Friendship, 2

A reader comments on the Friendship post:

"We really will not form friendship bonds with people who do not share the same thought process though".

I wanted to qualify this, or turn it around: in a friendship you have 'thought processes' that you couldn't have had outside the friendship, no? (Granted, I may be talking about certain kinds of friendship here). A conversation inside a friendship will lead to a place neither friend would have arrived at individually. This is partly what I meant by 'composition' - the thought of a friendship, irreducible to the 'thought processes' of either friend.

Perhaps sometimes, the thinking of a friend, in its very obstinate refusal to mirror or correspond with our own thinking, acts as a creative irritant - the necessary creative irritant which, precisely, one could not fashion oneself. And so, the friendship turns on something beyond this difference in thinking. (The idea, here, of a kind of still point on which the friendship turns?)

Finally, is there not something in excess about friendship: it exceeds the plane of identity/ difference. There is nothing on that plane which explains the friendship - or rather, there always is, so that its explanatory value is limited. That is, there are always points of identity and difference, in varying degrees in varying friendships. (If there is close resemblance, it is a mirroring; if none, 'opposites attract' - and all that's in between). Rather, the relation exceeds its parts; the parts escape into the relation.