Abstract
This article examines the representation of friendship in S.J. Naudé’s Van vaders en vlugtelinge (Of fathers and fugitives) (2023) from the perspective of contemporary friendship studies. Although Naudé’s fiction has attracted scholarly attention for its engagement with transnationalism, migration, queer identity, cosmopolitanism and alternative forms of kinship, friendship itself has not yet received sustained critical consideration as an autonomous object of literary analysis. This gap is striking, since interpersonal relationships, and especially fragile, unconventional and often difficult forms of human connectedness, form an integral part of Naudé’s literary project. His fiction repeatedly portrays characters who occupy liminal geographical, cultural and emotional spaces, while struggling to maintain meaningful relationships that cannot be adequately described through conventional categories such as family or romantic partnership.
The article argues that friendship should not merely be regarded as one expression of queer relationality, but as an independent analytical category capable of generating questions that extend beyond gender, sexuality and identity. While queer theory remains an indispensable interlocutor throughout the discussion, the primary theoretical lens employed here is friendship itself. This shift of emphasis responds to a broader tendency within existing scholarship to analyse unconventional relationships primarily through the frameworks of sexuality, heteronormativity or queer identity. Instead, this article proposes that friendship foregrounds a different set of questions concerning voluntary attachment, care, reciprocity, loyalty, ethical responsibility, self-formation, loss and chosen forms of belonging. These questions apply not only to queer relationships but to human relationality more generally, making friendship a particularly productive framework through which to interpret Naudé’s fiction.
The article begins by situating friendship studies within a broader intellectual tradition. Classical conceptions of friendship developed by Aristotle and Montaigne establish the historical foundation from which later theories depart. Aristotle’s understanding of philia emphasises friendship as a condition for ethical flourishing and conceives of the friend as “another self”, thereby locating personal identity within relational existence. Montaigne, by contrast, foregrounds the singularity, contingency and voluntary character of friendship, arguing that genuine friendship cannot be reduced to social obligation, kinship or utility. Together these classical perspectives establish friendship as a distinctive site of ethical selfhood and voluntary human connection.
Rather than abandoning these classical traditions, contemporary theorists critically reconceptualise them. Jacques Derrida’s The politics of friendship exposes the exclusions embedded within inherited models of friendship by demonstrating how canonical understandings have historically privileged fraternity while marginalising women, strangers and other forms of alterity. Friendship consequently becomes characterised by openness, undecidability and ethical responsibility toward the other rather than by sameness or stable reciprocity. Michel Foucault reconceives friendship as an ethical practice and a “way of life” through which alternative forms of intimacy and subjectivity may emerge outside normative social institutions. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick further destabilises rigid distinctions between friendship and desire by demonstrating the fluid continuum between homosocial and homoerotic relations. Finally, José Esteban Muñoz introduces a future-oriented understanding of relationality by interpreting queer social bonds as anticipatory practices through which alternative modes of communal life may be imagined.
The article also incorporates a feminist intervention into the discussion of friendship through Marilyn Friedman’s work on communities of choice. Friedman critiques traditional communitarian models that privilege inherited communities such as family, nation or neighbourhood, arguing that these structures have historically reproduced forms of gendered exclusion and domination. In contrast, voluntary communities, including friendships, enable individuals to reconstruct identities beyond inherited social constraints. Her work broadens friendship studies beyond the predominantly male philosophical tradition represented by Aristotle, Montaigne and Derrida, while simultaneously strengthening the article’s emphasis on friendship as a chosen rather than inherited relationship.
Rather than applying each theoretical perspective independently, the article develops an integrated analytical model consisting of four interrelated dimensions through which the literary representation of friendship may be analysed, specifically the friendship between the characters Daniël and Theon in Naudé’s novel. The first dimension, openness to alterity, concerns friendship’s capacity to embrace difference without reducing the other to sameness. Drawing on Derrida, this dimension foregrounds friendship as a relation that remains fundamentally open, unstable and resistant to fixed categorisation. The second dimension, ethical self-formation, synthesises Aristotle’s conception of friendship as moral formation, Foucault’s understanding of friendship as ethical practice and Friedman’s emphasis on chosen communities. Friendship here functions as a relational practice through which individuals continuously reshape themselves through care, responsibility and reciprocal transformation. The third dimension, affective undecidability, builds upon Sedgwick’s account of homosocial desire while extending beyond questions of sexuality to examine emotional ambiguity, intimacy, distance and the refusal of stable relational labels. Finally, the fourth dimension, utopian possibility, draws upon Muñoz’s concept of queer futurity to investigate friendship as an imaginative practice that anticipates alternative forms of belonging and communal life beyond existing social structures.
This analytical framework is applied to the relationship between Daniël and Theon, arguably the most significant interpersonal relationship in Van vaders en vlugtelinge. The article demonstrates that their bond consistently exceeds conventional classificatory frameworks. Although the relationship originates through kinship, it gradually incorporates elements traditionally associated with friendship, fatherhood, brotherhood, caregiving and love without becoming fully reducible to any of these categories. Rather than asking whether Daniël and Theon should be understood as lovers, friends or family members, the analysis investigates what their relationship accomplishes and how it functions within the novel’s broader exploration of relationality.
The first analytical dimension demonstrates that the friendship between Daniël and Theon is founded not upon similarity but upon radical difference. Their contrasting personalities, life histories and moral dispositions become the very conditions that make their friendship possible. Instead of eliminating alterity, their relationship preserves it, thereby embodying Derrida’s conception of friendship as openness toward the irreducibly other.
The second dimension reveals friendship as a process of ethical transformation. Daniël’s gradual movement away from emotional detachment and self-interest toward care, responsibility and sustained commitment illustrates how friendship reshapes ethical subjectivity. Through his relationship with Theon, Daniël increasingly participates in acts of caregiving, shared responsibility and mutual dependence that fundamentally transform his understanding of himself and of others. Friendship thus emerges not merely as emotional attachment but as an ethical practice through which both characters continuously become different persons.
The third dimension explores the affective complexity of their relationship. The novel consistently resists determining whether Daniël and Theon should be understood primarily as relatives, friends, lovers or something else altogether. Erotic possibility remains present but unresolved, while emotional intimacy develops independently of sexual fulfilment. The relationship therefore inhabits a productive space of affective undecidability in which categories such as friendship, kinship and desire remain deliberately unstable. Rather than interpreting this ambiguity as narrative uncertainty, the article argues that such undecidability constitutes one of the defining characteristics of friendship itself.
Finally, the fourth dimension investigates the relationship’s utopian significance. Daniël and Theon’s chosen attachment imagines alternative forms of family, fatherhood and care that exist beyond biological kinship and heteronormative institutions. Although many of their attempts at creating new forms of belonging ultimately end in grief and loss, the novel nevertheless presents friendship as a fragile but enduring practice through which alternative futures may become imaginable. The article argues that Naudé avoids sentimental or idealised portrayals of friendship; instead, he presents friendship as simultaneously hopeful and tragic, always marked by vulnerability, mourning and incompleteness.
The article concludes that Van vaders en vlugtelinge ultimately shifts attention away from questions concerning the nature of desire toward questions concerning chosen relationality. The novel repeatedly depicts the failure of biological family, romantic relationships and conventional models of fatherhood while simultaneously suggesting that voluntary, ethically sustained friendship offers an alternative mode of belonging. Friendship consequently emerges not simply as another type of interpersonal relationship but as a relational practice capable of reorganising the boundaries between family, romance, caregiving, kinship and queer intimacy.
By positioning friendship rather than queer theory as its primary analytical framework, the article offers a distinctive contribution to both Naudé scholarship and contemporary friendship studies. It demonstrates that friendship provides conceptual tools for understanding literary relationships that cannot be adequately explained through categories of sexuality or identity alone. More broadly, the article proposes that friendship functions as an autonomous theoretical category through which literature may imagine new ethical forms of relationality, selfhood and communal life in an increasingly fragmented contemporary world.
Keywords: affective undecidability; alterity; ethical self-formation; friendship; friendship studies; S.J. Naudé; Of fathers and fugitives; relationality; utopian possibility; Van vaders en vlugtelinge
- This article’s featured image was created by Ketut Subiyanto and obtained from Pexels.