Marina Garcés: "Why do we want more family if we can have friends?"

Marina Garcés (Barcelona, ​​​​1973) says that the first impact of a strange friendship is the film ET., which she saw when she was nine years old. "It radically raises the question of where unconditional love lies with a different being, in this case so bizarre that it's literally extraterrestrial." A friendship between a child and a chili pepper from another planet confronts you with a question: what does it mean to love unconditionally? This is one of the questions the Catalan philosopher poses. in his latest book, The passion of strangers (Galaxia Gutenberg).

What is a good friend?

— Someone we feel loves us and is with us just because. Friendship has no other purpose than the company we keep and the affection we have for one another. There is no economic, romantic, or familial purpose.

Is it the difference with love?

— Friendship is also love, but I understand what you mean. When we fall in love, we're talking about a relationship where there's a future intention: building a life together. That's why expectations about a romantic relationship can easily be disappointed; on the other hand, with friendship, there doesn't seem to be as much potential, although we do see issues that make it conflictive.

Which is it?

— That nothing is established: I think this is one of the key ideas of friendship. What's at stake is who each person is to the other in a very naked and direct way.

What does it mean that there is nothing instituted?

— It's the only bond without law. Reviewing the other forms of bonding we have, I saw that they all have some formula for establishing it: from an ornithology association to the family and marriage. The state imposes and determines certain ways of being part of the community. But friendship hasn't been legislated, it hasn't been instituted. There are rules, but there's no contract, and there's no record. Where is the trace?

And yet we all know it's important.

— And it's also because of the bond and social cohesion. Friendship isn't just intimate, because it also has to do with the way we relate to those outside our lineage, class, or social group. And this is preserved—I think fortunately—in that uninstitutional status that has to do with going beyond limits, going beyond what we already know and those we already know who they are. And perhaps they aren't the ones we expected to be part of our lives.

Why do we become friends with someone?

— Great question. It can be asked in general terms: what is the function of a friend, if there is no purpose beyond the relationship itself? And also in specific terms: why do we become friends with someone even when they don't seem to fit in with us? One of the philosophers I mention in the book, Gilles Deleuze, says that friendship is a matter of perception, not classification. We grasp something about the other that makes the bond possible. But there are no formulas for this; we don't know how to make a friend.

Can we be friends with someone who is ideologically very different?

— The Greeks say that anything too distant cannot be linked. Lord and vassal, elder and younger... we could say this from an ideological perspective. But it's not written anywhere that this can't be the case. Who knows who can become a friend? And this not knowing is a power, also a political one, because it disrupts the usual classification of a society. Friendships break the contours of our well-defined lives.

And we certainly do, break these limits?

— Often the problem is that we end up fitting friendships into very narrow confines. And in times of fear and uncertainty like ours, we tend to take refuge, no longer among equals, but among identical people. So, rather than friends, we end up creating bubbles to protect ourselves from the harsh conditions we feel our daily life has become in our society.

Is male-female friendship possible?

— I strongly defend it, not only because I believe gender segregation is an evil in all its forms, but also because it challenges one of the great suspicions with which friendship is dismantled, which is the suspicion that there is something more. And in friendship there will be whatever there is, and sexual desire or other things are excluded because we have placed it on a level of purity. I, to begin with, don't know what purity is in human life. It's a term that distresses me. Friendship isn't built from virginity; many dimensions of us are touched upon.

And then, why is it limited?

— It is limited when suspicion is used as a form of social surveillance, and the space of friendship is delimited to save the space of legitimate love, marriage, whatever you want to call it. All these compartmentalizations seem like the protection of morality in its different eras and manifestations.

She claims that the models we've had for friendship are masculine. How does this affect women?

— Traditional representations of female friendship have been primarily in segregated spaces: women talking about their husbands, or leaving them, domestic life, etc. But segregated. And toward men... notice how the lover has traditionally been referred to: the friend. This tells us many things. The friend transcends a limit; she is in a place that unsettles the moral order.

One word that has been in fashion is 'sorority'.

— And I've discovered that the first person to champion it was Miguel de Unamuno, a man who I don't think was very feminist. I think it's a term worth reclaiming if we understand that he has been able to overthrow the stigma that patriarchy has placed on friendship between women: they are either victims who help each other or they are rivals. They can only help each other if they are victims. What we really share is the struggle against the same oppression or system of oppressions: patriarchy.

Is everything explained to the friend?

— I don't believe much. I believe in trust, which each of us gives and receives based on what we're willing to do with others without knowing everything about them. And ultimately, a friend is someone who, at the end of the day, goes home; they won't be 100% part of who we are. In fact, if a friend can only be friends with one other, we would say that's very toxic. Because we're never just friends with one other. And we're not equal with each of our friends. Friendship is also a terrain where this multiplicity of ways of being that we are finds a system of relationships.

There are those who say that their family is their friends.

— Yes, the chosen family. My question is: why do we want more family if we can have friends? Friends open up another playing field and another way of connecting. Actually, I think there's a longing for family when we say these things. There's a rejection of family, but it's replaced by a longing for family.

Can you have many friends?

— The Greeks said no, that whoever has many friends has no friends. It's one of the clichés of Greek philosophy on friendship. Facebook would say otherwise, but I think the key lies in the relationship between time and life. Many friendships have entered the realm of emotional consumption, of accumulating contacts, experiences, and possibilities of whatever. Aristotle put it beautifully: you have to have consumed many kilos of salt together to be friends. There's always a relationship with lifespan that has to do with friendship. And if anything is at stake in our lives today, it's how much time we have for the life that matters to us.

If we change over time, does it make sense to change friends?

— Perhaps the most difficult thing is how we accompany each other through life's transformation. What do we do today? Since we have lives on demand, and we're closing folders and opening new chapters, we're sometimes left with our school friends as a kind of testament to ourselves in another phase. It's increasingly difficult for us to endure the discomfort of relating to what we've been.

He explains in the book that the first impact of a strange friendship is ET.

— I must have been nine when I went to the cinema, like so many of my generation, and I think that the power of it isn't just a beautiful story of salvation, but it also poses in a very radical way where unconditional love lies with a different being, in this case so bizarre that it's literally extraterrestrial. The child finds it and can be there unconditionally, but not to keep the chili pepper, but to help it leave, to return, and therefore to separate itself. And I think this story is moving because it poses this question: what does it mean to love unconditionally?