The black Swan. Friendship and Politics in Kant.

Abstract

Friendship is defined in Metaphysics of Moral as “the union of two persons by equal love and reciprocal respect”. We believe that it cannot be a coincidence the fact that Kant places his reflection about friendship as a conclusion of his theory of virtue, an aspect that, according Derrida, tells us “something essential about Ethics. It tells us something irreducible about the essence of virtue as well. It tells us about its universal political horizon, it tells us the cosmopolitan idea of every virtue deserving that name”. Beginning from this suggestion made by Derrida in Politics of Friendship, we aim to analyse the crucial features of friendship, some of them pointed out by Derrida and others not, in this and others Kantian texts. Along this undertaking we hope to discover in what sense friendship assembles, as Derrida says, the most relevant characteristics of Ethics and Politics, indicating the topos as well as the tropos of both fields.