.. although the figure of the friend, so regularly coming back on stage [?] with the features of the brother - who is critically at stake in this analysis - seems spontaneously to belong to a familial, fraternalist and thus androcentric configuration of politics.
Why would the friend be like a brother? Let us dream of a friendship which goes beyond this proximity of the congeneric double..
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..is the friend the same or the other? Cicero prefers the same ... the friend is, as the translation has it, 'our own ideal image'. We envisage the friend as such. And this is how he envisages us: with a friendly look. Cicero uses the word examplar, which means portrait but also, as the exemplum, the duplicate, the reproduction, the copy as well as the original, the type, the model.. Now, according to Cicero, his exemplar is projected or recognised in the true friend, it is his ideal double, his other self, the same as self but improved. Since we watch him looking at us, thus watching ourselves, because we see him keeping our image in his eyes - in truth in ours - survival is then hoped for, illuminated in advance, if not assured for
this Narcissus who dreams of immortality.
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