The semantic of friendship has been associated, from an historical point of view, to the equality and fraternity ideals. In that way, friendship is thought of within the frames of a familial semantic that associates the friend to the figure of the brother. Indeed, some authors point out to the fact that the familial semantic privileges homogenization processes by ways of suppressing otherness itself. Also, this semantic can be blamed of fostering social intolerance attached to discriminative practices. Therefore, they consider of great importance the disarticulation friendship-familiarity, and try to understand the friendship mostly as a privileged intersubjective relation for political experimentation, for the unexpected quality in the bond with otherness matches better with the difference inherent to political life than equality ideals. Friendship, since it is thought of as an unexpected space of experimentation, brings about the discussion of the possibility of creating new forms of relationship and subjectivity in our contemporary social context, which is extremely individualistic and where the public bows more and more fragile.
Friendship; Alterity; Experimentation