Tom Roach is Assistant Professor of Literary and Cultural Studies at Bryant University.

• AcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Between Friends1. A Letter and Its Implications2. An Ethics of Discomfort3. Ontology Matters4. Labors of Love: Biopower, AIDS, and the Buddy System5. Common Sense and a Politics of Shared EstrangementEpilogue: Whatever FriendsNotesBibliographyIndex

"Friendship as a Way of Life is a pulsing and intriguing volume … Tom Roach has done an inspiring job of reminding us how [much] there is to consider within the elliptical references Foucault made to friendship in his lectures and interviews. His reading of the politics and practice of friendship is apt and important." — Political Media Review"Finally a book that makes good on Foucault's remarks about the radical possibilities of friendship. By considering in philosophical terms Foucault's relationship with Hervé Guibert, Tom Roach presents an original and profoundly de-idealized account of friendship, in which betrayal is necessary rather than contingent. His theory of 'shared estrangement' makes a vital contribution to a number of hotly contested debates, in queer theory and beyond, concerning intimacy, community, impersonality, and biopolitics. Friendship as a Way of Life is such a pleasure to read—so lucid, smart, and compelling—that I wish I'd written it myself." — Tim Dean, Professor of English and Comparative Literature, SUNY Buffalo "Tom Roach rightly places friendship at the center of Foucault's attempts to imagine alternatives to sexual identity and to the disciplinary strategies that would constrain us within the confines of sexual identity. Roach masterfully demonstrates how friendship grounds a potentially new communal politics in a private relation; it allows for a move to a radical politics from what Roach speaks of as the impersonal ethic inherent in friendship. This is an important and original contribution to contemporary cultural studies." — Leo Bersani, author of Is the Rectum a Grave? and Other Essays ["Tom Roach offers us a sustained, rigorous, and sensitive reading of Hervé Guibert and Michel Foucault on the aesthetics of friendship—an aesthetics that in Roach's persuasive argument bespeaks a sociality radically other than the 'society' that afflicts and governs us today, but that nevertheless flourishes in the interstices of our affliction. We need to hear this in our contemporary culture of political despair as much as we did twenty years ago in the early years of the AIDS pandemic. This is a timely and important reminder of the most serious stakes of gay politics." — William Haver, author of The Body of This Death: Historicity and Sociality in the Time of AIDS]