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Politics of Friendship - A Comparative Analysis of Thomas Aquinas and Jacque Derrida on Friendship -

Jiwhang Lew 1

1가톨릭관동대학교

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ABSTRACT

Thomas Aquinas and Jacque Derrida have respectively posed their own understanding of friendship as a way of both acknowledging and criticizing Aristotle's view on friendship. Aristotle argued the political possibility of friendship for the good communal life through fraternity based on the mutual common relationship and the presupposed legitimacy of justice founded on the metaphysical value of law. But Thomas Aquinas has taken little of the political effect of friendship in such a way that he interpreted friendship as a process of virtue formation for the ultimate union with God. Supposed politics to be the realization of justice for the good social life, friendship for Aristotle is a good political principle while friendship for Thomas Aquinas is a limited principle of politics in the real life of this world. Thomas Aquinas thought of, unlike Aristotle, the actual power of friendship for justice as being imperfect, despite Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas both accepted the legitimacy of law as the actual criterion of justice. The politics of friendship through the realization of law and justice is, for Aristotle, a real matter, yet it for Thomas Aquinas is a theological matter. In this regard, Jacque Derrida criticizes Aristotle's exclusive idea of fraternal friendship and Thomas Aquinas' concept of friendship as a theological formation of virtues, and points out the problems of their cannonical ideas of friendship. However surprisingly, Derrida suggests the politics of friendship significantly in relation not only to Aristotle's argument about the politics of friendship but also to Thomas Aquinas' emphasis on charity as the crucial element of friendship. He asserts the realization of justice through the politics of friendship that deconstructs the violence of law actualized by finite and relative power realities, and that tries to see and solve the specific particular problems of human social life. His politics of friendship rejects the exclusive form of friendship grafted on homogeneous mutuality, yet tries to contact and talk and thereby forms the solidarity of love in spite of difference on the constantly emerging brink of friend and enemy. This is the politics of friendship by which Derrida both critically overcomes and critically reconstructs the ideas of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas on friendship.

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