The French translation completely omits Agamben’s observation regarding the “omega with iota subscript”: it has been cropped out.Īlthough it has been and still is often attributed to Aristotle, the quote “O friends, there are no friends” does not appear in the the Corpus Aristotelicum (the collection of Aristotle’s work). I find the English translation to be more reliable, especially for the matter at hand here. The French translation by Martin Rueff was published the same year as L’amitié (Paris: Payor & Rivages).įor some reason, the French edition has L’Amicizia as the original Italian. It was first published in Italian under the title L’Amico in 2007 (Nottetempo). 26-27.Īgamben’s essay was first published in an English translation by Joseph Falsone under the title “Friendship” in issue 5 of the journal Contretemps, in December 2004 (pp. by David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009, pp. ☛ “The Friend” in What Is an Apparatus?, by Giorgio Agamben, tr.
But if we open a modern edition of the latter’s Lives of Eminent Philosophers to the chapter dedicated to Aristotle’s biography (5.21), we do not find the phrase in question but rather one to all appearances almost identical, whose significance is nevertheless different and much less mysterious: ōi (omega with iota subscript) philoi, oudeis philos, “He who has (many) friends, does not have a single friend.”Ī visit to the library was all it took to clarify the mystery.
It is an analogous, and probably conscious, sense of discomfort that led Jacques Derrida to choose as a leitmotif for his book on friendship a sibylline motto, attributed to Aristotle by tradition, that negates friendship with the very same gesture by which it seems to invoke it: o philoi, oudeis philos, “O friends, there are no friends.” It can be found in Montaigne and in Nietzsche, both of whom would have taken it from Diogenes Laertius.
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