Greetings,
I’m attaching the short text “Friendship,” written by Maurice Blanchot on the occasion of George Bataille’s death (1962), as a sort of “ancillary bundle” to accompany leek soup.
In a nutshell, what I think I’ve gleaned from my recent reading, in retracing the bond that links Bataille to friend Blanchot to friend Derrida to friend J-L Nancy—across the intertextual field delimited by Bataille’s Friendship (first half of Guilty), Blanchot’s “Friendship” and The Unavowable Community, Nancy’s The Inoperative Community and Derrida’s The Politics of Friendship—goes something like this: the “plasma of friendship” is Death, in the same way that the “plasma of community” is the Death of my Friend.
This line of inquiry into issues of friendship and community begins with Bataille and, like much of Bataille’s major work, emerges from the very heart of Nazi-occupied France (not to say Europe).
So, I guess the question for me is whether we can take Olson’s notion of “polis” as another word for “community.”
See you round the campfire.
a’
