POL S 514 A: Selected Topics in Political Theory

Pol S 514: The Politics of Friendship

Autumn 2024

Tue 1:30-4:20

Instructor: Noga Rotem (nrotem@uw.edu)

Office hours: by appointment

Hannah Arendt says that Socrates—who used to stroll in the Athenian agora and pick up conversations with his fellow citizens—did this because he wanted to make friends out of the Athenian citizens. Aristotle famously argued that friendship—and not justice—is the true bond of the political community. Friendship, he thought, makes us partners in a common world.

What are friendship’s promises as a political practice and as an analytical concept with which we might think the political? What are its limitations? How should we think about the role of affect/affection in politics more broadly? What does friendship help us understand about the pleasures of collective action, about our political investments? What does friendship occlude? When is friendship world building and conducive of transformative politics and when is it a source of the displacement of conflict and of politics? What is the role of friendship in contexts of structural injustice or of transitional justice? Arendt thought that friendship might play key role in the resolution of the conflict in Israel/Palestine. She imagines a federated structure in Palestine which rests on Jewish-Palestinian community councils, and where “the conflict would be resolved on the lowest and most promising level of proximity.” Is this vision delusional? Inspiring? or both? When talking about friends, must we talk about enemies too? 

Ultimately, we will ask: might we rework friendship to reclaim, complicate, and/or de-fraternize it, as a concept and practice that might bear some political promise for us today? 

This seminar will explore these questions and others, discussing friendship as a form of affective investment (alongside other, adjacent inclinations and relations such as love/affection, solidarity, kinship, etc.), and as informing historical and contemporary forms of political organization (such as council democracy and coalition building). We will read works by Aristotle, Carl Schmitt, Hannah Arendt, Judith Butler, Audre Lorde and Michel Foucault, alongside contemporary works in Political Theory by Leela Gandhi, Çiğdem Çidam, Lida Maxwell, Stephen White, Danielle Ellen, David Kim, Lisa Beard, and others.

Requirements include a ~15 pp seminar paper, one in-class oral presentation, weekly discussion posts, and participation in an in-class mini-conference where students will present their work in progress and will give/receive feedback from peers.