Friendship as a way of living: Deconstruction and Quantum Storytelling

Kenneth Mølbjerg Jørgensen, David Michael Boje

Abstract


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This article explores Derrida’s notion of friendship and extends towards a quantum understanding of friendship. It deconstructs and resituates the hegemonic relationship of friend/enemy and develops another notion of friendship based on infinite alterity. We then regard friendship as a way of living. As an attitude to life, friendship is about being-there. It implies recognizing difference, multiplicity as well as lived experience in the moment of becoming. Friendship is about suspending of our immediate inclination to judgment embedded and embodied in theories, narratives, bodies, spatial and material arrangements and expose ourselves to the plural forces of the moment. The quantum understanding of friendship emphasizes that politics of friendship is embedded not only in discourse but also in spatial and material arrangements. It emphasizes the complexities involved in friendship in the sense that the material-discursive apparatuses that we are part of create the conditions and possibilities of connections but also separations. Further, it takes us beyond the human and discursive domain and recognizes instead the entanglement and connectedness of human and non-human agents.  Our care and hospitality must then be directed to the world including people, nature, animals, artifacts and the practices that we are engaged in.


Keywords


Derrida, friendship, way of living, deconstruction, quantum storytelling.

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