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Reading William Blake’s Politics of Friendship with Jacques Derrida

This paper aims to read William Blake’s notion of friendship with Jacques Derrida’s re-politicization of Friendship in Politics of Friendship, in order to express Blake’s powerful presence within a field of political philosophy. While friendship in neo-liberal world order is marginalized as private, impotent, and sentimental feeling, it was originally a strong political concept working as a condition for genuine justice. Derrida is trying to revive friendship as a political concept supplementing justice, which will illuminate Blake’s similar efforts to redefine friendship in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. For Blake, friendship is the very power that imbalances the “antagonistic” relationship between a friend and an enemy resulting in the de-stabilization of the subject herself. The marriage in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell is not between the Angel and the Devil but within the Angel (or Angel turned into Devil), which points out the incessant indeterminacy within each friend. Without friendship, human beings are completely isolated, left only with a violent way of interaction, if such thing is possible. Derrida’s disruption of the friend-enemy antinomy similarly suggests the subject’s fluidity or her openness to the absolute heterogeneity of the other. This opennenss and indeterminacy are presented as a baseless base of community without home or hearth, a kind of community completely breaking itself from a faction or a clique. Blake’s last work, Jerusalem, tests the theory of friendship he explored in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell as a public and political principle of community-building. Some might be skeptical about the political efficacy of this loose community without strong solidarity. However, the revolution of “the political” that both Derrida and Blake pursue is something waiting to be actualized since, as Blake succinctly put, “what is now proved was once, only imagin’d” (E 619).