Siegfried Kracauer's Differentiating Approach to Friendship

Abstract

Siegfried Kracauer's essays Über die Freundschaft (‘On Friendship’) and Gedanken über Freundschaft (‘Thoughts on Friendship’) exemplify a conceptually differentiating approach to friendship. This article aims at highlighting the explanatory yield of such an approach in contrast to a prevalent conflation of personal relationship types in research today. Kracauer's work is a call from the past to take seriously the semantic nuances of friendship in the present in order to better reflect lived experience in a sociologically plausible manner. I begin by identifying the practice of semantic conflation and its methodological problems. A brief description of the publication background of the friendship essays and their embeddedness in Kracauer's anxiety about the modern subject precedes a selective exposition. To conclude, I offer a summary reflection on the contemporary significance of Kracauer's approach with reference to social media friends and political friendship.

Do political theorists have friends? Towards a redefinition of political friendship

“…What lies at the root of these (and other) attempts at describing political friendship is the problem of semantic conflation of different relationship types (Blatterer, 2015, 2018b). To be more precise, it is a problem from a perspective that pays heed to the lived experience of intimate friendship and its action norms.…”

“…To recognise processes of differentiation is to also recognise what Hogen, in reference to Musil, Canetti and Kracauer, has called ‘the modernisation of the I’ (Hogen, 2000). Echoing Simmel’s reflections on the modern personality, and especially his thoughts on ‘differentiated friendship’ (1906), Siegfried Kracauer (2011) provides an example of a ‘differentiating approach to friendship’ (Blatterer, 2018b). From a broadly phenomenological perspective, Kracauer distinguishes friendship from erotic love, acquaintanceship, comradeship and collegial relationships according to the typical norms that underpin each and the fundamental logics that orient these types.…”