Tlon: friends are an alter ego who heals us from the evil of living

This article on friends is published in the number 17 of Vanity Fair on newsstands until April 22, 2025

One of the quotes attributed to Oscar Wildeand that are often used on social networks to accompany photos of holidays or couples in love, reads: «The mystery of love is more than the mystery of death». Love contains in itself something that cannot be said to be completely, that cannot be explained, as if it were a skein that does not accept to be destroyed. According to the philosopher Giorgio Agambenhowever, that offriendship It is an even more difficult mystery to define: it is easier to say “I love you” seeming credible and sincere, than to say “I am a friend”. Perhaps because we live in one cynical and distrust company? Maybe because we always have the idea that the other approach us by convenience?

In Friendships (Einaudi), Agamben gives us the portraits of some of his friends who are no longer there, including Elsa Morante, Italo Calvino, Guy Debord, Patrizia Cavalli, Giorgio Caproni. People often difficult, crooked, bearers of a complexity at all at all light, even when the public image has returned them resolved, made, equipped with the rare gift of art, writing or philosophy. And also capable of great tendernessespecially when public perception painted them – is the case of Elsa Morante – as unpleasant, fickle, intractable.

What had such different people in common, for Agamben, was what made them indestructible: “Their fragility, their infinite ability to be destroyed». It seems a paradox, and instead this ability tells something of the human being, a Istabilissimum Animal which is always vulnerable, but who succeeds to survive each change and every destruction. So here’s how Agamben feels he can define friendship: if this instability is something that makes us life difficult and tiring, and if our ego sometimes becomes the greatest enemy, friendship manages to make us peace with this dimensions, to make us lovable and make us grateful to be alive. In essence, Friends help us to stay in the world for the same fact that they remind us that we are not uselesswe are not a weight, and for this they have chosen to combine their existence for ours. I am an alter ego that heals us from the evil of living.

If philosophy has spoken so much – Michel de Montaigne wrote beautiful pages on her friendship with Étienne de la Boétie and on the pain for her death – it is because this sincere union really between human beings contains something that we cannot explain to the end. Nevertheless, Because love should not afford all this? Perhaps because there are also romanticism, sexuality, expectations and projections that can obscure the real person we have in front of us at stake?

Friendship, on the contrary,, It seems to welcome the other precisely in his irreducible difference. He does not try to own or transform him, but accepts him in his imperfection. It does not cancel loneliness, but makes it shareable. In this sharing space, friends teach us to look at each other for what we are.

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