Abstract

In Politics of Friendship, the aporias of friendship transposed to democracy indicate that if democracy is a promise of the universal inclusiveness of each singular one counting equally, and if its fraternal or national limitation naturalizes the ineluctable decision of inclusion and exclusion, then true friendship requires dis-proportion. It demands a certain rupture in reciprocity and equality, as well as the interruption of all fusion between the you and the me. In this way democracy remains an un-fulfillable promise. In what follows, an imaginary voyage to Europe inspired by the so-called Syracuse-paradigm, by means of a close reading of Derrida‘s The Other Heading: Reflections on Today's Europe, a sort of ’untimely meditation’ a la Nietzsche, I critically argue that Derrida’s idea of European identity, begotten by the irruption of the other, involves the radical other as a force that shows the limits of identity and of the self. Re-viewed, revisited and re-thought in the optic of the deconstructive standpoint, The Other Heading acquires a new light focusing on the possible/impossible relation between the political and the ethical (the Other Heading, i.e. democracy to come, Europe to come). The deconstructive standpoint I use here falls within the well known Derrida’s binary conception that undergird his way of thinking: presence/absence, speech/writing, and so forth.