Marina Garcés. La pasión de los extraños. Una filosofía de la amistad. Galaxia Gutenberg, Barcelona, 2025, 183 pp. ISBN 978-84-10317-20-8

Abstract

Spanish philosopher Marina Garcés has published a new essay in which she proposes a reconsideration of friendship. As is well known, friendship has been one of the main themes of philosophy since Plato and Aristotle. But unlike the great disputes surrounding other topics such as truth or justice, reflection on friendship is surprisingly harmonious. "There are nuances, but no disputes" (p. 35). Virtuous friendship permeates academic circles, pop culture and even self-help: friendship is thought of as an ideal of purity, the teleía philía produced between two free and equal individuals who do not need each other. However, Garcés suspects that this ideal does not correspond to our precarious existence and also reproduces an androcentric and hierarchical view. He therefore proposes exploring an 'unwritten history' of friendship. His main proposal is that friendship does not consist of loving the virtue of the other, but rather a passion for what is strange in the other.