When I first started writing about friendship, or at least trying to, I found some comfort in the 1625 painting by Giovanni Serodine, The Parting of St. Peter and St. Paul Led to Martyrdom. I had found Serodine’s painting in a short essay by Giorgio Agamben,Footnote 1 whose description of The Parting also helped put in perspective my failures—and my discipline’s failures—to write much about this vital relationship:
[W]hat renders this painting genuinely incomparable is that Serodine has depicted the two apostles so close to each other (their foreheads are almost stuck together) that there is no way that they can see one another…. This painting has always seemed to me to be a perfect allegory of friendship. Indeed, what is friendship other than a proximity that resists both representation and conceptualization?Footnote 2
The Parting of Saint Peter and Saint Paul Led to Martyrdom. Giovanni Serodine, Public Domain.
Figure 1. Long description
At the center of the composition, Saint Peter and Saint Paul are locked in a close embrace, their faces nearly touching in a final farewell. Saint Paul, on the right, wears a deep red cloak over a dark tunic, his expression solemn. Saint Peter, on the left, is partially obscured by the arm of a man in the foreground.
To the left of the saints, a muscular man with his back to the viewer reaches upward, his arm extended toward a large wooden beam or cross that cuts diagonally across the upper frame. He wears a white shirt with a red sash. In the upper left corner, a soldier in dark armor blows a trumpet.
To the right of the saints, two soldiers in helmets and dark uniforms observe the scene. One soldier in the foreground holds a metal object, possibly a weapon or shackles. The lighting is high-contrast, characteristic of the tenebrist style, with deep shadows swallowing the background and bright highlights illuminating the faces and limbs of the central figures. The overall atmosphere is chaotic and emotionally charged, emphasizing the tension of the impending martyrdom.
Agamben, of course, is concerned with philosophers’ difficulties in representing and conceptualizing friendship, not anthropologists’ difficulties. And his larger argument—re-reading Aristotle to redefine friendship (universally, as philosophers often do)—was less striking for me than the simple description of the two apostles being so close they could not see each other. I took The Parting not as just an allegory of friendship, as Agamben suggests, but as an allegory of the anthropological scholarship on friendship. Unlike philosophy, which has friend (philos) in its very name, anthropology (whose name, sadly, lacks reference to relations) has seen only sporadic bursts of interest in friendship.Footnote 3 That is, it has attended relatively little to friendship, especially in comparison to kinship. This might certainly be an issue related to “conceptualizing” friendship, as Agamben put it, and I will return to this. But at the time, it made sense to me that the main reason for the meager discussion was that there had been a succession of major anthropological approaches, from structural functionalism and political anthropology to concerns with translation, that made it more difficult for anthropologists to see friendship (sometimes literally, as Edward Evans-Pritchard once suggestedFootnote 4) as an exciting topic for anthropological research.
Today, I find it fascinating that such diverse approaches, with such different relations to the universal, share a disinterest in friendship. While structural functionalists sought universal social laws, and political anthropologists condemned the abuse of (universal) rights, anthropologists concerned with translation interrogated presumed universals.Footnote 5 And though few said this explicitly, none found friendship to be an especially useful focus for their respective ends: friendship was deemed either not universal, or too universal, or not universal(ly important) enough for the task at hand.
While it is well known that the play of universalist and particularist concerns has affected modern anthropology, few, understandably, have remarked how this has especially affected the anthropology of friendship—and studies of friendship beyond anthropology.Footnote 6 After all, speaking about “universal/ism” might have seemed pretty antiquated, at least in anthropology, until recent revived interest (albeit more in the ethnography of universalismFootnote 7). I myself have certainly avoided commenting on, or even thinking much about, the question of friendship’s “universality.” My recent book sought simply to describe a particular friendship formation I encountered in Southeast Pará, Brazil.Footnote 8 I called this formation the mystic of friendship, the simultaneous longing for consistent support, unity, among humans and God, and the sense that true support among humans in particular was precarious, even impossible because of the pervasiveness of evil. This did not mean that people had no (human) friends, but it did have effects on how people approached relationships generally, as well as politics, law, and the settlement and re-settlement of the Amazonian frontier. In the book, I had no desire to speak for all friendship everywhere. I was simply developing an argument around how people in a particular time and place wrangled with friendship (though I noted that secular discussions of friendship and social agonism have recurred in scholarship on BrazilFootnote 9). I was also calling on scholars to recognize the limits of conventional political theory and its effects on scholarship—especially how it subtly imposed its universal, unselfconsciously secular cast, or even compelled us to study “kinds” of politics or face irrelevance.Footnote 10 This is not to say that I consider politics unimportant; I was ultimately hoping to show how ethnographically- and religiously- (and therefore secularly-) sensitive scholarship could help think about activist pedagogies anew, including by taking seriously forms of thought that questioned the perception that “politics” or variations thereof was universally relevant or determining. But admittedly, open comparison was not my central interest. Thus, I did not really address the obvious comparative question: how does this mystic of friendship relate to friendship elsewhere, especially beyond Brazil?
The recent books by Michael Jackson, Sonja Mechjer-Attasi, Brenna Moore, and SherAli Tareen have inspired me to finally engage with this question.Footnote 11 And my answer will speak to the general, the universal, and especially the generic (and more on that shortly), while identifying the promises and perils of the particular. The mystic of friendship—an acute local awareness of human friendship’s limits (especially compared to God’s)—certainly does not operate everywhere. However, it has allowed me to see, especially in dialogue with these books (and many other worksFootnote 12), what is vital in studies of friendship: to attend to what I suggest calling friendship’s mystic affordances. Borrowing the idea of affordances from psychologist James J. Gibson via anthropologist Webb Keane,Footnote 13 I use friendship’s mystic affordances to mean that though friendship is often perceived as a straightforward “good,” friendship affords various kinds of experiences of, and reflections on, its limits (whether its precarity, paradoxes, impossibilities, failures, excesses, mysteries, etc.). Certainly, mystic affordances are immanent to all relationships—and I have suggested as much in occasional reference to “mystic relational dynamics” in The Mystic of Friendship. Still, I maintain that such mystic affordances are often more readily visible in friendship (especially as we understand the word today in English and similar languages), because our experiences and expectations of friendship are defined even less precisely than our experiences and expectations of people classified as “kin.”
I have been inspired to offer this argument because, as I read through these works, I noted that they all, with varying degrees of intention, explore friendship’s mystic qualities. Yet I have also noted that they are perhaps more fundamentally marked by struggles with universalist thought and its opposite, particularism. Certainly, all of the books I am considering—and only one is by an anthropologist—are invested in their own particular accounts and are illuminating because of that. But I also offer these books as examples of how different kinds of universalist thinking, as well as certain kinds of particularism, affect the scholarship on friendship, and by extension can affect any kind of humanistic scholarship. I start by describing two forms of universalism—what I call “universalist particularism” and “unreflective universalism”—which are visible, respectively, in the books by Jackson and Mejcher-Atassi. Both have implications for how friendship is narrated, as do the forms of “extended particularism” that I analyze next through the works of Moore and Tareen. I show how the latter two authors, although offering excellent accounts of particular (including non-secularist) kinds of friendship, nevertheless leave important questions unanswered because they intensify (extend) their particularism; that is, they do not engage more general concepts of friendship in their research contexts.
This means that this essay is not merely a critique of universalizing thought. Rather, it is first a call to better know how it might operate in all humanistic scholarship—which includes knowing how we enact particularism. And this holds a specific message for anthropologists: as anti-universalist as anthropology might (often) be, it is not as readily able to rid itself of the universal as we might think. Therefore, we should not only reject or investigate universalist projects, but also be aware of how universalist (or universal-adjacent) thinking can still animate our work: often for the worse when we deploy universalist thinking unreflectively, although when integrated carefully and consciously, it can help our work to better communicate both inside and outside of the academy.
I am not the first to make such an argument,Footnote 14 but here it has a particular purpose. It allows me to be clear: I am offering mystic as a general term. Some might even call it universalist, in the sense that I think it could potentially be applicable anywhere. However, given that I know it will encounter limits, including in non-English languages, and especially because it has particular qualities that not every universal has, it is more accurate to call it a “generic.” Marilyn Strathern has reminded us that to call a term a generic does not imply that it is vague or imprecise (see also Scott MacLochlainn’s discussion).Footnote 15 Rather, it is a term “leached out” of specific content, a “metaphorical extension of ideas calling out for concrete expression.”Footnote 16 (In contrast, a universal generally contains specific definitional content that is projected universally, though Strathern does not discuss universals in her essay.) Moreover, Strathern notes, a generic has its own domains and tenors, whether positive, negative, or otherwise. And most importantly, because of its relative abstraction, a generic can encompass more meanings than other terms. This all indicates that, while there is no one particular that a generic points to in its domain, it nevertheless invites particular/ist exploration (while a universal tends not to in the first instance). In this case, the generic “mystic” invites investigation into the particular kinds of complexities shadowing a perceived good, while friendship’s mystic affordances call for identification of the specific movements, oscillations, paradoxes, challenges, and so on, accompanying the goods that friendship can offer. “Friendship,” I argue, if nothing else, is perennially shaped by these mystics.
The importance of this generic notwithstanding, by the end of this review, I hope readers will have been reminded to abandon an easy assumption that we universally know what friendship is, or what its specific mystic qualities might be, making particular and particularist accounts vital. And I also hope that some will consider my final argument, which I will return to as I conclude: that being more attuned to the mystic affordances of friendship might be useful politically, perhaps especially at this moment.
Universalist Particularism
Let me begin with Jackson, both because he is an anthropologist, and because his universalism is expressed in a uniquely particularist way. In fact, given his poignant descriptions of particular experiences of friendship in eighteen short chapters and one longer fiction, one might almost miss his universalist commitments—and what they illuminate about friendship and its representation. But when you look closely, from the start you find Jackson’s universalism encoded in the particularities of friendship’s experience:
What we talk about when we talk about friendship is the mystery that we are never more fully ourselves than when we are in the company of our friends.
While every friendship may be experienced as unique, it possesses characteristics that are common to all intimate human relationships—the trust that someone cares for us as deeply as we care for them…and the fear that this trust and recognition may be lost.Footnote 17
Jackson’s movement here between the uniqueness of friendship and the desires of trust it shares with “all intimate human relationships” recurs throughout the book. What also recurs is the notion of the fundamental “mystery” of friendships, which is where Jackson offers, as I see it, one of the mystic readings that friendship affords.
Significantly for Jackson, this mystery means that it is not worth trying to codify, overanalyze, or attend to the languages of friendship—because they cannot capture friendship as lived:
no matter how avidly we subject them to analysis, creating typologies and vocabularies that give the appearance that life is reducible to language and that feelings can be subjugated to rules, relationships are by their nature dynamic and fluid. Even as I conjure images of my closest friends and try to fathom…what has sustained my friendship with them over time, I come up against the unreliability of memory and the mystery of what attracts us to some people and not others.Footnote 18
Jackson has not just recently discovered the fact that language can never quite capture the mysteries of friendships (and relationships). Rather, this issue has animated his phenomenological anthropology over decades, though he is not explicit about this in Friendship.
In any case, Jackson decides not to craft his descriptions to answer the usual (typologically-minded) questions: “Is a shared worldview essential to friendship? …In what ways does friendship differ from kinship and marriage?…”Footnote 19 Instead of addressing these questions, Jackson just gives us accounts of friends and friendships—especially his own—though he does begin with a chapter on Hannah Arendt. But all are essentially descriptions of “contexts in which the very possibility of such questions arises.”Footnote 20 In short, Jackson thinks that it is more effective to describe specific friendships through crucial moments and personal histories.
Put otherwise, Jackson privileges the practice and experience of friendship over language and other forces that produce difference. This means that the work elides discussion of the less immediately tangible forces that might shape the individual experience of friendship in a given time and place. This does not mean that Jackson entirely ignores relations across difference and their challenges. His most provocative passages on this score are his two chapters drawing on his work in Africa. The first (chapter 3) recounts two stories about friendship told by the storyteller Keti Ferenke Koroma in a Kuranko village in Sierra Leone in the 1970s. The moral of the first story, about a man relying on his friend during his search for a wife, is summed up by Jackson: “If you…have a friend who is not as clever as you, you should not look down on your friend or laugh at his misfortune but help him in whatever way you can.”Footnote 21 The second story, according to Jackson, shows the “shadow side” of friendship—how friends can appear to have your best interests but do not. However, Jackson does not dwell too much on this. Instead, via Ferenke, he draws a positive lesson about the politics of friendship: how “if…friends complete or complement each other…[this] set[s] an example and help[s] build a community in which each person makes good what others lack.”Footnote 22 In other words, Jackson draws a universal conclusion: our private relationships affect our communities and, depending on their relative good, can either nurture or destroy them.
What is notable for me is that Jackson’s readings of Kuranko stories are not meant to explain friendship among the Kuranko, just as his discussion of his own friendships—in Africa and otherwise—are not mined for any cultural markers. The second chapter on Africa, chapter 4, “Friendships in the Field,” confirms this relative elision of cultural specificity in Jackson’s approach to friendship. This approach is revealed less by the main story itself, which conveys, via another story,Footnote 23 how Jackson’s friendship with his Kuranko field assistant really only blossomed after they stopped working together. Instead, Jackson’s commitment to particular experiential accounts with general, even universal, import is made evident in an interlude halfway through the chapter. There, Jackson is supposed to be translating Blaise Cendrars’s Moravagine:
This is not the first time Jackson quotes this passage in his work. It also appears, for example, in The Other Shore: Essays on Writers and Writing, a book where Jackson is even more direct about his aspiration to write universally through his own perspective. To this effect, he quotes D. H. Lawrence, who writes to a friend, “each of us is in himself humanity.”Footnote 25 He also places himself among those anthropologists who think, like George Devereux did, that all cultural behaviors overlap with psychoanalytic findings, “thus demonstrating…the psychic unity of mankind.”Footnote 26 Jackson, it should be said, does recognize that “the gap between particularizing and universalizing perspectives is notoriously difficult to close” and has chosen, in Friendship and elsewhere, to work on closing the gap between the universal and the particular with detailed narratives.Footnote 27
The storied approach makes for enjoyable reading. As I paged through Friendship, I was by turns uplifted, touched, and intellectually engaged by accounts of interpersonal support, reflections on mortality, and by Jackson’s agile theoretical moves from phenomenology and existentialism to the Frankfurt school. However, for me, it was still odd for so many particulars to be left as universals, especially at the hands of an anthropologist. While I certainly did not want or expect a typology, I ultimately missed attention to language and difference, or at least some recognition that we were reading an experiential account of unmarked “universal friendship” from an older, white, and male—if cosmopolitan and heartfelt—perspective.
Unreflective Universalism
In contrast, Sonja Mejcher-Atassi’s book, An Impossible Friendship, does not overtly offer itself as a universalist account. In fact, the book draws you in by promising a very particular account of an “ecumenical circle” of friends in pre-partition Palestine, which she suggests was always “impossible” but which became actively so in the wake of the 1946 bombing of Jerusalem’s King David Hotel, the 1948 foundation of the state of Israel, and the ongoing Nakba. It certainly does provide a solid biography of four individuals—Christian, Muslim, and Jewish, though none apparently “religious”—who would spend time together as friends until 1946–1948. It also offers a fascinating and important history to return to at this time of re-intensified war, conflict, and genocide. The book is worth reading for those wanting to deepen their understandings of life in Mandate Palestine and the effects of 1948.
However, after reading the book, I wondered if it would be entirely fair to include it in this essay, because it really is not about “friendship” as a concept or practice. Rather, it is simply about members of a group of friends, whose lives intersected as a result of intellectual, political, and aesthetic-literary sympathies. Still, I have decided to include it here because the author, in addition to being a literary scholar and biographer, considers herself a cultural historian. As such, it is worth looking more closely at what happens when cultural history is written with unreflective universalist presuppositions, without trying to excavate the languages of relation that animate the main actors’ thoughts and actions. In particular, I think it is important to learn what happens when an author writes about friends while assuming that we already know what friendship is, as well as what circumstances make friendship “impossible.”
I say that Mejcher-Atassi assumes that we know what friendship is, because at no point does she dig into what friendship is for her subjects, or in the region more generally. Mejcher-Atassi might say that this is a function of what is available in the archives or the tenor of the interviews she was able to conduct with the one surviving member of the ecumenical circle, Walid Khalidi and peripheral relatives. Certainly, members of the circle did not always have the best records. Sally Kassab, for example, a woman of Greek Orthodox origin who was in a relationship with the one Jewish member of the group, Wolfgang Hildesheimer, had no archive to speak of. Therefore, as Mejcher-Atassi acknowledges, she remains a ghostly presence compared to the other members of the group besides Wolfgang: Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, a Syrian Christian, and the married Walid Khalidi and Rasha Salam Khalidi, both Muslim. All of these friends had archives, especially Walid, Jabra, and Wolfgang, who all became well-known figures in their fields even outside of Palestine/Israel post-1948: Jabra helped shape Arab modernism from Baghdad as a writer, art critic, and translator of authors such as Shakespeare, Beckett, and Faulkner; Wolfgang returned to Germany and became an influential literary figure, a member of the realist literary circle Gruppe 47, and wrote plays, novels, and a biography of Mozart. Meanwhile, Walid became an internationally celebrated historian of Palestine, as well as a public intellectual, and has been living out his golden years in Cambridge, Massachusetts, after years of affiliation with Harvard University. Rasha, too, wrote an unpublished memoir in her later life, which was informed by letters she exchanged with people around the world including Wolfgang. Of course, working across these archives must have been a challenge; all archival work requires dedication and strategy. Still, if Mejcher-Atassi felt that there was too little to draw on in these archives to allow for a discussion of what counted as friendship among these friends, it would have been appropriate to consult other archives to situate these figures and their investment in friendship. That is, she could have explored the broader religious and cultural histories of the day—Muslim, Christian, Jewish, secular. Nevertheless, I suspect that it was not so much the personal or other archives that did not offer paths to follow in this regard. Rather, I think Mejcher-Atassi just did not deem it necessary: to say that the members of the group were once “friends” was considered enough of a framing device and justification for proceeding with chronological biographies of these people as individuals.
And then there is the author’s invocation of impossibility. With my interest in friendship’s mystic affordances, it should be clear I am not one of those scholars who objects when someone discusses friendship’s impossibility. On the contrary, I think it is healthy to explore what effects senses of impossibility have in the world.Footnote 28 However, Mejcher-Atassi’s discussion of impossibility suffers the same fate as her discussion of friendship—it barely appears because it is largely assumed. She offers the following brief statement about this issue in the introduction:
An Impossible Friendship argues that what brought the ecumenical circle together in Jerusalem was more than mere historical coincidence; it was beyond wars but, paradoxically, also because of them. An impossible friendship is a certain kind of friendship, not a friendship that is impossible, and as such, it has a historical presence built on dreams and aspirations, futures past, that hold manifold possibilities for the future.Footnote 29
The discussion of impossibility in the conclusion essentially echoes this with little modification: “With their late correspondence, Rasha and Wolfgang renewed their dialogue and breathed new life into their friendship (despite their shared pessimism and hatred for everything), showing us that inscribed in the impossibility of that impossible friendship is the possibility of friendship.”Footnote 30 Ultimately, employing the label “impossible friendship” has more to do with Mejcher-Atassi’s own understanding of what “friendship” is—rather than her interlocutors’—and how friendship, again in her own understanding, would be complicated by the transformation of Palestine.
Let me offer a brief example of how Mejcher-Atassi assumes and imposes notions of friendship and its impossibility, rather than engaging with her sources on this issue. In her chapter on Wolfgang, she questions his claims to friendship because she brings a narrow, totalizing (even authoritarian) understanding of friendship that we are used to seeing in the Western canon—one where you are supposed to know, share, and accept everything about the other.Footnote 31 Not that Wolfgang is not of the “West” himself, but in cultural history one should be wary of such generalized categories, and she doesn’t really let him speak for himself. Instead, she quotes Wolfgang saying that his “greatest friends” in the final years of the war until he left in 1946 were Walid, his sister (Sulafa), his wife Rasha, and Rasha’s cousin Asid Salaam. And then, Mejcher-Atassi interrogates this:
His “greatest friends,” however, knew little about his life in Germany, about the Zionist circles his family background had placed him in during his first stay in Palestine…. In conversations with Walid…he recalled that Wolfgang would at times warn him about how dangerous the mood was in the Yishuv and its leadership, which was preparing for war, suggesting that the Arab side may not have been fully aware of the seriousness of the situation; however, all in all, they did not discuss politics much.Footnote 32
Here, Mejcher-Atassi suggests that someone’s “greatest friends” should know more than what Wolfgang’s friends knew about him. On the one hand (and barring the fact that he was talking about his “greatest friends” during a specific period in his life), Mejcher-Atassi’s narrow definition of friendship here insinuates that there is something disingenuous in his statement. On the other hand, her account is not terribly convincing: if Wolfgang was talking about the dangerous mood in the Yishuv with his Arab friends, these friends were undoubtedly sometimes talking about the Zionist movement (the Yishuv was the name for the Jewish population, as well as its paramilitary, in Mandate Palestine). Moreover, I find it difficult to believe that Wolfgang, who, according to Mejcher-Atassi, told his Zionist parents how much he hated Zionism and how he wanted nothing to do with nationalism and therefore any Jewish state, would not also tell his friends this. Yet even if he did not, it still does not seem reasonable (or cross-culturally curious) to equate an aversion to discussing politics as a lack of friendship.
Mejcher-Atassi’s ultimate aim is admirable: her book seeks a “language of historical reconciliation” and “new visions of solidarity and justice” that might allow us to carve out a space for an impossible friendship…[that can offer] a glimmer of hope for the future.”Footnote 33 I can only agree. However, if we are to offer friendship as a path to reconciliation, it is unlikely that we will find it in preconceived universalist understandings of friendship. Reconciliation inevitably begins before we are all on the same page, and it can only succeed if it is not based on authoritarian fictions: the possibility of perennial sameness, agreement, and full acceptance.
Extended Particularism
The final two books I am considering have real particularist commitments; they teach us about specific kinds of friendship and various mystic modes. They also, significantly, attend to friendship in the context of specific religious formations, thus moving beyond the naturalized secular understandings of friendship that have predominated in the literature. These books should be widely admired. Yet it also is worth noting how their particular objects—twentieth-century Catholic “spiritual friendship” and “Muslim-Hindu friendship” in colonial South Asia—are also so closely explored that questions remain about how they intersect with, and are shaped by, broader understandings of friendship in these traditions. I am calling this more bounded scholarly focus “extended particularism.”
Brenna Moore’s Kindred Spirits offers a charismatic account of the “spiritual friendship” binding an early twentieth-century network of Catholics that often overlapped in France. The charisma is no accident; it comes from Moore’s lively writing as well as the people she writes about, beginning with the “spiritual charisma” of Jacques Maritain and his wife Raïssa, background figures who connect most of Moore’s protagonists.Footnote 34 Spiritual friendship was both “a fundamental, experiential way of communing with the world and with God” and a “political ideal, a worldview and a social practice.”Footnote 35 Spiritual friends were souls, not only people—dead and alive, saintly and common—and their friendships were grounded in a sensibility likened to fire: “holy friends burn, scorch, ignite, light, or kindle other souls with their inner flame.”Footnote 36 This amorous flame was attributed great transformative power and not only with private faiths: spiritual friendship was considered a force that could counter the ascendant far right, with its extreme nationalism and emphasis on conventional gender and nuclear family norms. And it was also seen as resistance to the secularizing tendencies of modern politics—from atheist leftist movements to rationalizing liberal technocracies.
Although Jacques and Raïssa were key nodes in these networks and important Catholic figures of the early twentieth century (most especially Jacques, who was a prolific public philosopher and theologian), they are not the focus of this book (though see her book, Sacred Dread). Moore shifts attention away from the prominent cardinals or widely read theologians (like Jacques) who populate most histories of early twentieth-century Catholicism. Instead, Moore offers chapters on women, scholars, literary figures, and people of color, while centering their friendships. Some of these people, like the protagonists of the first two chapters, are towering figures in their own fields but are still rarely discussed in accounts of Catholicism: Gabriela Mistral (1889–1957), the focus of chapter 1, was a Chilean poet who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1945, and whose friendship with the Maritains transformed her life. And Louis Massignon, the main figure of chapter 2, was a famous scholar of the Islamicate world, who held a chair at the Collège de France from 1926 through 1954. Two of the remaining chapters home in on Magdeleine Davy, a well-known scholar of Christian mysticism who developed a devotional friendship later in life with the memory of Simone Weil (whom she had met not long before Weil died). Then the final chapter recounts the life of a well-known poet and novelist, Claude McKay, whose Reference McKay1922 book of poetry Harlem Shadows made him “the most famous poet among black Americans.”Footnote 37 McKay is now considered to have helped inspire the Harlem Renaissance. All these spiritual friends, Moore notes, were attracted by a certain “counter-cultural” Catholicism, which is different from—although inevitably aware of, and connected to—mainstream “colonial Catholicism.”Footnote 38
Although Moore’s book is mostly a celebration of this globally diffused spiritual friendship, she does not shy away from its mystic dimension. To be clear, I do not mean only its mystical aspects—the search for spiritual, divine connection is already implied in the concept of “spiritual friendship.” Moreover, all the figures of this book are drawn to the mysticism of spiritual connection beyond the institutional realm. Yet the properly mystic dimensions, as I see them, are the ambivalent movements: the paradoxes, challenges, and even impossibilities and casualties that spiritual friendship can produce, whether or not they come from the divine. For example, Moore concedes that while spiritual friendship offers a space of resistance to political and familial conventions of the day, the families of these spiritual friends suffered greatly. Moore implies that Mistral, for example, might have become so invested in her spiritual friendships, including her relationship with her long-time female lover Palma Guillén, that her adopted child, her nephew Yin-Yin, became a shadowy figure, growing increasingly isolated until he committed suicide as a teenager. Then there is the case of Louis Massignon, who was openly gay until he married, after which he lived at some emotional remove from his wife and children while experiencing passionate, spiritual friendships. Some of these spiritual friends were the people he wrote about, for example Husayn Ibn Mansur al-Hallāj (858–922), a Persian mystic. But others caused explicit trouble: Mary Kahil, an independently wealthy philanthropist and activist from Cairo, maintained an intense friendship with Massignon. Although their relationship may or may not have been sexual, it was certainly “sexually charged,” and after Massignon’s death, any mention of her was forbidden by the family.Footnote 39 And then, although for Claude McKay “friends, male and female, white and Black, were his lifeline,” he also found friendship “difficult.” Footnote 40 He struggled especially with some of his white friends, even later among the Catholics he met, because they were “so naive about the lives of their Black friends.”Footnote 41 This made, Moore says, “real mutuality and genuine affection almost impossible.”Footnote 42
Moore’s book, in short, is a marvelously textured and absorbing account of a kind of Catholic friendship that—despite its ambiguities—generated a real, unique sensibility that was able to resist the conventions of modernity. Spiritual friendship also, of course, resisted the conventions of traditional Catholicism. Yet here is also where I wished for more. I fully accept that this “counter-history of Catholic love [was] meant to oppose—at least quietly—the replicative injunctions to reproduce or the narrower homogeneous bonds based on blood kinship, national identity, or ‘Judeo-Christian heritage.’”Footnote 43 Still, Moore could have turned up the volume on this “quiet” critique of conventional Catholicism. I found chapter three to be the most critically engaged with the Catholic tradition, as it follows Magdeleine Davy’s struggle as the “first female student to enroll at the Institut Catholique,” the main seminary in Paris, and her subsequent need to chart her own path. However, perhaps a less extended particularism (a less bounded “spiritual friendship”) might have taught readers more about the struggles with friendship that have recurred throughout the history of Christianity and Catholicism. As I see it, spiritual friendship as Moore describes it was a continuation of these struggles.Footnote 44
This is not to say that Moore does not situate spiritual friendship in an older tradition. Moore tells us in chapter 1 that spiritual friendship was actually a medieval Christian ideal, “given articulation by the twelfth-century Cistercian Aelred of Rievaulx in Spiritual Friendship, which defined human friendship as sacramental.”Footnote 45 This tradition, Moore remarks, modeled itself on the Jesus of Matthew and Mark, “who ‘demanded a readiness to forsake marriage and family’ (Mt. 10:37).”Footnote 46 But what she does not mention is that the value placed on friendship has not been a simple constant in Catholicism—or in Christianity more generally.
To start, we should not forget that brotherhood (or sisterhood) has always been the preferred label for Catholic, and Christian, relationship. And, even if this brotherhood points to a form of belonging beyond blood,Footnote 47 which does connect it to a conventional understanding of friendship, it is also a specific label: brotherhood is ultimately not quite friendship. David Konstan, for example, has pointed out the decline in the theme of friendship in early Christian writings, and suggests that one reason for this decline is that Christians were trying to distinguish themselves from pagans, for whom friendship, as is well known, was an important virtue.Footnote 48 Significantly, classical friendship made no reference to God, and it was also inimical to the values of Christian humility and charity because it prized too much self-awareness and pride in one’s own virtue, while promoting particular affections rather than universal love. Thus, for Konstan, when terms for friendship were used among early Christians, they regularly modified classical understandings.
Even Augustine had an ambivalent relationship to friendship. He preferred the language of brotherhood,Footnote 49 and at one juncture he was famously categorical: noting in his Confessions that friendship was a “huge fable” in comparison to what the love for and of God can offer.Footnote 50 The value of friendship rose and fell at different moments of Christian history thereafter. The Cistercian interest in Aelred’s time, for example, was a recuperation of investments in the concept and practice prior to 850.Footnote 51 Then, after 850, friendship in monastic life was relatively eclipsed, as it was increasingly after Aelred, at least according to some.Footnote 52 Still, Brian Patrick McGuire notes that by the fifteenth century, “there apparently came a flight from friendship because of a conviction that friendship among two or three spiritual men would undermine the integrity of life in religious community.”Footnote 53
These oscillations vis-à-vis friendship arguably continued in various spheres: from friendship being valued, as I have argued elsewhere, in expanding the mystical body of Christ in the colonization of the Americas,Footnote 54 to being repressed, especially in relation to men.Footnote 55 By the 1920s and 1930s, McGuire notes, “it was fashionable, at least in Catholic circles, to look upon friendship primarily in terms of the relationship between the individual and God: friendship with God.”Footnote 56 He describes how one Aquinas-inspired treatise even rendered relationships beyond God as “purely secondary.”Footnote 57 In the 1950s, there continued to be reticence, to say the least, toward friendship. For example, in American monastic circles novices were sometimes forbidden to read Rievaulx and were often supervised to make sure they were not developing “particular friendship” (a euphemism for homosexuality). Michel Foucault apparently told Louis Althusser about these Catholic struggles with friendship, which were confirmed by a priest who was present during the same “extraordinary exchange of ideas and experiences” (Althusser Reference Althusser, Corpet, Boutang and Veasey1993: 271). We can still see this oscillation—between an opening toward friendship and a fear of it—in contemporary Catholic spaces like the New Catholic Encyclopedia. Footnote 58
In short, although it may be possible that members of Moore’s early-twentieth-century network of spiritual friends were not aware of the Catholic ambivalence toward friendship—including in their own day—it seems to have been somewhat well known in Catholic and adjacent circles. Either way, what seems sure is that widening the view to contemplate more general Catholic orientations to friendship could have highlighted how much more radical the advent of spiritual friendship really seems to have been—not resistance solely to modernity but also deep resistance to traditional, institutional Catholicism.
Also shaped by an extended particularism is SherAli Tareen’s account of Hindu-Muslim friendship in South Asia from the eighteenth century to the early twentieth century. This is an especially fraught kind of friendship, Tareen tells us—full of ambivalence and worry—which intensifies in the context of the loss of Muslim sovereignty, especially to British rule. In other words, this book is not about the close interpersonal relations that we usually associate with “friendship” in English. Even so, it is definitely a study of relating (or thinking about how to relate) in a more mystic mode. To arrive at this notion of friendship, Tareen draws inspiration from the category that appears most regularly in his materials, the Arabic term “muwalat,” which can variously mean “a relationship of friendship, intimacy, and loyalty or that of clientage and patronage, as between the state and its subjects.”Footnote 59 He also notes that it shares roots with wali / wilaya, referring to “friend of God” (wali, usually referring to a Sufi master) or wilaya meaning both sainthood and also sovereign power and authority (also written as walaya). Tareen takes this fascinating array of meanings as an invitation to define his own notion of friendship broadly: as a “relationship or encounter of intimacy, collaboration, cooperation, or hospitality with the other that, while affording particular benefits, opportunities, and forms of power and pleasure, also renders untenable exclusive claims to the purity and sovereign ownership of the self.”Footnote 60
This expansive definition of friendship allows Tareen to consider a wide range of encounters: chapter 1 is about an eighteenth-century translation project to make Hinduism more intelligible to Muslims; chapter 2 is about a nineteenth-century interreligious “polemical festival” where Hindu, Muslim, and Christian “missionary scholars” got together to argue for the validity of their doctrines and forms of worship; chapter 3 is the first chapter of two where muwalat explicitly appears, and in this chapter serves as a point of debate about how much solidarity Muslims should offer Gandhian anti-imperial activists; chapter 4 focuses on debates around cow sacrifice and beef consumption in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, specifically addressing questions of whether Muslims should refrain from them to express hospitality to their Hindu neighbors; and chapters 5 and 6 focus on the issue of “imitation” (whether ritual, celebratory, or aesthetic), a question and concept that has arisen in light of the Prophet’s dictum: “Whoever imitates a people becomes one of them.”Footnote 61 Together, these instances of engagement, which happen as colonial modernity is being consolidated, offer Tareen an opportunity to shift scholarly focus away from the usual questions on the ruptures wrought by colonialism, especially with regard to religion. Instead, Tareen explores how indigenous scholars themselves debate the “boundaries of religion and religious identity.”Footnote 62 He finds that South Asian scholars adopt a significant variety of positions that do not easily map onto contemporary understandings of traditionalism/modernism in Islam. This is a key argument for Tareen, alongside how these variations are related to intra-Muslim debates on these issues. However, his most important point is that all of these positions are marked by the inheritance of an “imperial political theology,” or an “assumption of Muslim political and theological supremacy over non-Muslims.”Footnote 63 Of course, by the period Tareen is studying, the specifically imperial power that would allow Muslims to truly reign over non-Muslims had disappeared. Still, Tareen observes something interesting: in the absence of true Muslim political supremacy, the problem of Muslim sovereignty was channeled through discussions of how to conduct everyday life among non-Muslims, especially ritual.
As suggested by the above summary of arguments around doctrine and ritual, the concern with Hindu-Muslim relations starts well before any question of close interpersonal friendship and intimacy among Hindus and Muslims. In fact, some of the people Tareen writes about deem such potential intimacy to be problematic. The debates on this point are connected to two passages in the Qur’an that discuss this matter. One is the Surah Mumtahana (chapter 60: 8–9 in the Qur’an), which “does not forbid” friendship with non-Muslims as long as they “do not fight you on account of your faith.”Footnote 64 The other, Surah Maʾidah (chapter 5:51) explicitly forbids interreligious friendship (or, depending on the interpretation, forbids friendship only with Christians and Jews): “O people of faith,” the relevant part says, “do not take the Jews and Christians as friends; they are each other’s friends. Whoever takes them as friends (yatawwalahum) becomes one of them.” Tareen points out that there has been much debate on whether the first, the Sura Mumtahana, modifies the latter’s more apparent condemnation of interreligious friendship. However, Tareen does not pursue this question in the abstract. Rather, in chapter 3 he explores how these dictums ground a local scholarly debate that only touches on questions of interpersonal friendship and is ultimately more about whether Muslims are permitted even pragmatic relations with Hindus, or Christians, especially the British.
The apparently limited discussion in Tareen’s archives about close interpersonal Hindu-Muslim friendship is likely one reason he does not tarry on the question of interpersonal friendship among Muslims, either. This silence confused me at the beginning, especially as a non-specialist, as I thought it would be a natural part of any story of Hindu-Muslim friendship. I admit I was also keen to see more discussion around a topic that has appeared at intervals in the broader (though admittedly more anthropological) literature on Islam.Footnote 65 I was especially interested to see if there was anything in the South Asian context that was comparable to Talal Asad’s comments via an interlocutor in Egypt: that there is a social dimension to Islam, whereby Muslims are enjoined, as friends (though not like police), to watch over each other’s faith and devotion.Footnote 66
Certainly, Tareen was not obliged to cite or engage the relatively limited comments by Asad in his 2015 essay. Still, it was one of the places (alongside Paul Rabinow’s Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco Footnote 67) where I learned that friendship among Muslims could be deemed a distinct kind of relation perhaps not available to non-Muslims (Asad in this article also talks about “brotherhood”). And thinking on Asad’s discussion is how I also came to devise an answer as to why Tareen does not explore, even in passing, Muslim friendship: because from an extended particularist perspective, interreligious relations/friendship can be seen as its own domain with separate strictures and rules, even though it can be connected through the term muwalat to interpersonal friendship among Muslims. If this is indeed why Tareen took the approach he did, I think he could have made more of this point, especially discussing at more length the choice to translate muwalat (and all of the practices it entailsFootnote 68) to “friendship.” The fact that he eschewed this path indicates again how extended particularism can curtail understanding. Nevertheless, I think the move to translate muwalat to friendship offers an interesting provocation to anglophone scholarship: it stretches the English meaning of friendship, removes the dimension of relatively close interpersonal support, and essentially makes it a generic, an equivalent to “relation.”
This is arguably not the first time a similar move has been made. Back in 1973, Julian Pitt-Rivers “accused” Meyer Fortes of using a French-derived term for friendship, “amity,” to capture the essence of kinship.Footnote 69 He then immediately drew inspiration from this move and proposed a new category, that of “amiable relations.” This category was supposed to do something that Fortes’s “axiom of amity” still did not do: bring kinship and friendship under one rubric, thus overcoming the perceived opposition (at least in English) between friendship and kinship (see also Erik Schwimmer’s call to use the Greek philia for this end; and Strathern for discussion on all of the above).Footnote 70 Neither Pitt-Rivers’ nor Schwimmer’s suggestion stuck, however.
It is also worth mentioning, still via Strathern, that until the eighteenth century (in English, at least), “friendship” had such a generic function, in some of the same ways that “relation” does today (that is, friendship was being used, though not exclusively, as a generic term for kinsfolk).Footnote 71 This means that “friend” could be used broadly: you did not have to specify what kind of kin you were speaking of and you could use it to refer as much to sisters and their children, as to wives and their families. But as “relation” was becoming a new generic for kinship—having moved into the sphere of kinship, whereas it had previously been operating exclusively in the domain of knowledge—friendship lost its generic status for referring to kin. Why exactly this happened is hard to trace, though it may be down to the emergence of a more “rational” ethic, as Strathern says (drawing on Alan Bray).Footnote 72
Whatever the cause in English history, what would it mean to suggest friendship as a (re)new(ed) generic for relations today in English? I am certainly sympathetic to the task of thinking about new generics, albeit perhaps most when they invite more attention to particulars. Friendship, however, is a term potentially weighted with particulars, especially in English. Yet some writers thinking for an explicitly political context have considered recuperating friendship in such a way, and I discuss this shortly, in conclusion.
Recall that I have not argued in this essay that thinking generically, or universally, per se produces bad scholarship. Rather, I have merely shown that hewing too close to either edge of the universal-particular spectrum—being unreflectively universalist on the one hand or extending particularism on the other, cutting away relevant parts of the broader context—leaves important questions unanswered. Moreover, one wonders about the effects of unthought anti-universalism, too: it might be a cause of extended particularism, which can paradoxically end up excluding important specifics.
Still, I have found that all of these works attend in some way to the oscillation, or the possibility of an oscillation, between the ideal (the “good”) of friendship, and the sense of its failure (or precarity, breakdown, contradiction, or impossibility). I have called this oscillation, whether an affordance or a full-blown dynamic, a mystic. I have suggested mystic not only because I think it is useful for academics to keep this movement in mind when investigating the variable fate of “goods” they encounter in their research. I also think that we need to be especially attuned to mystic affordances, and especially to friendship’s mystic affordances and dynamics, in this political moment.
Conclusion
This brings me back to Agamben, who provided me with that early comfort via Serodine, if not quite scholarly guidance. Indeed, I initially had to bracket philosophers—always relatively universalist—in order to allow my ethnography to breathe.Footnote 73 I was, admittedly, sympathetic to Jacques Derrida’s undoing of Carl Schmitt’s friend-enemy distinction, which thereby unraveled Schmitt’s definition of politics (and more on this below), but Derrida’s critique, too, as I argued in an early essay, leaves much unsaid.Footnote 74 Agamben’s essay, a response of sorts to Derrida, was even further from my concerns. Returning to these texts now, however, I can see that both Agamben and Derrida were trying to envisage a politics to come (beyond Schmitt), by leaning toward a more mystic conception of friendship. Neither had a name for this mystic, but in their own ways they pointed to friendship’s processual and uncertain promise as both a reality and a political asset.
Neither analysis has really taken hold, however. Politics of Friendship has remained among Derrida’s most “underappreciated” texts,Footnote 75 and Agamben has never apparently returned to friendship in his scholarship (being always more concerned with sovereignty and the decisionFootnote 76). It is notable, however, that a recent hybrid activist-academic book by Matt Hern and Am Johal has just resuscitated Derridean and allied reflections on friendship (including Leela Gandhi and Jean-Luc Nancy) to rethink politics for a borderless and ecologically attuned world.Footnote 77 You could say that they are calling for a new—more generic—use of friendship for political thought and action, without embracing Schmitt’s devotion to enmity (they ask: “If any ecology demands that we find good relations with the more-than-human, then why not as friends?”Footnote 78). Yet despite the book’s useful call for a more “exposed” notion of friendship, like Derrida’s and Agamben’s efforts it may not go far enough. First, Hern and Johal’s book does not fully flag the authoritarian dispositions encoded in conventional Euro-American understandings of friendship. And second, it does not robustly or positively name where the basic transformation should begin.
On the first issue, it is worth noting briefly that the early Carl Schmitt can teach us much about notions of friendship that produce authoritarian dispositions. As alluded to above, in The Concept of the Political, Schmitt grounded the political in the friend/enemy distinction, specifying that the essence of political behavior lay in the decision to exclude (and potentially kill) a political “enemy”; a group of homogeneous friends led by a sovereign. It is true that Schmitt underscored a difference between private and public friendship/enmity. However, we certainly do not have to accept Schmitt’s positions, especially because much of Schmitt’s writing, while masquerading as empirical social science, was political strategy. The public/private distinction was part of this strategy: it positioned him to be talking only about the political while depoliticizing “the inner life of the polity.”Footnote 79 And yet, an authoritarian politics would necessarily transcend its public role; it would have private effects. And this is why Schmitt can teach us that a homogeneous form of (personal and public) friendship entails authoritarian dispositions.
This brings me to my second point: if homogeneous, unified friendship is partner to authoritarian politics, it follows that naming friendship’s mystic affordances, and embracing friendship in its more mystic mode, can support—be translated into—a more radically democratic and resilient form of politics. I underscore translation here (while acknowledging translation’s own mystic affordances); I am not simply asserting that “the personal is political” or that “everything is politics.” This is something for scholars to observe empirically (if they can), and for people in their everyday lives to choose. What I am trying to say is that it is not the political that necessarily defines our friendships and relationships. But our relationships—and our ideas about them—ultimately shape our politics.
I am also saying, more specifically, that a concept of interpersonal friendship that does not expect or require sameness, agreement, or homogeneity is not only more realistic but can also be more resilient—if internal differences become valued. In my fieldsites in Pará, for example, the sense that “no one has friends, only acquaintances [except God]” was both a reality and a lament. While this understanding encouraged forgiveness toward others (no human friend, after all, can equal God’s friendship), it could also lead to the erosion of solidarity over time. Indeed, while real friendship (on a divine/Catholic model) was understood as constant benevolence, help, and unity, any sense of disunity could be an indicator of evil, something to be avoided. In a context where activist communities had to form, this dynamic ultimately complicated solidarity among friends, comrades, companheiros, over the long term. Of course, such religiously inflected dynamics are not found everywhere. Nevertheless, in North America and Britain (the anglophone regions I know well), differences among friends (even minor political differences) can similarly end friendships, and they can and do end political solidarities as well. This is particularly problematic for the left, which tends to fragment as a result. What if, at this political moment, we begin to make legitimate space for friendship’s mystic affordances as means to fashion more resilient interpersonal relationships and potentially build better political solidarities as well?
This is easier said than done, of course, but the first step toward achieving it is to name these affordances, and to name them using a positive term we can embrace that can be made generic enough to encompass a wide range of phenomena. I have chosen to repurpose the term “mystic,” to this end, while not directly invoking “mysticism,” the “mystical,” or any related term in Euro-American languages.Footnote 80 At a more abstract level, however, mystic shares with these terms a similar experience of, and movement with, precarity, partiality, paradox, unknowing, impossibility, senses of failure, and so on, while people search for the good, long for the other. This built-in motility, coupled with a positive valence gained from mystic’s adjacency to mysticism—although admittedly scholars, especially philosophers, have not always considered it positive per se Footnote 81—is why I adopted the term despite its potential awkwardness. I admit, for readers it might be initially difficult to follow my modification of the referent of “mystic” from a person (an individual mystic, say) or a connection to the divine, to a more general internal movement of will to relation that will never be fully satisfied (see also my discussion of Michel de Certeau’s translator, Michael B. SmithFootnote 82). Nevertheless, I think it is possible to embrace, even enjoy, this awkwardness, through something similar to what Michel Foucault called an “ethics of discomfort.”Footnote 83 We might think, too, of Leela Gandhi’s account of the democratic potentials of “moral imperfectionism.” However, I prefer a term that does not encode a lack. Mystic describes a “positive” state—that is, a state of its own—while being able to encompass more particulars, which include, but also go beyond, imperfection or discomfort. A mystic is akin, as I see it, to Strathern’s “partial connections” but helps draw more explicit attention to the real work that relating (always “partially”) requires. Relating is hard; let us see this and value it, anew.Footnote 84
Finally, I thought it was important to choose a term steeped in what we might call secular ambivalence. Certainly, “mystic” is a term traditionally associated with the religious field. However, it seemed especially apt to re-use it now and apply it more broadly, given that as a term and “new” practice mystics emerged after the loss of the universal Church and at the dawn of modern secularity.Footnote 85 It would help us in keeping all these processes in mind, even when studying very “secular” things (and without newly reifying our scholarly understandings as Basit Iqbal, Milad Odabaei, and Talal Asad tell us can happen with “political theology” if we are not carefulFootnote 86). Indeed, in this sense, mystics are inevitably conditioned by secularity; that is, shaped through interpersonal and conceptual relations with the secular and the political (much like “religions,” and even our scholarly languages).Footnote 87 Still, mystics never wholly concede universal reality to any political or even religious force (which is different from merely saying mystic is neither religious nor secular). This seems an important place to begin when we look for friendship’s mystic affordances—which I have offered as a generic whose contents we can never know in advance—and work toward valuing them in our scholarly and political endeavors.
I must still reflect on the proposals for friendship as a generic for relation, however. On the one hand, especially in English, friendship can be too freighted with already existing significance. On the other hand, the meanings of terms can and do change. In any case, I think that if friendship should be made into a generic (especially with our political action in mind), I think it is best to consider developing “a” mystic of friendship. Indeed, we cannot universally inhabit “the” mystic of friendship as I have described it. That is, we can contemplate compounding two new generics that would allow groups in different times and places to acknowledge the promises and the challenges of relating more fully, thus helping to build more robust solidarities for our future struggles.Footnote 88
Acknowledgments
My sincere thanks to the CSSH editor Jatin Dua, as well as (the now emeritus managing editor) David Akin for their original interest in this review essay. I thank the editorial team, especially Jatin, for making helpful suggestions that sharpened this article’s message. I am grateful for an anonymous reviewer, too, who also made stimulating comments. Tanya Richardson and Derek Hall read the essay and gave helpful comments, and conversations with Alicia Sliwinski, Yunus Telliel, and Seçil Dağtaş were very inspiring, too. Sincere appreciation also goes to the current managing editor of CSSH, Lauren Kapsalakis, who expertly shepherded the essay to final publication. My deepest thanks go to Erik Mueggler, who read and commented on a draft of this essay and then some—he was a keen and wise interlocutor as I wrote it, as ever.
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