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“O mes amis, il n'y nul amy.”“O my friends, there is no friend.”
In addressing you in this way, perhaps I have not yet said anything. Perhaps I have not even addressed myself to you.
On the two sides of a comma or a pause, the two parts of this sentence seem incompatible with each other, destined to annihilate themselves in their contradiction. And, first, I have not yet said anything in my own name. I have contented myself with quoting. Spokesman for another, I have reported his words, which belong in the first place to a foreign or even rather archaic language. I have, then, signed nothing, put nothing on my own account.
“O my friends, there is no friend.” This is not merely a citation which I am reading at present; it was already the quotation by another reader of the country I come from, Montaigne; “it is a saying which,” he says, “Aristotle was used to repeating.”1 In other words, I have quoted the quotation of a saying attributed to Aristotle, a saying whose origin seems to lose itself in the anonymity of time immemorial. Nonetheless, it is not one of those proverbs without an assignable origin and whose aphoristic mode rarely takes the form of an apostrophe.
This meditation on friendship should also involve, at the very same time, a study of quotation, and of the quotation of an apostrophe. What happens when one quotes an apostrophe? Later on we will connect these themes to those of the friend's name and death, of memoirs and of testaments. In the Eudemian Ethics (VII, 4, 1239 a 35-40), Aristotle inscribes friendship, knowledge, and death within the same configuration, in a constellation whose necessity gives much