These days, the burning questions about friendship seem to revolve around the impact of information technology and social networks on human relationships. Undergraduate students report that they have multiple “best” friends and countless “regular” Facebook friends. With the former they go shopping; the latter they never meet in person even though they follow each other’s activities in excruciating detail. For their understanding of the nature and value of friends, adolescents are frequently accused of knowing nothing of the “real” friendships of the olden days. Teeming with injunctions and instructions for acquiring and keeping friends, that tradition suggests, however, that a time when friendship was spontaneous and uncomplicated never was. Friends, it seems, have always been as elusive as they have been desired.

This course invites students to reflect on the intricacy and the novelty of their exchanges with friends. Having friends is about the pleasures of exchange, of knowing others, and of being known. Yet these pleasures have been difficult to get: seemingly inherent in human nature, they have been a source of great disappointment. For those living in human societies, good friendship has been seen as an exemplary ethical behavior: universal friendship could be a model of a just society. Still, outlaws and renegades have managed to become friendship’s iconic figures. In societies where all human relations are said to aspire to transparency, egalitarianism, benevolence, and disinterest, friendships continue to fail.

As students acknowledge how commonly they make “frenemies,” this course invites them to articulate their own understanding and theories of friendship, guided by selections from a long history of conversations about what it means to know others and to imagine one’s identity and desires transparent to them. This study of friendship is a way to investigate what motivates students to know others, what they believe they can know about others, and what they wish to know about themselves. Because friendship is a field of knowledge that probes the limits of the modern ideals of individuality, authenticity, self-knowledge and self-determination, the course takes it, as anthropologist Robert Brain suggests, “as seriously as sex, aggression and marriage” (264).