Scatter I: The Politics of Politics in Foucault, Heidegger, and Derrida by Geoffrey Bennington (review)

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...