The Promise of Friendship investigates what makes friendship possible and good for human beings. In dialogue with authors ranging from Aristotle and Montaigne to Proust, Levinas, and Derrida, Sarah Horton argues that friendship is suited to our finitude—that is, to the limits within which human beings live—and proposes a novel understanding of friendship as translation: friends translate the world for each other so that each one experiences the world not as the other does but in light of the friend’s always-unknowable experience. The very distance between friends that makes it impossible for them to know each other wholly also makes it possible for them to be transformed by friendship. Friendship, then, is possible and good for those who love precisely that they can never wholly know the friend. Friendship is a profound, mutual self-giving that highlights the irreplaceability of each person, fundamentally shapes the self, and is one of the greatest joys of human existence.
Table des matières
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Introduction: Can One Write of Friendship?
1. At the Origins of Friendship: Initial Displacements
2. The Ethical Challenge of Friendship
3. Within Finitude, Bearing the Infinite
4. The Writing of Friendship: Reading Proust’s
In Search of Lost Time
5. Fidelity in the Dark: On Presence and Knowledge
6. The Creation of Impossible Friendship
Conclusion: Risking Friendship in the Twenty-First Century
Notes
Bibliography
Index
A propos de l’auteur
Sarah Horton is pursuing research in philosophy at the Institut catholique de Paris.
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