Academic and Artistic Approaches to Friendship

Claus Emmeche, associate professor, University of Copenhagen

My first and most reliable friend: On writing and translating friendship.

In the meeting points between academic and literary approaches to know Self and Other, we find surprising suggestions of what it means to know about, to talk about, and to be within relationships of love, care and friendship. We’ll see how Agnes Heller loves Shakespeare, how Georg Saunders befriends Marya (in Chekhov’s In the Cart), and how Sine Plambech is supported by her informant friends (and vice versa).

Marie-Elisabeth Lei Pihl, postdoc, University of Copenhagen (w. support from the Carlsberg Foundation)

Friendship from Aristotle to Snapchat

This talk will zoom in on ways to define friendship in an era heavily structured by new media and digital forms of interaction. Based on my book Friendship from Aristotle to Snapchat, I walk through different descriptions of friendship, and argue that it’s possible to supplement older definitions of friendly relations with a new and more flexible approach that can include everything from minor interactions to the deepest bonds.

Christian Refsum, professor, University of Oslo

The ‘Just Friends’ Topos in Popular Music, from Chet Baker to Amy Winehouse

This paper examines the pop-lyrical topos of “just friends” by contrasting Chet Baker’s 1956 recording of the jazz standard Just Friends with Amy Winehouse’s 2006 neo-soul song of the same title. In popular music, love is a much more recurring theme than friendship, and many of the friendship songs frame being “just friends” as a solution when love has failed. Winehouse’s “Just Friends,” by contrast, destabilizes this hierarchy when she asks: “When will we get the time to be just friends?” I argue that Winehouse’s original reworking of the Just Friends topos signals a broader cultural reorientation in which friendship emerges as an alternative to romantic love in its own right. Yet in Winehouse’s ambivalent musical rendering, friendship is not fully established as a viable life form. Instead, being “just friends” in a positive sense appears as a mode of relation that can be dreamed of and anticipated — a way of living together that stands out as a fragile future possibility.

Ida Retz Wessberg, Artist and sculptor

Based on my sculptural work series Ghosts (2023/2025), I want to talk about how the digital space has changed the way we relate to other people – in professional, friendly, and romantic contexts. In particular, the work series looks closely at how relationships can disappear without explanation in today’s digital world. Ghosting is a term that covers the digital behavior where a person suddenly stops responding, and where the silence can leave behind longing, shame and doubt.