The article discusses friendship as a centrifugal movement away from commonality, identity, similarity, and sameness. In contradistinction to approaches that tend to look for the essence of friendship and discuss it as a relationship that takes place in a chronotopic vacuum, the argument presented here is based on a particular diagnostics which holds that the condition of the contemporary subject and its relational fabric are largely centripetal in nature, and entangled with discourses of the common, security, and trust as per the requirements of the contemporary psycho-political demand for the production of shielded and encapsulated personhoods. Drawing on Esposito’s notion of community not as a common property or a fusion of individuals, but, rather, as constituted by lack and abstraction, and with reference to anthropological evidence on the notion of friendship among the Mapuche indigenous population of Chile, the article attempts to prefigure friendship as entailing the opening-up of the individual to the outside, a relational experimentation, a radical grammar of relating that can resist the domination of centripetal tendencies and the consequent impoverishment of the relational fabric.
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