Scatter, Proto-democracy, and the Non-political Opening of Politics

Scla 2019 keynote talk

This lecture is a mixture of excerpt and summary from my forthcoming book Scatter II: Politics in Deconstruction. After a lot of hesitation and what I believe American English might call "waffling" about how to organize the book, in the end it came out fairly simply: less scattered and more gathered than I had expected—much to my editor's relief, I might add. The first part tracks the theologico-political construction of the concept of sovereignty by following the fate of what I call a "tagline" from Homer ("the rule of many is not good, let there be one ruler, one lord" [Iliad, II, 208]) as subsequently quoted, and progressively Christianized, by, among many others, Aristotle, Philo Judaeus, Suetonius, the early Church Fathers, Aquinas, Dante, Ockham, Marsilius of Padua, Jean Bodin, Etienne de la Boétie, up to Carl Schmitt and Erik Peterson, and even one of the defendants at the Nuremberg Trials. The second part starts again, as it were, and tracks the concept of democracy as it regularly interferes with and tends to undermine that same sovereignist tradition: here the readings focus on Plato, Aristotle (Aristotle is something of a hero for me throughout the book), Hobbes and Rousseau, with a few sidebars along the way.

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In this talk I'll be drawing more on Part II of Scatter II. I want to pursue some of the implications of the curious conceptual status of "democracy" in what Leo Strauss and Giorgio Agamben agree is a rather shady and potentially disreputable branch of philosophy—namely so-called political philosophy. Strauss says that political philosophy is the least philosophical branch of philosophy, and Agamben makes the typically bold and trenchant claim that it is "the most tenuous and uncertain discipline among the many taught in our universities" (Agamben 27). Philosophy has arguably never known quite how to deal with politics which, along with poetry, its official ancient adversary since Plato, seems always to be in an at least potentially antagonistic relation with philosophical thought. I want to argue that this antagonism (what Jacques Rancière famously called a mésentente, which is something more radical than just a "disagreement," as the translation has it: more like the kind of "misunderstanding" that leads to a persistent state of "bad blood") is at its most salient and urgent around the concept of democracy. Broadly speaking, political philosophy has attempted to deal with politics by referring it to the figure of the One, what comes to be thought of in theologico-political terms as the Sovereign: and "democracy" seems to name something in politics that endlessly resists or originarily contests its subordination to that figure. Whence Socrates's interestingly excessive, exuberantly sarcastic treatment of democracy and the democratic man in Book 8 of The Republic (an account recently revived, modernized, and endorsed by Alain Badiou) in which democracy is famously described as a shimmering and seductive, multi- and brightly-colored fabric that is all appearance and show, and offers a merely superficial attraction fit only for the foolish, for women and children, a regime that is not really a regime at all, but a "bazaar of constitutions," always-already on its way toward tyranny.

As Derrida points out when he refers to this passage of the Republic in both "Plato's Pharmacy" and much later in Rogues, the key concept wielded by Socrates in this passage is that of to poikilon. This term (a neuter noun formed from the adjective poikilos), almost always negatively marked in its uses by Plato, connotes multiplicity but also multifariousness (not just many things but many different, heterogeneous, things), things that are multi-colored, dappled, variegated, inconsistent and insubstantial, shallow but also intricate and complicated, labyrinthine, and by extension indirect and misleading, cunning and devious. My preferred English translation for to poikilon is often the word motley, which captures at least some of these senses of the Greek. Part of the point for me is to develop (against Plato, then), a non-moralistic account of motley in this sense as an irreducible component of politics (and the...