2013 - Firenze University Press
The principal aim of this study is to participate in the current renewed discourse on the meaning of friendship, initiated in 1994 by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida with hisPolitics of Friendship, by combining the philosophical method of inquiry with the hermeneutical approach to poetic representations of friendship in theIliad, theDivine Comedy, and theDecameron. It examines friendship not only as the unique love between two persons based on familiarity and proximity, but as the love for the one who is far away, the stranger, for this is a natural extension of the implicit love of the distant other, of the other-as-stranger – what Emmanuel Levinas has called "the infinity of the Other" – which is concealed in our friend, and which, in the words of Maurice Blanchot, puts us "authentically in relation" with him or her. [Publisher's text]
xviii,158 p.
