit of experimentation and risk. As Lovink (2011) argues, now that the
means to build relationships, individual or collective, are no longer in the hands (at least
as they used to be) of institutions that emphasized commonality and sameness, such as
the Church (brothers in Christ), the village (same place of origin), the clan (common
descent) and so on, we are now free to start experimenting with new relationships, provisional and sticky, and break from the rigidness of the norms defining who can relate
to whom and in what terms. Such a gesture is predicated upon a radical break with our
obsessive attachment to security, safety, and trust that keeps us isolated in like-minded
territories:
Out there are random encounters with a cause. In order to be open to radically different
possibilities, we need to say farewell to the trust paradigm that conceptually supports
paranoid security systems and culminates in walled gardens. The risk discourse should no
longer only apply to entrepreneurs who are praised for their courageous risk-taking (with other
peoples money) while the vast majority of users remain locked into trust cages. (Lovink,
2011, p. 164)
Kingston (2009) argues that to think of friendship as dependent on shared values and
similarity is to assume that shared background and common goals naturally dictate the
terms of the relationship. Indeed, to place emphasis on commonality and the shared
would not merely serve to negate the anarchic character of friendship, but also leave
practically no space for social experimentation. Forms of relating that do emphasize the
common and the shared, security and trust, such as fraternity, identity politics, comradeship, etc., all presuppose the existence of strong norms that prevent experimentation.
Foucault (1997) is right in his assertion that the program of action that characterizes
certain forms of relationships, what we could refer to as their scripts, so to speak, places
a prohibition upon invention and experimentation within relationships. In friendship,
unlike other forms of relating whose nature is strongly determined by societal norms, its
patterns and workings can be decided exclusively and internally by the participants
themselves, and vary considerably from friendship to friendship. There is no doubt a
dialectic relationship between the public and the private in friendship too; that is, between
societal and cultural expectations about what friendship really ought to be and friends
own perception of their friendship (Rawlins, 1992). However, the fact still remains that,
unlike marriage, family, and other contractual relationships, friendship remains outside
the reach of the legal system, and in opposition to relationships whose norms are determined by a structure/organization, and are often already in place when someone joins
inin friendship the norms and rules, the relational elements involved, are autonomously set. Friendship is outside the reach of the law, it produces its own laws, it lacks a
formalized status, and it is in this sense that it is an anarchic form of relating.
Foucaults (1997) texts on friendship are especially useful for helping us grasp the
importance of experimentation, both for building new friendships and for resisting the
impoverishment of the relational fabric. The defining elements consist of the opening up
of the self, experimentation as a process of attending to an encounter, a break with the
normalizing systems of relating and power relations, and the engagement with dynamic
and unstable systems of power relations. Kingston (2009) notes, by way of Foucault, that
75
Mentinis
friendship means working together with others to build new subjectivities and relationships rather than falling back on social norms. It is a concept of friendship that privileges
experimentation over traditional, institutional or racial bonds (p. 10). It would be more
apt in terms of our discussion here, then, to say that friendship means experimenting with
others for the strict purpose of undoing the self, smashing out of its encapsulation, transgressing its borders, disidentifying, and, in turn, producing community, for community is
also an act rather than merely a state of a situation.
To break from the paradigm of security and safety, it is important to develop a notion
of friendship that is not simply reduced to a site of refuge and shelter for the individual.
If friendship and community as a relation are tightly linked as aforementioned, then it is
important to reiterate that, for Esposito, community
isnt a mode of being, much less a making of the individual subject. It isnt the subjects
expansion or multiplication but its exposure to what interrupts the closing and turns it inside
out: a dizziness, a syncope, a spasm in the continuity of the subject. (2010, p. 7)
Friendship, then, as an act constituting community, does not keep us warm, and doesnt
protect us; on the contrary, it exposes us to the most extreme of risks: that of losing, along
with our individuality, the borders that guarantee its inviolability with respect to others.
The exposure that friendship entails, the munus of self upon which it is predicated, cannot be experienced without pain. Exposure is a serious threat, both for the one who gives,
but also for the one who receives. It is precisely this risk-taking that disturbs individual
closure and immunity. Friendship as exploration and experimentation, ultimately, is a
threat to liberal democracies; a threat to normative relationships and its relational configuration. As Vernon argues:
in one mode friendship resists the limiting constraints of inherited social conventions, notably
in terms of the dictates of tight notions of family; in another mode it is a protest against
individualistic, competitive, conceptions of what it is to be human; and in another it is an effort
to create new forms of relationship founded upon the freedom of friendship that go against the
norm. (2010, p. 254)
Although Vernon (2010) recognizes the socially and politically destabilizing effect friendship can induce, he is hesitant to develop this line of inquiry further. Similar in this regard,
albeit from a more radical perspective than Vernon, is Cutterhams (2013) claim, noted at
the beginning of the paper, that capital systematically attempts to subordinate friendship to
its logics. It is important, then, to rescue friendship from becoming just another commodified relationship operating within the market logic of the relational fabric of capitalism, and
instead re-invent it as a form of active resistance. Recall how in the first section I referred
to Ridley Scotts film Thelma & Louise. It was argued there that the foremost problem with
Nehamas approach was the non-appreciation of the sociopolitical context within which
processes of friendship emerge and take place. As such, Nehamas is a depoliticized reading of the relationship between the two women as an example of how friendship can be
expressed even through crime, cruelty and immorality (2010, p. 277). Vernon, on the other
handas well as Vices (1997) Bakhtinian reading of the same filmoffers a more
76
politicized reading of the film and takes into account the context, which he reads as being
hostile to women and seeking to keep them in check. Thus, Thelma and Louises friendship
is read, ultimately, as one of resistance. But this is an insufficient account also, for it
assumes that friendship qua relationship pre-exists the act of resistance itself, and fails to
see the re-invention of their friendship not along the lines of a mutual tolerance and acceptance but as a profound dissolution of self (as well as risk taking) upon which resistance is
predicated in the film. Thelma and Louise, therefore, do not continue in a linear fashion
within the confines of their previous relationship and simply utilize it as a means to resist
the hostile phallocratic society; but, rather, they are engaging in a new type of friendship
precisely in order to resist, and this new type of friendship involves a process of disidentifying from their roles as women in a given society, exploding the borders of the self and
taking risks. Risk taking also appears to be inherent in the Mapuche act of friendship we
discussed in the previous section. The fact that the receiver of the wine drinks first can definitely be considered as an act of risk taking, since wine is the primary medium through
which sorcery and witchcraft are performed. Furthermore, friendship (and by extension all
sociality) takes place as a form of transgression, and this is because, despite the fact that
other kinds of alcoholic beverages are legally available, the ceremonial act is performed by
the use of illegally obtained wine. In other words, through giving wine and engaging in an
act of friendship one is taking a risk, and performing an act that breaks with the laws of a
situation. If one cannot risk himself, as Esposito argues vis--vis George Bataille, then
meaning is enclosed within a homologous conception of being, the self is subtracted from
otherness, shielded off inside itself. The final image of Thelma and Louises car hovering
out over somewhere between freedom and death may very well leave us with mixed feelings. But the fundamental point is to see how the act of friendship itself is constituted precisely through an act of risking the self and resisting the established relational fabric.
Resistance, thought, and risk are tightly linked here: not to resist, as Badiou says, is not
to think. Not to think is not to risk risking (2005, p. 8). And what is it precisely that one
must risk risking so as to be able to think and resist if not his/her very own individuality,
his/her encapsulation, his/her immunity, his/her identity. Risking the self, then, is the very
condition of thinking and resistance, and it is friendship that can ultimately bring the two
together. It is then, and only then, that we can begin to talk of communication in relation to
friendship and as an important aspect of community, for, as Georges Bataille points out,
communication cannot proceed from one full and intact individual to another. It requires
individuals whose separate existence in themselves is risked at the limit of death and nothingness (as cited in Esposito, 2010, pp. 145146). It is time to start living dangerously in
order to re-invent friendship.
Funding
This research received funding from the Interdisciplinary Centre for Intercultural and Indigenous
Studies. CONICYT - FONDAP 15110006.
Note
1. It is true that between Derrida and Esposito there are important theoretical tensions when it
comes to community and therefore friendship (even if Esposito does not discuss friendship).
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Mentinis
However, the nature and purpose of the present article does not require that these theoretical
tensions are addressed. The use I make of philosophers like Derrida and Foucault is rather
instrumental in this sense, and I do not follow their overall theoretical positions.
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Author biography
Mihalis Mentinis is a visiting researcher in the Interdisciplinary Centre for Intercultural and
Indigenous Studies (ICIIS) at the Pontificia Universidad Catlica de Chile. His research interests
are in the area of critical social psychology and indigenous psychologies.

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