The Spectral Life of Friends: Derrida, Cicero, Atticus

This paper digs into Derrida's critical engagement in The Politics of Friendship with Cicero's idealised portrait of friendship in On Friendship. It argues that the issue Derrida takes with Cicero's narcissistic model of friendship as a relationship of similitude, as exemplified by the historic friendship between Scipio and Laelius, is in fact belied by the friendship that hovers around the margins of this text: that between Cicero and Atticus, the dedicatee of On Friendship, whose unequal status with Cicero is a precondition for the alterity at the heart of their friendship, along thoroughly Derridean lines. The paper then seeks to show how Cicero's Letters to Atticus further exemplifies Derrida's fundamental insight about another aspect of the friend's alterity -- namely, the fact that one friend dies before the other, leaving the latter to commemorate and mourn the one who dies first. Cicero's posthumously published collection of Letters to Atticus displays this asynchronicity in its very structure, as the letters in the opening book are shown to have been chosen for their resonance with moments from the very end of Cicero's life, which Atticus outlived. Cicero's Letters to Atticus, structured as it is by the anticipation of death, mourning and survival that provide the key to Derrida's formulation of friendship, is shown to anticipate Derrida's treatise by some millennia.