Rights statement: This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Global Discourse on 21/08/2018, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/23269995.2018.1505348
Accepted author manuscript, 335 KB, PDF document
Available under license: CC BY-NC: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Final published version
Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
}
TY - JOUR
T1 - Friendship and the new politics
T2 - beyond community
AU - Nordin, Astrid Hanna Maria
AU - Smith, Graham M.
N1 - This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Global Discourse on 21/08/2018, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/23269995.2018.1505348
PY - 2018
Y1 - 2018
N2 - What role can friendship play in contemporary politics? This article answers this question by showing how friendship supplements one of the central tropes of modern European thought: community. It argues that both the recent phenomenon of populism and more traditional political practice rely on this trope. This results in a politics which focuses on identity and difference, inclusion and exclusion. Ultimately this form of politics seeks an immanence which is impossible to achieve. In contrast, friendship offers a new way of thinking about politics as it focuses on open-ended relations between persons based not on sameness, but otherness and difference. The article articulates five key features of this understanding of friendship: (1) that it is a relationship; (2) between self and other; (3) which exists between the friends; which is (4) extendable into a network but not a unity; and (5) it eschews all programmes or projects. In this way, friendship suggests not a project or a programme, but an ethos. This article concludes by claiming that friendship is the open-ended and ongoing encounter with the other, and its politics holds a shared space open for the potential that this encounter brings.
AB - What role can friendship play in contemporary politics? This article answers this question by showing how friendship supplements one of the central tropes of modern European thought: community. It argues that both the recent phenomenon of populism and more traditional political practice rely on this trope. This results in a politics which focuses on identity and difference, inclusion and exclusion. Ultimately this form of politics seeks an immanence which is impossible to achieve. In contrast, friendship offers a new way of thinking about politics as it focuses on open-ended relations between persons based not on sameness, but otherness and difference. The article articulates five key features of this understanding of friendship: (1) that it is a relationship; (2) between self and other; (3) which exists between the friends; which is (4) extendable into a network but not a unity; and (5) it eschews all programmes or projects. In this way, friendship suggests not a project or a programme, but an ethos. This article concludes by claiming that friendship is the open-ended and ongoing encounter with the other, and its politics holds a shared space open for the potential that this encounter brings.
KW - Friendship
KW - community
KW - populism
KW - self
KW - other
U2 - 10.1080/23269995.2018.1505348
DO - 10.1080/23269995.2018.1505348
M3 - Journal article
VL - 8
SP - 615
EP - 632
JO - Global Discourse
JF - Global Discourse
SN - 2326-9995
IS - 4
ER -