2020 Cinema Studies Graduate Student Union's Conference: Friendship

“Is it the one who loves who is the friend of the one who is loved, whether [they’re] loved in return or whether [they’re] actually hated? Or is it the one who is loved who is the friend of the one who loves? Alternatively, in such a case is neither the friend of either, unless both of them love each other?”

-Socrates in Plato’s Lysis, 143

“We have in fact caught and killed a large predator that supposedly injured some bathers. But as you see it’s a beautiful day, the beaches are open, and the people are having a wonderful time. Amity, as you know, means friendship.”

-The Mayor from Jaws (1975, Spielberg)

Friendship takes many forms. It manifests in, but is not reducible to: camaraderie, solidarity, allyship, accompliceship, companionship. Friendship can be formed in the midst of struggle, or it can run counter to political commitments. CSI’s annual graduate conference for 2020, held on January 31st and February 1st, takes up the theme of friendship in all its myriad configurations, from the conceptually abstract notion of affinity, to the quantifiable datafication of social media “friends.” There are as many theories of friendship as there are theorists. Kant delineated between perfect friendship, moral friendship, and friendship based on feeling. Schopenhauer argued for friendship as an admixture of selfishness and compassion. Samuel Delany recommended the promulgation of interclass contact, exemplified in the porno theaters of Times Square, while Alenka Zupančič criticized the “false friendship” of philosophical attempts to divorce sexuality from psychoanalytic insights.

Meanwhile, in the movies, friendship has been returned to again and again, irresolvable and ever-present. Given the long history of sexual regulation in the cinema along lines of gender, race, “decency,” and the mutual-imbrication of all three, friendship has often been read in cinema as occluding sexuality; friendship imposed on narratives by the needs of propriety. Yet what happens when we focus on friendship on its own terms? What do we gain and what do we lose in contending with a more robust notion of friendship? Is not the recent ubiquitous (and at times insincere) call to interdisciplinarity a broadening of the horizons of just what intellectual friendship (and, by extension, intellectual community) could look like?

Plato’s Lysis concludes with the words, “…we were not as yet able to find out precisely what a friend is.” We take this as both signal and opportunity, description and provocation.