In Praise of Friendship
by Michał Herer

If we are to resist returning to the logic of clashing, violent particularisms and defend ourselves against fascist or fascistoid tendencies that appear on the political horizon, we need a renaissance of the culture of friendship.

We are living in the age of decline, or at least crisis, of what might be called a ‘culture of friendship’. Our existence as social beings is constricted in a triangle whose three apices are: the alienated work, subjected to the principle of ruthless competition, the closed, isolated nuclear family and the national or ‘cultural’ community constituted in the act of aggression towards a common enemy (the ‘alien’). It is precisely this constriction that makes the culture of friendship decline, and vice versa: it is this decline that seems to make any other way of life increasingly harder to imagine.

However, if we are to resist the temptation of returning to the logic of clashing, violent particularisms and defend ourselves against fascist or fascistoid tendencies that appear on the political horizon, some kind of opening must occur, we must once again be able to experiment with new forms of being together, despite divisions resulting from territorial and cultural identities or family relations. What we need is a renaissance of the culture of friendship.

Originally published in Poland, this edition from Zero Books is the first English language publication of In Praise of Friendship.

Reviews:
This is a surprisingly, maybe even shockingly classical view of friendship, while fully aware of all the counter-arguments available. Michał Herer’s essay is preoccupied by the main question of moral and political philosophy, to wit, how are we to live together. In the last two centuries or so we’ve been telling each other why are we divided. Mr Herer demonstrates in a novel way that the foundations of togetherness are not lacking, even if they don’t coincide with the foundations of our societies. This is both alarming and reassuring. ~ G. M. Tamás, Visiting Professor at the Central European University in Budapest and Vienna
Michał Herer is an outstanding Polish philosopher of younger/middle generation, the author of some important books on contemporary philosophy, connaisseur, more specially, of Nietzche’s, Foucault’s and Deleuze’s thoughts and an brilliant interpreter of the hole critical tradition in the modern philosophy.

His essay Apologia of Friendship win the first prize in the periodical “Barbara Skarga competition for philosophical essay” organized by The Foundation for Thinking, a free Polish philosophical organization. It was highly appreciated by all ten jurors as both original, dealing in a subtle way with a long tradition of the philosophical reflection on friendship, and “classical” in its form, elegant and clear. The essay shows the erudition of the author, freely moving from the ancient to modern approaches to the concept of friendship, but it develops mostly his idea of renewing this concept in the context of contemporary moral, social and political problems.

The text is philosophical but accessible also to a larger public. Its significance is surely universal. I have no doubt it should be published in English to be red broadly beyond Poland. ~ Małgorzata Kowalska, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Białystok, the Chair of the Jury in the Barbara Skarga Competition for Philosophica
Michał Herer has written an important book the subject of which is the late-modern crisis of friendship. Friendship, conceived here as a complex dialectical play between intimacy and distance, possesses an indefinable quality which binds singulars in a singular manner, and because of that falls out of the charts of the modern society which now is achieving its peak of the Weberian disenchantment and rationalisation. Modern people, isolated and disciplined to enter only the relations regulated and prescribed by the law, have a need of a new collective, yet ‘neither family nor national community prove sufficient against the late-capitalist sense of anomy.’.

...Following the unfinished project of Michel Foucault, who, right before his death, announced that he wanted to write a ‘history of friendship,’ Michał Herer gives a succinct account of all the transformations of the concept from Plato and Aristotle, via Saint Thomas and Montaigne, to contemporary psychoanalysis (Reich, Horney, Lacan), Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida. But the main asset of Herer’s aproach is that he situates these transformations within the Foucauldian context of the socio-economic evolution of the Western culture and locates the moment in which the interest in friendship begins to wane in the early-modern bourgeois construction of family based on the notion of the romantic love... This little book is remarakbaly well written: by avoiding jargon and going straigth into the most essential matter of things, it reads smoothly as a convincing argument. ~ Prof. Agata Bielik-Robson, Professor of Jewish Studies Theology & Religious Studies, University of Nottingham, UK