(My) Life in a Community of Friends

Taking up Jacques Derrida’s conception of all people’s singularity and working through Bernard Williams’s approach to the idea of all people’s equality, the essay explores a significant changeover underway in our understanding of democracy. Two aspects of this changeover are highlighted. The first concerns a shift from a distinctively modern conception of democracy as having an ideal telos to a variation in which democracy is conceived without a telos at all. The second concerns a shift from a distinctively modern conception of democratic citizenship that affirms the likeness of each citizen to a variation that, paradoxically, stresses unlikeness. These shifts are not conceived as simple departures from previous conceptions of democratic politics but as belonging to a faithful recollection of the very experience that calls for democratic politics in the first place: the experience of the friend. Attempting to develop a compelling conception of life in a community of friends that can do justice to both the singularity of each and the equality of all, the essay explores an outlook on democratic politics that promises a future for democracy beyond its increasingly exhausted modern condition.