Scatter I

In Scatter I, Geoffrey Bennington argues simply that “Our fondest desire is to find or invent a politics unaffected by the politics of politics” (4). Indeed, Bennington remarks, “the zoon politikon as zoon logon ekhon is engaged in the politics of politics as soon as that zoon is engaged in politics, that is, from the very first, ‘naturally,’ as Aristotle put it. Politics is always already the politics of politics” (4). Motivating Scatter I is Bennington's understanding that there is no politics that is not, from the start, the politics of politics: “Politics is immediately doubled up in a complex self-referentiality or recursivity that flows directly from the logos that is coterminous with it and that shows up in that logos as an irreducibility of the kind of possibilities of distortion and deceit that are usually, moralistically, associated with sophistry and rhetoric” (4). The “politics of politics,” which is coeval and coterminous with all “politics,” is an (if not the) effect of logos's irreducible, constitutive deception, deceit, lie, fraud, counterfeit, error. Because all politics is marked by the recursivity of the politics of politics, politics is essentially disrupted, “scattered,” as Bennington puts it, in advance, from the start. Consequently, the teleological projection of politics as such—of any politics “worthy of the name”—is ruined (scattered) by the autoimmune logic of the logos essential to it. Put simply, and here too quickly, politics as such is grounded upon the as if that haunts and determines the language(s) in which politics takes place. (See Bennington's remarks, pp. 264–65, on Derrida's interest in the logic of analogy in his last seminars. Derrida himself was clear about this interest. In “The University Without Condition,” he wrote: “this small word, the ‘as’ of the ‘as if’ as much as the ‘as’ of the ‘as such’—whose authority founds and justifies all ontology as much as all phenomenology, all philosophy as science or as knowledge—this small word ‘as,’ could well be the name of the true problem, not to say the target of deconstruction”; in J. Derrida, Without Alibi, edited and translated by Peggy Kamuf [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002], 234.)Yet, because “our fondest desire” is to “find or invent” a politics of truth, a politics unmarked by constitutive deception, we are bound to make distinctions that, however necessary, are impossible to sustain. And it is to these distinctions that the six chapters of Scatter I are devoted, each pursuing a specific concept, figure, or problem. Chapter 1, “Parrhesia,” concerns the relation of truth and philosophy to rhetoric and politics in Foucault demonstrating that the distinction between philosophy and rhetoric, while no doubt essential, is also impossible and that rhetoric, which entails the possibility of deception, of a discourse not determined by truth, does not supervene upon philosophy or truth, corrupting it from the outside, as it were. Bennington shows, first, that in order to describe parrhesia as “fearless” or “frank” speech and the parrhesiast as the one who speaks truth to power, Foucault must distinguish between a good parrhesia and a bad parrhesia; but, second, that this distinction is necessarily ruined from the start insofar as both the good and the bad parrhesia (and the “truth” that either may tell) are necessarily bound to rhetoric. Much later, in Chapter 6, “Axioma,” Bennington puts it rather succinctly: “Rhetoric in a fundamental sense names the sense of logos once the primordiality of the necessarily possible pseudos has been recognized. The zoon logon echon is from the start a zoon rhetorikon echon” (241, emphasis in original). Importantly, Bennington also shows that Foucault countersigns—rather than simply describes—the distinction between a good and a bad parrhesia, and thus the dismissal of rhetoric from philosophy, not simply as a late Hellenic, early Christian phenomenon, but as necessary for what Foucault calls philosophy's “constant and permanent relationship to truth” (Foucault, Government of Self and Others 352; quoted in Benningtion 41). Bennington makes clear, then, that Foucault ultimately endorses the philosophical desire to have done with politics. On Bennington's account, however, the irreducible recursivity of politics means the political has no end, no telos. On the contrary, the “politics of politics”—as the condition of politics—interrupts and scatters the end of politics from the start: “What I call ‘the politics of politics’ is a name for the persistence of the political in the face of all attempted philosophical resolutions of it and indeed for its ability to turn them (and all other philosophical enterprises) into so many rhetorical-political gestures in spite of themselves” (241).At the end of Chapter 1, Bennington notes that had Foucault been a better reader of Heidegger, who Foucault claims was the most essential philosopher for him, he may have been better able to understand the impossibility, finally, of distinguishing the good parrhesia from the bad, and thus of expelling rhetoric from philosophy. Bennington points out that “at least in his early work” (48), Heidegger held rhetoric in much higher esteem than did Foucault, claiming in both the 1924 lecture course Basic Concepts of Aristotelian Philosophy and in Being and Time, that rhetoric amounts to the interpretation of concrete Dasein and instances the first hermeneutic of Dasein in its everydayness (48–49). The paradox that organizes Chapter 2, “Pseudos,” is the following. Heidegger's “more positive account of rhetoric ... recognizes that if rhetoric were to be grounded in truth it might perhaps accede to the status of a true tekhne and thereby be sublated ... into dialectic, which Plato (though emphatically not Heidegger) thinks is the place of philosophy and truth. But in the course of this more concessive view of the possibilities of rhetoric, Heidegger points out that by making truth the condition of possibility of any genuine rhetoric ... Socrates is also driven to recognize that a true rhetorical tekhne would ipso facto also open onto the possibility of perfect deception” (49–50). The paradox, which Bennington suggests haunts Heidegger from one end of his œuvre to the other, is that the most genuine self-expression (parrhesia, then) instances (the necessary, hence constitutive, possibility of) the most perfect deception. Contrary to excluding deception, truth would be the name of an empirical modification of the transcendental—the quasi-transcendental—logic or rule of deception. This paradox ultimately hinges on the originariness of the “as-structure” in Heidegger: “Heidegger's own consistent position is that the as-structure is indeed originary in perception and not subsequent to some prior simple aesthesis or ‘simple disclosing’ in aletheuein; that ... the ‘as’ is always already ‘structurally present’” (62). Bennington stresses that Heidegger acknowledges that our perception “is already bound up with the structures of the logos and therefore exposed to the possibility of the pseudos, which now seems to be as primordial as can be” (65) and he suggests “that pseudos retreats from the relatively epiphenomenal position Heidegger sometimes seems to give it ... and comes to name a more general possibility that ontologically precedes the structures of intention that characterize lying and intentional deception per se. Aisthesis and eidos are really what they are only via logos: logos entails the general possibility of dissimulations of all sorts, and the best Greek name for those dissimulations, be they intentional or not, will turn out to be pseudos” (68).The insights of Chapters 3–5, follow from Bennington's analysis of pseudos in Heidegger, the logic or structure of which informs Bennington's reading of the Moment (of time, then) and of the decision (thus, of justice) in Heidegger, for sure, but also in Kierkegaard and Derrida. This reading of pseudos opens onto a thought of the political and of Heidegger's politics that has so far escaped so many of Heidegger's critics (his executioners as well as his apologists). But Scatter I is more than a brilliant reading (and one has to stress that it is an exercise in reading and not, as Bennington points out, either of scholarship or of interpretation or hermeneutics) of parrhesia and pseudos (and of the Moment and of the decision) in Foucault, Heidegger, and Derrida. It also offers an account of how to think Derrida's enigmatic assertions concerning the finitude and infinitude of différance, one of the upshots of which ought to be a renewed effort to rethink the limits—if there are any—of the “worst” violence, of “absolute” violence. In these troubled political times, helping us to think about how to respond to violence and to violation without succumbing to the metaphysical dream of the end of politics in and through the end of rhetoric—as if we will ever be done with rhetoric, with deception, with violence—may well be Scatter I's most important achievement

Philosophy · Philosophy, Ethics, and Existentialism