To think about the experience of friendship as a space of experimentation which may bring about fixed forms of subjectivity and sociability, thus constituting a form of political resistance, represents an invitation to a state of otherness in an experimental relationship designated by the irreversible commitment with the other. This paper intends to describe and discuss some results of a research elaborated in a Master’s Dissertation project which investigated the semantics of friendship and the possibility of friendship turning into a space of political experimentation. Trying to understand how friendship ties may constitute privileged forms of experimentation of other forms of relationship, incompatible with the individualist and excluding models of capitalism, the authors conducted several interviews with workers of popular cooperatives (an autonomous and non-hierarchical form of work-group organization) about their friendship histories. The results of this survey highlight that the solidarity ties that flourish among friends of the lower class working groups do not coincide with the neoliberal imperatives but rather resist against oppressive situation, revealing creative ways of facing unfair working conditions, thus contributing to revert them.
friendship; otherness; experimentation; solidarity; resistance