<sec>Book Notes</>
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<bkr>Kuisma Korhonen. Textual Friendship: The Essay as Impossible Encounter—From
Plato and Montaigne to Levinas and Derrida</>
<bkf>New York: Prometheus Books, 2006, 494 pp.</>
How does the form of the essay relate to its content? How should one “read” the essay—
in opposition to, or in conjunction with rhetoric, philosophy, and literature? Why does
friendship appear as a recurring motif in so many notable essays? These are key questions
that inform Kuisma Korhonen’s Textual Friendship: The Essay as Impossible
Encounter—From Plato and Montaigne to Levinas and Derrida, a thorough and
ambitious literary and philosophical analysis of the rhetorical and formal strategies that
have been applied to the study of essayistic discourse. Korhonen centers this
consideration around the thematic element of friendship: friendship as a recurring trope in
the essay where the essayist is at various moments haunted by the memory of deceased
friends and cognizant of future readers, and where the writer transcribes a living
friendship or responds to a friend’s letters in the assumed privacy afforded by this literary
form, as occurs to varying degrees in Plato’s Phaedrus, Montaigne’s Essais, and
Derrida’s Politiques de l’amitié. Friendship also structures the author/reader pact at the
heart of the reading experience and within the scope of rhetorical persuasion. However,
as Korhonen reminds us, any notion of textual friendship, as inscribed within the
framework of textual encounter is, in many ways, always already haunted by the
possibility of rhetorical violence; thus, textual friendship necessarily implies the
impossibility of friendship.
In the first part of this work, “The Essay and Textual Friendship,” Korhonen
provides a comprehensive overview of the many ways in which the essay as a genre has
been considered. As an “antigenre,” rather, the essay occupies a liminal status: neither
philosophy nor literature, or, perhaps more precisely, both philosophy and literature. As
such, the essay resounds with a polyphony of voices. Who speaks in an essay? The
writer? The narrator? The real-life author? For the purposes of this analysis, Korhonen
refers to the essay as the history of transition from the rhetorical violence implied by the
collision of textual voices to the (im)possibility of textual friendship. Friendship, like the
essay, remains situated at the problematic crossroads of Aristotle’s definition of
secondary friendships: pleasurable on the one hand and useful on the other. Like the
essay, friendship too is both/and and simultaneously neither/nor useful and pleasurable.
Alongside the cacophony of textual voices in the essay, the definition of reading and
readership becomes equally blurred.
Korhonen considers three distinct reading strategies in the second part of this
work, “An Ethical Genealogy of the Essay,” citing three traditions that have played an
important role in the history of the essay: rhetorical composition, philosophical dialogue
and the Pyrrhonian skeptical method. Korhonen notably cautions us to avoid considering
one single method in our own analyses; rather, we might seek a reading in between these
three approaches. To this end, Korhonen turns to the ethical relation between self (writer)
and other (reader) and the potential for dialogue opened up within the space of the essay.
In the third part of this study, “From Plato to Derrida: Some Readings on Textual
Friendship in the Essay,” Korhonen turns to specific and exemplary essayists and those
essays (or, in the case of Cicero and Seneca, ethical writings and letters respectively) that
explicitly address friendship: Plato’s Phaedrus, Lysis and Symposium, Cicero’s Laelium,
Seneca’s Epistulae ad Lucilum, St. Augustine’s Confessiones, Montaigne’s Essais,
Bacon’s Essays, Emerson’s writings, Saint-Évremond’s “Maxime qu’on ne doit jamais
manquer à ses amis,” “L’amitié sans amitié” and “L’intérêt dans les personnes tout à fait
corrompues. La vertu trop rigide. Les sentiments d’un honnête et habile courtisan sur
cette vertu rigide et ce sale intérêt,” Madame de Lambert’s writings and Derrida’s
Politiques de l’amitié: Suivi de l’oreille de Heidegger. It is refreshing that Korhonen
includes female voices in this study as they shed light on questions of friendship between
women as well as friendships between men and women; however, it is rather
disappointing that more examples were not given, particularly in light of Korhonen’s
inclusion of Luce Irigaray’s work. This final part of Korhonen’s analysis nonetheless best
exemplifies the weight and significance of this work as it moves adroitly between textual
analysis of specific essays and theoretical questions of friendship all the while
illuminating the link between these single essays and the breadth of secondary literature
on them.
<rau>Adrienne Angelo <#> Auburn University</rau>
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