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In this book, renowned anthropologist Michael Jackson draws on philosophy, biography, ethnography, and literature to explore the meanings and affordances of friendship—a relationship just as significant as, yet somehow different from, kinship and love. Beginning with Aristotle's accounts of friendship as a political virtue and Montaigne's famous essay on friendship as a form of love, Jackson examines the tension between the political and personal resonances of friendship in the philosophy of Hannah Arendt, the biography of the Indian historian Brijen Gupta, and the oral narratives of a Kuranko storyteller, Keti Ferenke Koroma. He offers reflections on childhood friends, imaginary friends, lifelong friendships, and friendships with animals. He ruminates particularly on the complications of friendship in the context of anthropological fieldwork, exploring the contradiction between the egalitarian spirit of friendship on the one hand and, on the other, the power imbalance between ethnographers and their interlocutors.Through these stories, Jackson explores the unpredictable interplay of mutability and mutuality in intimate human relationships, and the critical importance of choice in forming friendship—what it means to be loyal to friends through good times and bad, and even in the face of danger. Through a blend of memoir, theory, ethnography, and fiction, Jackson shows us how the elective affinities of friendship transcend culture, gender, and age, and offer us perennial means of taking stock of our lives and getting a measure of our own self-worth

What is the nature of friendship, and what is its significance in our lives? How has friendship changed since the ancient Greeks began to analyze it, and how has modern technology altered its very definition? In this fascinating exploration of friendship through the ages, one of the most thought-provoking philosophers of our time tracks historical ideas of friendship, gathers a diversity of friendship stories from the annals of myth and literature, and provides unexpected insights into our friends, ourselves, and the role of friendships in an ethical life. A.C. Grayling roves the rich traditions of friendship in literature, culture, art and philosophy, bringing into his discussion familiar pairs as well as unfamiliar - Achilles and Patroclus, David and Jonathan, Coleridge and Wordsworth, Huck Finn and Jim. Grayling lays out major philosophical interpretations of friendship, then offers his own take, drawing on personal experiences and an acute awareness of vast cultural shifts that have occurred

Preliminary Material -- Introduction: Encountering Friendship with Francesco Alberoni /Harry Blatterer and Sveva Magaraggia -- The Meanings of Friendship -- Friendship as Encounter -- The Times of Love and Friendship -- Friendship as Ethical Form of Love -- Preferences, Impartiality and Friendship -- Friendship and Power -- Three Social States -- Friendship and Love's Paradise Lost -- Friendship and Group Solidarity -- Childhood, Adulthood and Friendly Company -- Self, Friends and Benefactors -- Eroticism and Friendship -- Power and Ambivalence, Envy and Desire -- Morality and the Logics of Market and Organization -- Friendship and Creative Action -- Spiritual Friendship -- Familiar Friendship -- Ideal and Reality: Brothers, Friends, Caritas -- Bibliography.

Friendship names the raw, sensuous, delicate, multi-dimensional, secret intelligence shared by sentient beings at the moment of their extended encounter. It requires nothing of identity politics, selfhood, social agency, though its very expression enables and indeed solidifies, all this and more. Unlike companionship, it generates a strangely emboldened shared knowing, a suspended aliveness of (and to) otherness without recourse to an old-fashioned 'mastery' or 'authority' or binaric split between 'self and Other'. This is not a suspended aliveness as in 'freefall' or some kind of nihilistic relativism that generates an always-already 'in between' or 'transitioning' state of affairs. Leastwise it is 'romantic', though its irruptions have launched over a thousand delicious plateaus. Friendship requires a wholly different logic of senses, emotions, libidinal economies, calculations and intentions, closer to the Socratic parrhesia (truth) and its reinvention by Foucault in his Courage of Truth, as epimeleia (the technologies of care). Drawing on a specific encounter, a wild encounter, one stretched over a seven-year period with a semi-feral mustang whose precise split-down-the-middle brown/white face, earned him the Ojibwe name "Manhattan" (corrupted from "Madweijwan, the 'heard-flowing' of where the two rivers meet), these remarks here today will step into that suspended aliveness of (and to) otherness in order to develop a wholly different logic of this event-secret-sensuous intelligence called 'friendship'. At its core is an ability to harness a particular type of raw energy, sexual presence, even joy – an athleticism, respect, trust, odd form of mastery and slowness of time (despite or, even perhaps, at a gallop), that not only goes beyond the traditional (and anthropomorphically bound) tropes of 'fraternity' or 'brotherhood', but beyond the linguistic turn itself, with all the trappings of 'subject' and 'object', the 'becoming-x' and the 'transcendental', now thrown to one side. In so doing, a form of consciousness and indeed a 'new' form of communication is enabled, one that speaks a wholly different language game, embodied in the breat(d)th and fractal singularities that today go under the such headings as quantum entanglements, ana-materialisms, incompletenesses and undecidabilities. All this I learned from befriending a wildly playful and somewhat dangerous horse named Manhattan.

"A friend is another self": Aristotelian foundations -- "A sort of secession": the emergence of modern friendship -- A structure of the soul: friendship and the arts -- "And so on": why do we love our friends? -- "No sense of humor": a friendship breaks down -- The good of friendship

Is it possible to have too many friends? Is your spouse supposed to be your best friend? How far should you go to help a friend in need? And how do you end a friendship that has run its course? In a wickedly entertaining anatomy of friendship in its contemporary guises, Joseph Epstein uncovers the rich and surprising truths about our favored companions. Friendship illuminates those complex, wonderful relationships without which we'd all be lost