Never Divide and Love: From The Ethics of Psychoanalysis to The Politics of Friendship

In this paper, I would like to propose a kind of parallel reading of Lacan and Derrida, not in order to confront them with each other and to decide in favor of one of them, but in order to shed light on a certain conceptual configuration or topography that they seem to share. In the first half of the paper I focus on the notion of neighbor, proposed by Lacan in his seminar The Ethics of Psychoanalysis. I show how he elaborated this notion with multiple references to Freud and to various literary works, and in relation to the positing and removal of a dividing line relative to love. In the second half of the paper I try to demonstrate that the notion of friend occupies a homologous position in the conceptual framework of Derrida’s Politics of Friendship, at the center of which we find an in-depth analysis of that distinction between friend and enemy which marks the works of Carl Schmitt. Nevertheless, this homology does not spell identity. I suggest in the conclusion that the divergence between the two thinkers opens up a field for new and potentially important investigations.