As a scientist friend of mine, who likes to reflect on such matters, writes to me, the fundamental event in the history of living beings was the emergence of a microorganism capable of feeling pain. This thesis must, of course, be clarified by placing “pleasure” before — or adding it to — “pain”. If we rate this fundamental capacity of living beings to what Aristotle writes about the perception of the sensation of existence (“to perceive that one lives is a thing pleasant in itself, life being a thing naturally good, and the perceiving of the presence in ourselves of things naturally good being pleasant”), we can then say that the primordial form of the capacity to feel pleasure or pain relates to the very fact of existing, to the sensation of being alive. The sensation of the sweetness of living is, in fact, matched by its symmetrically opposite counterpart, in which, for some reason—or even for no apparent reason at all—feeling that one is alive proves painful.
The quote from Aristotle that we have cited forms part of the treatise on friendship contained in Books VIII and IX of the Nicomachean Ethics. After defining the sweetness of the sensation of living, Aristotle adds that we experience that very sweetness through the existence of a friend, and that friendship is this “sharing in” (synaisthanesthai) the existence of another person, who thereby becomes an “other self” (heteros autos). Not only is there a sensation of existence, a feeling of being alive, but this sensation is always already shared; it is always already an affirmation of the other’s existence; and friendship is the instance of this “co-feeling” of the friend’s existence within the very feeling of one’s own existence.
It will then be possible to develop this thesis in relation to the other polarity of the sensation of existence, in which this sensation no longer appears as joy, but as pain. The consent to the existence of the friend will now be matched by the consent to the existence of the enemy. And if, according to Carl Schmitt, the friend-enemy pair defines politics, then at the foundation of politics lie the pleasure and pain that define the human sense of existence and the consent to the existence of the other that is inherent in it. Friendship and enmity, love and hate, the philein of philos and the echthairo of echthros do not refer to a doctrine of the affections, but are above all two fundamental ontological-political categories. If we perceive the sensation of living as sweet, then we are in friendship and at peace; if, on the other hand, we perceive it as hateful, we fall into war and enmity. Once again, at the root of our relationship with others lies our relationship with ourselves: the way in which we consent to our own existence determines the way in which we situate ourselves in the world. We ourselves are our first friend and our first enemy.
Giorgio Agamben: The first friend and the first enemy
As a scientist friend of mine, who likes to reflect on such matters, writes to me, the fundamental event in the history of living beings was the emergence of a microorganism capable of feeling pain. This thesis must, of course, be clarified by placing “pleasure” before — or adding it to — “pain”. If we rate this fundamental capacity of living beings to what Aristotle writes about the perception of the sensation of existence (“to perceive that one lives is a thing pleasant in itself, life being a thing naturally good, and the perceiving of the presence in ourselves of things naturally good being pleasant”), we can then say that the primordial form of the capacity to feel pleasure or pain relates to the very fact of existing, to the sensation of being alive. The sensation of the sweetness of living is, in fact, matched by its symmetrically opposite counterpart, in which, for some reason—or even for no apparent reason at all—feeling that one is alive proves painful.
The quote from Aristotle that we have cited forms part of the treatise on friendship contained in Books VIII and IX of the Nicomachean Ethics. After defining the sweetness of the sensation of living, Aristotle adds that we experience that very sweetness through the existence of a friend, and that friendship is this “sharing in” (synaisthanesthai) the existence of another person, who thereby becomes an “other self” (heteros autos). Not only is there a sensation of existence, a feeling of being alive, but this sensation is always already shared; it is always already an affirmation of the other’s existence; and friendship is the instance of this “co-feeling” of the friend’s existence within the very feeling of one’s own existence.
It will then be possible to develop this thesis in relation to the other polarity of the sensation of existence, in which this sensation no longer appears as joy, but as pain. The consent to the existence of the friend will now be matched by the consent to the existence of the enemy. And if, according to Carl Schmitt, the friend-enemy pair defines politics, then at the foundation of politics lie the pleasure and pain that define the human sense of existence and the consent to the existence of the other that is inherent in it. Friendship and enmity, love and hate, the philein of philos and the echthairo of echthros do not refer to a doctrine of the affections, but are above all two fundamental ontological-political categories. If we perceive the sensation of living as sweet, then we are in friendship and at peace; if, on the other hand, we perceive it as hateful, we fall into war and enmity. Once again, at the root of our relationship with others lies our relationship with ourselves: the way in which we consent to our own existence determines the way in which we situate ourselves in the world. We ourselves are our first friend and our first enemy.
Quodlibet, July 17, 2026