Friendship as a Way of Life departs from Michel Foucault’s April 1981 interview of the same name. Speaking about queer intimacies to Le Gai Pied, the historian called for a new political ethics born of friendship’s potential to reinvent relation, to formulate “new alliances and the tying together of unforeseen lines of force” that disrupt the “readymade” intimacies of the couple, family, corporation, and army.1Michel Foucault, “Friendship as a Way of Life,” interview by René de Ceccaty, Jean Danet, and Jean Le Bitoux, Le Gai Pied 25 (April 1981): 35–36. “We must think,” impels Foucault, “that what exists is far from filling all possible spaces.”2Ibid. Resisting the impulse to typologize friendship—an urge betrayed by nursery rhymes (“Make new friends, but keep the old. One is silver, the other is gold.”), DJ Khaled (“No new friends, no new friends, no, no new.”), the friendzone, BFF, and frenemy alike—we will study some of friendship’s possibilities as enacted in writing between artists across the twentieth-century, from Foucault to Hervé Guibert and Sophie Calle, to Paula Becker, Clara Westhoff, Rainer Maria Rilke, Fleur Jaeggy, Ingeborg Bachmann, Paul Celan, Peter Hujar, David Wojnarowicz, Félix González-Torres, Ross Laycock, Maurice Blanchot, Georges Bataille, Roland Barthes, and Larry Mitchell.
Our study of friendship departs from two propositions. First, to remove friendship from a relational teleology that, starting with the stranger, proceeds to the acquaintance, then the friend, then, finally, the lover. Disabusing the friend of such an overdetermined relation (of subordination) to the lover allows us to consider friendship’s possibilities without reference—or in-difference, as Avery Gordon would say—to the possibilities of the romantic. Second, our fantasy of researching friendship together entails, with urgency, a detachment of friendship from the couple-form, the binary geometry of I-and-thou and its tendency to restrict what is thinkable in friendship to the relational terrain of the straight family. We proceed, instead, through acts of triangulation and quadrangulation—the plural mesh of friendships as a more capacious opening for thought.
1: Michel Foucault, Hervé Guibert, Sophie Calle
- Michel Foucault, “Friendship as a Way of Life,” interview by René de Ceccaty, Jean Danet, and Jean Le Bitoux, Le Gai Pied 25 (April 1981)
- Michel Foucault, Letter to Hervé Guibert, as reprinted in Tom Roach, Friendship as a Way of Life: Foucault, AIDS, and the Politics of Shared Estrangement ([July 28, 1983] 2012)
- Hervé Guibert, “A Man’s Secrets,” Written in Invisible Ink: Selected Stories ([1988] 2020)
- Yve-Alain Bois, “Paper Tigress” (excerpt), October 116 (2006)
- Sophie Calle, Anatoli (1984)
2: Fleur Jaeggy, Ingeborg Bachmann, Paul Celan
- Fleur Jaeggy, “The Aseptic Room,” I Am the Brother of XX ([1980] 2017)
- Ingeborg Bachmann, “The Thirtieth Year” (excerpt), The Thirtieth Year: Stories (1961)
- Ingeborg Bachmann & Paul Celan, Correspondence: Ingeborg Bachmann and Paul Celan (excerpts) ([1949–1967] 2010)
- Peter Szondi, “Eden,” Celan Studies ([1972] 2003)
- Paul Celan, “Corona,” Memory Rose into Threshold Speech ([1952] 2020)
3: Peter Hujar, David Wojnarowicz, Félix González-Torres, Ross Laycock
- Peter Hujar, Three Lives, Matthew Marks Gallery ([1958–1985] 2011)
- Moyra Davey, “Two Hot Horses,” Supplement 6 (2022)
- David Wojnarowicz, “Living Close to the Knives” (excerpt), Close to the Knives (1991)
- Félix González-Torres, Letter to Ross Laycock: Lovers (1988)
- Ross Laycock, Letter to Félix González-Torres: “Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour” (1988)
- Félix González-Torres, Letter to George Carl (May 12, 1988)
4: Paula Becker, Clara Westhoff, Rainer Maria Rilke
- Marie Darrieussecq, Being Here Is Everything: The Life of Paula Modersohn-Becker (excerpts) (2016)
- Adrienne Rich, “Paula Becker to Clara Westhoff,” The Dream of a Common Language: Poems 1974–1977 (1978)
- Rainer Maria Rilke, “Requiem for a Friend” ([1909] 1981)
- Paula Becker, Self-Portrait with Two Flowers in Her Raised Left Hand (1907)
5: Maurice Blanchot, Georges Bataille, Roland Barthes, Larry Mitchell
- Maurice Blanchot, “Friendship,” Friendship ([1962] 1997)
- Roland Barthes, How to Live Together (excerpt) ([1977] 2012)
- Larry Mitchell, The Faggots & Their Friends Between Revolutions ([1977] 1991)