Friendship semantics has been historically articulated to the concepts of equality and fraternity. It has been characterized by a familial semantics that associates friends to brothers. However, several authors show that familial semantics, based on intimacy and familiarity, privileges homogenization processes and suppression of otherness. In fact, it may foreground intolerable practices of debasement and discrimination of the other. Current essay describes and discusses results of a research on friendship semantics in contemporary discourses. Friendship’s familial semantics seems to be associated with fragility of bonds and with the depreciation of social skills which an encounter of the other requires.
Friendship; familial semantic; fragility of bonds