From: "Lydia Perovich" <fauxprophete-AT-hotmail.com>
Subject: Re: on the virtuality of human relationships
Date: Fri, 23 Jan 2004 10:27:59 -0400


Maybe it is the case that "there are more opportunities to be tender to 
another being" than ever before, and maybe it is the case that human 
contacts have become more diverse than before.  Yet this does not imply that 
the conditions of possibility of friendship have followed suit.  The same 
way some aspects of technology have made travelling easier (by accelerating 
time through ever faster machines) and some other aspects have made it 
actually more difficult (surveillance techniques, biopolitics, bureaucratic 
management), opportunities for friendly contact have increased and actual 
materiality of friendship seems not to have.

There are some postulates of frienship that need to take place, for sure.  
As Eric reminded, "equal worth" between persons involved being one -- and we 
don't need to keep the Ancient idea of equality in order to acknowledge the 
importance of this postulate.  Many a current ideal of equality may be 
employed, including the marxist one.

Also, you can't "be friends" with your pet.  You can be loving, tender, 
protective or what have you, but a friend?  I actually think that the degree 
of emotional attachment of a great number of people in uber-developed 
countries to their pets is a bit worrisome. Many people I live among 
genuinely love their pets more than other people.  Has there anything been 
written about sociology and politics of pet-ownership?  I see people whose 
pets function as their fetishes, or as projection screens or all sorts of 
narcissistic objects ("My cat is the only creature who gives me 
unconditional love!"  Huh?).  Both a certain degree of wealth and a certain 
degree of existential solitude are probably preconditions for the emergence 
of a society in which humans desperately seek love and frienship in/from 
their pets.  But I digress.

Where you're right on, Steve, is that friendship has been irreversibly 
seiged by the difference. I think Kristeva should have the last word here.  
Only when we acknowledge that we are strangers to ourselves can we befriend 
a stranger (or be a real citizen).  To fear or be intrigued by another 
person's strangeness depends of how familiar we are with our own ghosts.

L

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