Pragmata 2.0 or Preliminary Remarks for a Transductive Theory of Relations
Her ne gelirse yahşidir, zira o dostun bahşidir
Third Part
Joy is man’s transition from a lesser to a greater perfection. (Spinoza, Ethics, Book Three)
Friendship, as we have seen, belongs to the realm of ethical pedagogy and emerged as a central philosophical concern in Ancient Greece and Rome. Its conceptual weight exceeds that of a mere social “relation”: for the Greeks, friendship took place outside the ordinary, standing apart from the everyday structures of kinship, commerce, or civic duty. It was defined not by accessibility, but by rarity, an exception rather than a rule. Although there was no fixed “type” of person to whom perfect friendship could be attributed, it appeared as an aspirational form of ethical life, available only to the few. In contrast to this logic of friendship, modern life situates friendship within the sphere of individual choice: it can arise between anyone, regardless of class, gender, or geography. Yet this democratization of friendship comes at a cost. The pace and structure of contemporary life rarely allow for the long duration, deep engagement, or ethical equality that ancient friendship required. Time, once the essential condition for trust and transformation, has become a luxury. As such, the ideal of perfect friendship has shifted, from a philosophical exclusion and numerical rarity point of view to a more accessible but thinner form of friendship, which we call the friendship of perfects.
What we often see today is not perfect friendship, but friendship of perfects -or rather, the aspiration toward mutual devotion, responsibility, and care between “perfect individuals” who strive to grow through each other. Frequently, these bonds resemble dyadic pairs, love couples: sometimes cross-gendered, sometimes same-gendered, mostly enclosed in family life, challenging, but reproducing the same ancient assumption that friendship must be between “equals” and “same”. Yet even now, the old exclusions persist. The idea that friendship between different and different, remains problematic or suspect has not been fully dispelled. The tension between equality and difference, desire and virtue, continues to haunt our conceptions of friendship, ancient and modern alike.
On the other hand, as mostly debated, in friendship of perfects, devotion and responsibility are distinctly modern themes, reaching their conceptual apex in Kant’s notion of duty (pflicht) as governed by the categorical imperative. In the contemporary from of friendship, following this Kantian framework, duties within friendship are not merely accidentalbut intrinsic, friendship itself becomes a moral relation defined by obligation, rather than by shared virtue or sameness like in ancient Greeks. The “perfection” of friendship is no longer something proven through long-term testing or rare philosophical equality; instead, it is embedded in the structure of time itself. Friendship ought to endure, not as a passive survival of duration, but as an active, transformative participation in time by both parties. In this framework, a friend’s devotion becomes constitutive of the relationship, encompassing even the egoistic elements bound up with commitment. Friendship thus shifts from an aristocratic privilege of the virtuous few to a moral practice available to all, though not without its own complexities and burdens.
Devotion, however, is not the defining feature of the modern conception of friendship; it is far more deeply embedded in other social bonds, most notably marriage, community, and religious commitments. Gilles Deleuze offers a striking alternative perspective, arguing that friendship is not primarily about, neither devotion or responsibility nor attachment or obligation, but rather participation. But what exactly do friends share? Must they have the same language, habits, or tastes? Deleuze’s insight is that friendship is not founded on common ideas or conscious agreement, but on something pre-linguistic and preconscious, or I should say transindividual. He writes: “There are people with whom you can never be understood or spoken to, even on the simplest matters, and there are people with whom you can understand—even if you disagree completely—with such a deep and profound grasp of the most abstract subjects that this grounding in doubt renders them mysterious” (Deleuze, 1991), and I would add, this mystery makes them friends.
This dimension of friendship, grounded in participation beyond rational discourse, finally opens the possibility for an ethics of friendship that embraces emotional and affective but also political elements. For Deleuze, friendship occurs at a level before conscious thought, a direct perception of attraction that reaches the roots of perception, to the most vital roots, in a gesture or a thought, even before the thought is expressed. This constitutive affective connection is what defines friendship. Now, slowly, we are getting to understand our problem. I have to admit that, both Spinoza and Deleuze, in different yet deeply interconnected ways, treat friendship not as a moral category or an ideal of virtue but as an ontological and political mode of association, grounded in continues transformation and the mutual enhancement of power of act. If we remember, in Spinoza’s Ethics, the relational nature of all beings is emphasized through his definition of individuals not as substances but as compositions of relations, structured by an interplay of motion and rest and to affect and to being affected. It is from this relational ontology that the idea of friendship emerges (potentia multitudinis- collective power). For Spinoza, and Deleuze, a friend is not someone who corresponds to a fixed essence or mirrors one's identity; rather, friendship is the outcome of an encounter in which friends affect one another in ways that increase each other’s power of acting (potentia agendi). Friendship, in this sense, is a mode of joyful composition, a composition of bodies and minds whose relations are harmonious and mutually reinforcing each other’s power. Only from this framework, “friendship becomes an ethico-political force”, and the meaning of friendship turns to comradeship, a (the only) non-coercive mode of social dwelling in which relations are made by mutual transformation rather than domination or subjection. Only in this way can we move beyond the perspective of “Oh my friends, there is no friend” (Derrida, 1997: 300) toward the Spinozist ideal of a “communism of friendship”, as expressed in Letter 44: “Among friends, all things are in common.”
In the end, we have to admit that friendship seems to resist a final definition. It slips between eras, between ethics and politics, between duty and desire, between affection and obligation. From the structured hierarchies of the Greek polis to the fragile, often fleeting connections of modern life, friendship remains a site of philosophical tension -at once rare and ordinary, exclusive yet radically open to new compositions. Whether seen as an ethical trial, a metaphysical longing, or a silent gesture of pre-linguistic recognition, friendship demands a relation to time: not simply endurance, but transformation. Therefore, what persists across centuries is not the perfection of sameness or the reassurance of shared virtues, but the possibility of becoming-with-other -of entering into a shared temporality and affection shaped not just by symmetry, but by asymmetry, difference, and participation, and the mystery of mutual presence. I believe, perhaps in this way, friendship might be conceived not as an ideal to be achieved, but as a mode of being that accompanies us quietly yet insistently thorough the unfolding of life itself, thorough, what I will call, a transindividuation of being-becoming. Thus, only in this sense, friendship turns to be a transformative, transductive relation, that makes us to utter one thing: friendship is either transductive or it is not friendship.
Kar-ı Ustad Siyah Qalam