Dialogue 56 (1):111-130 (
2017)
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Abstract
We argue that friendship is constituted in the practice of narration, not
merely identifi ed through psychological or sociological criteria. We show that whether
two people have, as Aristotle argues, ‘lived together’ in ‘mutually acknowledged goodwill’
can be determined only through a narrative reconstruction of a shared past.
We demonstrate this with a close reading of Thomas Bernhard’s Wittgenstein’s
Nephew: A Friendship (1982). We argue that this book provides not only an illustration
but also an enactment of the practice of friendship as the urge to redeem—and thus
to instantiate—Aristotelian suzên (‘living together’) by means of its telling.