In 1971 Maurice Blanchot published L'Amitie', a book whose last chapter, "L'amitie," is about (the impropriety of writing about) Blanchot's dead friend Georges Bataille, even about the impropriety of friendship for the dead. The book opens with a quotation from an article by Bataille, published in 1940, a text itself called "L'Amitie": "my complicitous friendship: that is all my temperament brings to other men." Bataille offers his fellow men complicitous friendship, not justice, nor love, but rather a generous, yet slightly suspicious, evil, and therefore all the more giving, affirmation of man's destiny as faulty, lewd, unjust, unfinished. The first chapter of Bataille's Le Coupable-also entitled "L'amitie"'-repeats and elaborates this overture of friendship-in-guilt, the accord between criminals, knowing themselves and their fellows to be untrustworthy: a nonguaranteed, non-guaranteeable relation, as Bataille says, "a confidence knowing itself betrayed." In neither of the two Bataille texts called "L'Amitie" is that word used or explained much. Brief glimpses of a network in which it operates appear. But no concept of friendship is ever set forth and defined as a standard to be adhered to more or less faithfully. That would be justice: "he who speaks of justice . . . proposes to his fellow men a judge, a father, a guide. I could not propose any justice. My complicitous friendship: that is all my temperament brings to other men. A feeling of festival, licence and puerile pleasure commands my relations with them."' Rather than guide with