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Philosophy has always had the greatest difficulty with its relation to politics. From the beginnings of Western thinking up to thinkers such as Leo Strauss, Hannah Arendt, Jacques Rancière and Alain Badiou, philosophy and politics have maintained what Badiou calls an “enigmatic” relation,¹ one that Rancière describes as a mésentente, more than a mere “disagreement,” as the English translation has it, almost “bad blood,” a deep-seated failure of understanding, a conflict, perhaps of the order of what Jean-François Lyotard had earlier called a différend, a dispute that cannot be resolved equitably for want of a criterion applicable to both sides.² Throughout this history, philosophy has repeatedly tried to assert its grasp of politics—and repeatedly failed. The Western tradition is tormented by this conflict, mismatch, or misunderstanding, whereby—in spite of appearances—philosophy itself cannot ever finally and convincingly conclude that the bios theōrētikos, the philosophical or contemplative life, really is superior to the bios politikos, the political or active life.

In the Socratic dialogue Gorgias, trying to talk down Callicles, Socrates separates out these two possibilities, which subsequently become canonical in Aristotle:³

For you see that our debate is upon a question which has the highest conceivable claims to the serious interest even of a person who has but little intelligence—namely, what course of life is best; whether it should be that to which you invite me, with all those manly pursuits of speaking in Assembly and practicing rhetoric and going in for politics after the fashion of you modern politicians [retorikēn askounta kai politeuomenon touton ton tropon, on umeis nun politeuesthe], or this life of philosophy [ton bion ton en philosophia]; and what makes the difference between these two.⁴

The remainder of the dialogue is devoted to urging the superiority of the “life of philosophy.”

Aristotle might at first seem to take this same Platonic line, when in what came to be called the Metaphysics he claims that the supreme science (of wisdom, sophia) is “the theoretical science of first principles and first causes [tōn prōtōn archōn kai aitiōn einai theōretikēn]” (982b9). But that statement is immediately preceded by the idea that “The highest science, which is superior to every subordinate science, is the one that knows in view of what end each thing must be done. And this end is the good of each being and, in a general manner, the supreme good in nature as a whole” (982b3–7): and this slight indeterminacy, between “principles” and “causes” on the one hand, and “ends” and “goods” on the other, between archeo-logy and teleo-logy, between what will later be clearly demarcated as the “theoretical” and the “practical,” allows what can look like a contradictory claim at the beginning of The Nichomachean Ethics as to the priority of politics:

So if what is done has some end that we want for its own sake, and everything else we want is for the sake of this end; and if we do not choose everything for the sake of something else (because this would lead to an infinite progression, making our desire fruitless and vain), then clearly this will be the good, indeed the chief good [heis tagathon kai to ariston].⁵ Surely, then, knowledge of the good must be very important for our lives? And if, like archers, we have a target [skopos], are we not more likely to hit the right mark? If so, we must try at least roughly to comprehend what it is and which science or faculty is concerned with it.

Knowledge of the good would seem to be the concern of the most authoritative science, the highest master science [tēs kuriōtates kai malista arkitektonikēs]. And this is obviously the science of politics, because it lays down which of the sciences there should be in cities, and which each class of person should learn and up to what level. And we see that even the most honourable of faculties, such as military science, domestic economy, and rhetoric, come under it. Since political science employs the other sciences, and also lays down laws about what we should do and refrain from, its end will include the ends of the others, and will therefore be the human good [anthrōpinon agathon]. For even if the good is the same for an individual as for a city, that of the city is obviously a greater and more complete thing to obtain and preserve. For while the good of an individual is a desirable thing, what is good for a people or for cities is a nobler and more godlike thing [kallion de kai theioteron ethnei kai polesin]. Our enquiry, then, is a kind of political science, since these are the ends it is aiming at.⁶

Apparently resolving this contradiction, or showing it to be merely apparent, Aristotle has most often been taken to be resorting to a stable distinction between a hierarchically superior “theoretical science,” in the form of what subsequently comes to be called “metaphysics,” and a clearly subordinated “practical science” (teleologically directed to and by the science of politics). This is, for example, the position taken by Aquinas in the prologue to his Commentary on Aristotle’s Politics (though a close reading of that text might well show that position to be less secure than it at first appears).⁷ But the assumption of such a distinction rather begs the questions raised here: from the point of view of metaphysics, it seems clear that the bios theōrētikos is superior (see for example Metaphysics, Lambda, 1072b22–23). But I will be claiming that once the bios politikos comes into play in such a way that the decision in favor of the bios theōrētikos is no longer simply a theoretical or metaphysical decision, then a fundamental tension emerges that complicates not only what is usually taken to be the clear subordination of politics (which is at best an art or a practical science) to sophia or first philosophy (which is a purely theoretical science), but also thereby what is often taken to be Aristotle’s own unambiguous endorsement of the superiority of the bios theōrētikos over the bios politikos. Here is how the problem is initially set up in the Politics:

Now it is evident that the form of government is best in which every man, whoever he is, can act best and live happily. But even those who agree in thinking that the life of virtue is the most eligible raise a question, whether the life of business and politics [bion airetōtaton poteron o politikos kai praktikos] is or is not more eligible than one which is wholly independent of external goods, I mean than a contemplative life [bios … theōrētikos], which by some is maintained to be the only one worthy of a philosopher. For these two lives—the life of the philosopher and the life of the statesman [more literally “the political and the philosophical”]—appear to have been preferred by those who have been most keen in the pursuit of virtue, both in our own and in other ages. Which is the better is a question of no small moment; for the wise man, like the wise state, will necessarily regulate his life according to the best end.⁸ (1324a22–32)

It is hard, however, not to think that Aristotle’s proposed resolution of this “question of no small moment”—which involves claiming a measure of activity for contemplation itself, so that a revised version of the “political life” allowing for that now active contemplation should be chosen—rather complicates this apparently simple distinction, or at least leaves a degree of tension unresolved, perhaps inviting deconstruction. Here is how Aristotle puts it, with a telling final reference to a theological principle:

If we are right in our view, and happiness is assumed to be virtuous activity, the active life will be the best, both for every city collectively, and for individuals. Not that a life of action must necessarily have relation to others, as some persons think, nor are those ideas only to be regarded as practical which are pursued for the sake of practical results, but much more the thoughts and contemplations which are independent and complete in themselves; since virtuous activity, and therefore a certain kind of action, is an end, and even in the case of external actions the directing mind is most truly said to act. Neither, again, is it necessary that states which are cut off from others and choose to live alone should be inactive; for activity, as well as other things, may take place by sections; there are many ways in which the sections of a state act upon one another. The same thing is equally true of every individual. If this were otherwise, God and the universe, who have no external actions over and above their own energies, would be far enough from perfection. Hence it is evident that the same life is best for each individual, and for states and for mankind collectively. (1325b14–32)

In some now classical reflections on this issue in Aristotle, Leo Strauss is also suspicious of this supposed resolution of the politics/philosophy relation, and has to work quite hard in his readings to ground the possibility of political philosophy in the maintenance of the very distinction Aristotle is here apparently trying to overcome, and in a clear hierarchization of the relation between the bios theōrētikos and the bios politikos. For example, in The City and Man (1964), Strauss summarizes Aristotle’s position as follows:

Prudence and moral virtue united and as it were fused enable a man to lead a good life or the noble life which seems to be the natural end of man. The best life is the life devoted to understanding or contemplation as distinguished from the practical or political life. Therefore practical wisdom is lower in rank than theoretical wisdom which is concerned with the divine things or the kosmos, and subservient to it—but in such a way that within its sphere, the sphere of all human things as such, prudence is supreme. The sphere ruled by prudence is closed since the principles of prudence—the ends in the light of which prudence guides man—are known independently of theoretical science. Because Aristotle held that art is inferior to law or to prudence, that prudence is inferior to theoretical wisdom, and that theoretical wisdom … is available, he could found political science as an independent discipline among a number of disciplines.⁹

But this apparently clearly hierarchized position is then interestingly complicated by Strauss, whose Aristotle also recognizes that the pursuit of the theoretical life entails some essentially political conditions:

In order to grasp the ground of Aristotle’s procedure, one must start from the facts that according to him the highest end of man by nature is theoretical understanding or philosophy and this perfection does not require moral virtue as moral virtue, i.e., just and noble deeds as choiceworthy for their own sake. It goes without saying that man’s highest end cannot be achieved without actions resembling moral actions proper, but the actions in question are intended by the philosopher as mere means toward his end. That end also calls for prudence, for the philosopher must deliberate about how he can secure the conditions for his philosophizing here and now. (26–27)

This means that the attempted resolution of the dilemma is not straightforward and that it depends on what is merely an “analogy”:

Aristotle … bases his thematic discussion of the best regime on the principle that the highest end of man, happiness, is the same for the individual and the city … The difficulty arises from the fact that the highest end of the individual is contemplation. He seems to solve the difficulty by asserting that the city is as capable of the contemplative life as the individual. Yet it is obvious that the city is capable at best only of an analogue of the contemplative life. (49)

As Strauss puts it in the essay “On Classical Political Philosophy,” this situation means that although theoretical philosophy may well be man’s highest pursuit, it needs to give itself a political justification or alibi in order to secure its own possibility. There has to be, as it were, a practical or active presentation of the theoretical or contemplative, and just this gives rise to “political philosophy” as such, now defined less by its specific object and more by its mode of presentation, whereby the philosopher convinces the politician or citizen, politically rather than philosophically, of the superiority of philosophy:

From this point of view the adjective “political” in the expression “political philosophy” designates not so much a subject matter as a manner of treatment; from this point of view, I say, “political philosophy” means primarily not the philosophic treatment of politics, but the political, or popular, treatment of philosophy, or the political introduction to philosophy—the attempt to lead the qualified citizens, or rather their qualified sons, from the political life to the philosophic life.¹⁰

This is why, in the eponymous essay “What is Political Philosophy,” Strauss can say “Political philosophy is that branch of philosophy which is closest to political life, to non-philosophic life, to human life” (10). Only subsequently, says Strauss, could anything like an academic discipline of “political philosophy” be established: “Classical political philosophy is characterized by the fact that it was related to political life directly. It was only after the classical philosophers had done their work that political philosophy became definitely ‘established’ and thus acquired a certain remoteness from political life.… It was its direct relation to political life which determined the orientation and scope of classical political philosophy.”¹¹ My suggestion is that the frontier between philosophy and politics, the border-zone occupied by political philosophy, is certainly complex, and best thought of in nonlinear, fractal terms (so that the closer we look at the supposed dividing line the more it divides, as in a “Newton Basin”), and that the problems raised cannot be satisfactorily resolved by any attempt to draw a hard boundary, nor indeed by giving in to the almost inevitable temptation to make predictions, issue specific political recommendations, or propose a general political program from this complex frontier space.¹² One upshot of this is that however far we go toward the “theoretical” extreme of the supposed divide our position will always have a “political side” (just as New York City is far to the east but still has a West Side), and however far we try to go toward the political extreme our position will have a theoretical side (Los Angeles is far to the west but has an East Side): part of the point of Scatter is to negotiate this space without entirely accepting the traditional ways it has been understood.¹³

At the beginning of an as-yet unpublished seminar dating from 1970–71, Derrida lays out some of the general issues here, wondering whether in general putting the question of textuality, of its “material inscription” to philosophy is a “political strategy”:

And in such a question what does “political” mean? … From the Aristotelian roots of such a division [between metaphysica generalis and metaphysica specialis] up to Husserl’s distinction and hierarchy between formal ontology and regional ontology, up to Heidegger’s question of the meaning of being in general … going via Hegel’s Logic as Science of sciences, the determination of the political as such has always appeared to constitute an extremely narrow, dependent, and derivative specificity. The text of political philosophy, when it appeared under this title, always appeared to be deduced on the basis of ontological, metaphysical, or moral positions [instances], of a knowledge or a will in themselves non-political. In this sense, we can say that the project and the text of political philosophy have been inscribed—in the sense of a figure comprehended within a more powerful figure in the text of philosophy, without this inscription or this architectonic derivation being interrogated for itself.¹⁴

This complexity in the relation between philosophy and politics has arguably never been satisfactorily resolved, and it allows Giorgio Agamben, for example, who has his own quite obscure reading of the relation between the active and the contemplative,¹⁵ to refer to the “most tenuous and uncertain discipline among the many taught in our universities: political philosophy.”¹⁶ Whence also Jacques Rancière’s attempt to identify what in the French is more than a “disagreement,” or Alain Badiou’s more recent location of a “relation énigmatique entre philosophie et politique,” and Michel Foucault’s attempt (which I criticize at length in the first chapter of Scatter 1) to formulate the appropriate relation of philosophy to politics as one of a truth-telling, a parrhesia, that does not, however, involve the attempt to tell politicians what to do: “it does not tell the truth of political action, it does not tell the truth for political action, it tells the truth in relation to the practice of politics, in relation to the political personage.”¹⁷

On the other side of a different philosophical frontier, John Rawls’s solution to the relation between politics and metaphysics, in “Justice as Fairness” (1985), seems at least as problematic.¹⁸ Rawls is attempting to provide a philosophically presented political solution to a problem he believes simply cannot be solved philosophically in a “constitutional democracy.” Just because there will (by definition) be a diversity of philosophical opinions, and such diversity must be respected if we are to remain within the terms of democracy, then philosophy cannot provide an answer (because any such answer would then merely be one opinion among others):

Thus, the aim of justice as fairness as a political conception is practical, and not metaphysical or epistemological. That is, it presents itself not as a conception of justice that is true, but one that can serve as a basis of informed and willing political agreement between citizens viewed as free and equal persons. This agreement when securely founded in public political and social attitudes sustains the goods of all persons and associations within a just democratic regime. To secure this agreement we try, so far as we can, to avoid disputed philosophical, as well as disputed moral and religious, questions. We do this not because these questions are unimportant or regarded with indifference, but because we think them too important and recognize that there is no way to resolve them politically. The only alternative to a principle of toleration is the autocratic use of state power. Thus, justice as fairness deliberately stays on the surface, philosophically speaking. Given the profound differences in belief and conceptions of the good at least since the Reformation, we must recognize that, just as on questions of religious and moral doctrine, public agreement on the basic questions of philosophy cannot be obtained without the state’s infringement of basic liberties. Philosophy as the search for truth about an independent metaphysical and moral order cannot, I believe, provide a workable and shared basis for a political conception of justice in a democratic society. (230)

Recommending his notion of “justice as fairness” as a good way to proceed in this situation, Rawls recognizes what he calls “certain hazards” which in his view rest on a misunderstanding of his famous “original position” and “veil of ignorance” argument:

As a device of representation the original position is likely to seem somewhat abstract and hence open to misunderstanding. The description of the parties may seem to presuppose some metaphysical conception of the person, for example, that the essential nature of persons is independent of and prior to their contingent attributes, including their final ends and attachments, and indeed, their character as a whole. But this is an illusion caused by not seeing the original position as a device of representation. The veil of ignorance, to mention one prominent feature of that position, has no metaphysical implications concerning the nature of the self; it does not imply that the self is ontologically prior to the facts about persons that the parties are excluded from knowing. (238)

This is all a “simulation” (239), from which, however, all “deception and fraud, and so on, must be excluded” (235: we might think that the force of the “must be excluded” is already a problem). As long as we recognize this non-fraudulent nature of the simulation, and exercise the principle of tolerance (“we must apply the principle of toleration to philosophy itself” [231]), as a “method of avoidance” (ibid.), then we are not unduly foisting our deep metaphysical views on others. Unless, of course, worries Rawls in a funny footnote, the fact that “there is no accepted understanding of what a metaphysical doctrine is” already compromises our earnest and liberal attempt to avoid such doctrines, if only because the principle of tolerance and the method of avoidance, and thus the whole “justice as fairness” proposal might themselves be already metaphysical:

One might say, as Paul Hoffman has suggested to me, that to develop a political conception of justice without presupposing, or explicitly using, a metaphysical doctrine, for example, some particular metaphysical conception of the person, is already to presuppose a metaphysical thesis: namely, that no particular metaphysical doctrine is required for this purpose. (240n22)

And so

One might also say that our everyday conception of persons as the basic units of deliberation and responsibility presupposes, or in some way involves, certain metaphysical theses about the nature of persons as moral or political agents. Following the method of avoidance, I should not want to deny these claims. What should be said is the following. If we look at the presentation of justice as fairness and note how it is set up, and note the ideas and conceptions it uses, no particular metaphysical doctrine about the nature of persons, distinctive and opposed to other metaphysical doctrines, appears among its premises, or seems required by its argument. If metaphysical presuppositions are involved, perhaps they are so general that they would not distinguish between the distinctive metaphysical views—Cartesian, Leibnizian, or Kantian; realist, idealist, or materialist—with which philosophy traditionally has been concerned. In this case, they would not appear to be relevant for the structure and content of a political conception of justice one way or the other. (240n22)

“No particular metaphysical doctrine,” perhaps, but certainly a very general metaphysical presupposition (so general that it is not indeed opposed by any of the views Rawls mentions), the presupposition of metaphysics itself as metaphysics of presence (and more specifically of what Heidegger would call “subjectity”).

As is also the case with Habermas, the politely liberal values of discussion and tolerance presuppose “some consensus” on the basis of which we address our disagreements, including presumably the consensus that “existing differences between contending political views can at least be moderated, even if not entirely removed” (231). Such that, as always, liberalism is extremely tolerant, but only really of liberalism itself, thereby in equal measure anxious and self-satisfied, and any “toleration” of apparent differences, divergencies and disputes is at best negative and condescending.¹⁹ A quick way of formulating the upshot of all this is that it would spell the end of politics as essentially and irreducible conflictual, and the end of philosophy, as we are too concerned to avoid dispute to pursue our deeper metaphysical issues (which are presumably now to be left to professional philosophers to discuss more or less acrimoniously in the safety of their departments). Jean-François Lyotard’s apparently scandalous suggestion at the end of The Postmodern Condition that consensus is only a local, unstable state of discussion, and that the end of discussion is to sharpen and accentuate differences rather than overcome them, can stand for now as the “continental” response—still undertaken in the name of justice—to Rawls’s arguments.²⁰ As we shall see as we develop the thought of scatter, Lyotard’s rather terse suggestion cannot be taken to be proposing a telos of absolute disagreement or dissensus as a substitute for the traditional telos of consensus and agreement (which for Lyotard is represented by Habermas), but must instead be seen to disrupt the whole teleological setup still implicitly governing Rawls’s arguments, rather than simply advancing a—quite unthinkable—telos of absolute disagreement. In Lyotard’s wake, Scatter does not advance the absurd idea that the more we disagree the better, but seeks a way of thinking about disagreement (and indeed about difference in general) that is not committed, even ideally, to seeing the end of disagreement in assent, consensus, or, as the currently fashionable idiom has it, “coming together.” Our (local and unstable, of course often precious) agreements also remain preciously precarious in a more general milieu that never resolves difference into sameness: and this maintenance of difference against its (even ideal) teleological resolution holds to a principle of general disruption and dispute, not necessarily manageable by dialectics in any sense, as underlying argumentative practices. As I shall go on to suggest, only this type of very general disruption (what I am calling scatter, then) can do justice to the thought of democracy, even as that thought has been, tendentially, repressed in the Western tradition of political philosophy. Scatter will be picking up the—scattered—traces of a different thinking of democracy that I shall argue can most promisingly be formulated in deconstructive terms. The maximal claim of this volume is not that politics has to be deconstructed, or that deconstruction has to be introduced into politics, but that politics as such has to be thought in deconstruction from the start, which is another way of saying that it has to be read.

This development of a thinking of difference and dissensus involves suspicion not merely of liberal and more generally metaphysical teleological schemas, but of a more pervasive pattern of thinking about difference in general, whereby politics has always been conceptualized in view of its end, in both senses of the word. The concept of politics as we inherit it from the tradition is always the concept of politics ending, coming to an end by realizing its end (however that end be specified: the good life, justice, liberty, prosperity, happiness, the classless society …). One pervasive and persuasive way in which such schemas have worked is essentially Kantian: ends are proposed in terms of Ideas of Reason toward which we are enjoined to make progress, in the sober realization that the end will never be fully realized in fact. With some help from Aristotle, later we will see that this way of presenting the situation is more complicated than it appears, in that the full realization of the end proposed is not only empirically out of reach, but would in fact be catastrophic—which then, as I have argued in detail elsewhere,²¹ complicates any progressive construal of the structure in question and indeed is the internal ruin of the teleological schema as such. Another powerful way in which this schema has been, as it were, enforced (provoked at least in part by an at least partial perception of the problem just mentioned) is exemplified in the Hegelian dialectic, which has the immense philosophical advantage over the relatively straightforward teleological schemas we have mentioned thus far of apparently allowing for a thoroughgoing admission into thought of negativity in general as the very motor of its possible advance. The Hegelian operator of sublation (Aufhebung) is, as it were, fueled by the very negativity it is always already destined eventually to overcome or redeem, and the supposedly logically secured horizon of that overcoming then allows for an indefinite and apparently attractive ability to dwell at great length, to “tarry,” with difference, dissensus, and antagonism, and indeed to exacerbate them into the at least apparently more conflictual forms of opposition and contradiction. It can easily seem as though contradiction must be the height of dissensus (and as we shall see in a moment, Hegel thinks it is, logically, the only way to think through difference in general).

First, let us note in Hegel a transformed but recognizable version of the problematic relation between bios theōrētikos and bios politikos we have been following. As is well known, in the general shape of Hegel’s encyclopedic “system,” “ethical life [Sittlichkeit]” (which includes what we would call politics) appears at the end of what Hegel calls “Objective Spirit,” which is the second major part of the third top-level division (philosophy of spirit) of the system. We might represent that place as follows in a simplified schema of the system as a whole:

[I. Logic (Spirit in and of itself); II. Philosophy of Nature (Spirit as other than itself); III Philosophy of Spirit [1. Subjective Spirit; 2. Objective Spirit [a. Abstract Right; b. Morality; c. Ethical Life]; 3. Absolute Spirit [a. Art; b. Religion; c. Philosophy]]].

According to a persistent pattern in Hegel,²² “political philosophy” can be located in two places: as philosophy it comes as part of the very end of the system (as indeed does the entire system itself), at its place as the culmination of Absolute Spirit as philosophy; but as political philosophy it is elaborated around its other place, as the culmination of Objective Spirit. What is more, the possibility of doing philosophy (of living the bios theōrētikos) is given by concrete developments at the level of objective spirit, namely the realization of the State. Here is a helpful account of this double positioning as given by Herbert Marcuse in Reason and Revolution:

One question still to be answered affects the whole structure of Hegel’s system. The historical world, in so far as it is built, organized, and shaped by the conscious activity of thinking subjects, is a realm of [spirit]. But [spirit] is fully realized and exists in its true form only when it indulges in its proper activity, namely, in art, religion, and philosophy. These domains of culture are, then, the final reality, the province of ultimate truth. And this is precisely Hegel’s conviction: absolute [spirit] lives only in art, religion, and philosophy. All three have the same content in a different form: Art apprehends the truth by mere intuition (Anschauung), in a tangible and therefore limited form; Religion perceives it free of such limitation, but only as mere “assertion” and belief; Philosophy comprehends it through knowledge and possesses it as its inalienable property. On the other hand, these spheres of culture exist only in the historical development of mankind, and the state is the final stage of this development. What, then, is the relation between the state and the realm of absolute [spirit]? Does the rule of the state extend over art, religion, and philosophy, or is it rather limited by them?²³

Various versions of this tension or duplicity show up explicitly in Hegel himself, notably perhaps in the Preface to the second edition (1831) of the Science of Logic, which, preciously for us given what awaits us, involves a reference to Aristotle’s Metaphysics:

“Only after almost everything which is necessary to life, and pertains to its comfort and sociability, was made available,” says Aristotle, “did man begin to trouble himself with philosophical knowledge.” “In Egypt,” he had previously remarked, “there was an early development of the mathematical sciences because there the priestly caste were brought early to a state of leisure.” Indeed, the need to occupy oneself with pure thoughts [i.e., Logic] presupposes a long road that the human spirit must have traversed; it is the need, one may say, of having already attained the satisfaction of necessary need, the need of freedom from need [das Bedürfnis des schon befriedigten Bedürfnisses der Notwendigkeit, der Bedürfnislosigkeit], of abstraction from the material of intuition, imagination, and so forth; from the material of the concrete interests of desire, impulse, will, in which the determinations of thought hide as if behind a veil. In the silent regions of thought that has come to itself and communes only with itself, the interests that move the life of peoples and individuals are hushed. “In so many respects,” says Aristotle in the same context, “is human nature in bondage; but this science, which is not pursued for any utility, is alone free in and for itself, and for this reason it appears not to be a human possession.”²⁴

It may be, of course, that this “need of freedom from need” is never quite satisfied, and that the very “modern life” that allows Hegel the freedom to occupy himself with pure thoughts also regularly intrudes in the form of “external necessity” on that freedom and strikes the work with necessary contingencies and imperfections, which provokes an interesting comparison with Plato (and perhaps not entirely contingently, the Plato of the Republic), and indeed a reference to scatter:

Anyone who in our times labors at erecting anew an independent edifice of philosophical sciences may be reminded, thinking of how Plato expounded his, of the story that he reworked his Republic seven times over. The reminder of this, any comparison, such as may seem implied in it, should only serve to incite ever stronger the wish that for a work which, as belonging to the modern world, is confronted by a profounder principle, a more difficult subject matter and a material of greater compass, the unfettered leisure had been afforded of reworking it seven and seventy times over. But the author, in face of the magnitude of the task, had to content himself with what could be made of it in circumstances of external necessity [unter den Umständen einer äußerlichen Notwendigkeit], of the inevitable distraction [Zerstreuung, dispersion, scatter] caused by the magnitude and multitude [Vielseitigkeit: multifacetedness, multifariousness] of contemporary interests, all the while in doubt whether the noisy clamor of the day and the deafening chatter of a conceit that takes pride in confining itself to just these interests, might still leave room for partaking in the dispassionate calm of a knowledge dedicated to thought alone. (21–22)

If the need to be free of needs cannot be realized, then one imagines that the speculative dialectic will always be (at least contingently, but by a kind of necessary contingency) falling short of its entire self-inwardizing as Spirit bei sich, and it thus leaves traces (“material” traces, in a sense to be specified) in the form of Hegel’s always insufficiently revised written texts, which are then open to the further contingency of potential misreading. The famous Marxist claim, made explicitly in a text by Friedrich Engels,²⁵ to set the Hegelian dialectic on its feet again is of course important, but that corrective inversion does not escape the formal problem recognized here, and that shows up most saliently in Marxism as the tension between “theory” and “practice” (or “interpreting the world” and “changing it”) which remain philosophical concepts through and through.²⁶

More specifically, the whole effort to think scatter in nonteleological and nondialectical terms involves asserting, not exactly contra Hegel—for any such contradiction plays into the dialectic—but otherwise than Hegel (and in the wake of Heidegger and more than one modern French philosopher) that it is at least possible for difference as such to be thought without its necessarily resolving itself dialectically into opposition, contradiction and sublation, as Hegel argues it must in the long account in The Science of Logic (361ff), including the claims that “Difference in itself is the difference that refers itself to itself; thus it is the negativity of itself, the difference not from another but of itself from itself; it is not itself but its other. What is different from difference, however, is identity [already treating difference as opposition, then]. Difference is, therefore, itself and identity”; that difference becomes diversity and that “diversity … is opposition” (365); and that “difference as such is already implicitly [an sich] contradiction” (374)). Or again, the more concisely quotable version from the Encyclopedia Logic (Part II, “The doctrine of essence,” Section A “Essence as Ground of Existence,” subsection a. “The pure determinations of reflection,” sub-subsection beta, “Difference [Der Unterschied]”²⁷:

§117 Difference is (1) immediate difference, diversity [die Verschiedenheit], in which each of the different [terms] is what it is on its own account and each is indifferent vis-à-vis its relation to the other, so that the relation is an external one for it. Because of the indifference of the diverse [terms] with regard to their difference, the difference falls outside of them in a third, that makes the comparison. As identity of those that are related, this external difference is equality [die Gleichheit], as their nonidentity it is inequality.

§118 Equality is only an identity of [terms] that are not the same, not identical with one another—and inequality is the relation between unequal [terms]. So equality and inequality do not indifferently fall apart into diverse sides or aspects but each is a shining into the other [ein Scheinen in die andere]. Hence diversity is difference of reflection, or difference that is in its own self, determinate difference.

§119 (2) Difference in its own self [an sich] is essential [difference], the positive and the negative: the positive is the identical relation to self in such a way that it is not the negative, while the negative is what is different on its own account in such a way that it is not the positive. Since each of them is on its own account only in virtue of not being the other one, each shines within the other, and is only insofar as the other is. Hence, the difference of essence is opposition [Entgegensetzung] through which what is different does not have an other in general, but its own other facing it; that is to say, each has its own determination only in its relation to the other: it is only inwardly reflected insofar as it is reflected into the other, and the other likewise; thus each is the other’s own other …

Addition 2 … Generally speaking, it is contradiction that moves the world, and it is ridiculous to say that contradiction cannot be thought. What is correct in this assertion is just that contradiction is not all there is to it, and that contradiction sublates itself by its own doing. Sublated contradiction, however, is not abstract identity, for that is itself only one side of the antithesis. The proximate result of opposition posited as contradiction is the ground, which contains within itself both identity and difference as sublated and reduced to merely ideal moments.

As Lyotard analyzes it in Le différend, this means that Hegel is already presupposing at the beginning of his discussion of difference that it will indeed resolve into diversity, opposition, and contradiction: our claim against this (with Lyotard, and in a slightly different way also with Derrida or Deleuze) is that it is at least possible to hold difference short of this resolution (and possibility is all we need here, as Hegel needs the sequence to be necessary), and that difference thought in this way (what Derrida calls différance, what I am here calling scatter) cannot be presumed to give rise, via opposition and contradiction, to sublation. Another way of putting this is that in order to operate the dialectical resolution, Hegel has to apply to difference the notion of the absolute: absolute difference indeed resolves into diversity, opposition, and contradiction. But différance or scatter hold short of absolutizing in this way, and can be thought of as names (among others, for there will of necessity be a scatter of names for “scatter”) for a non-absolutizability of difference, a holding back of difference as difference that inhibits or impedes its dialectical resolution.²⁸ As Derrida put it in Positions, “If there were a definition of différance, it would be precisely the limit, the interruption, the destruction of Hegelian sublation everywhere it operates.”²⁹

Although these passages in Hegel are, perhaps surprisingly, never the object of detailed published commentary by Derrida, on at least two occasions he states very clearly the importance of this moment. First in a very general context in the third interview collected in Positions (where he is being interviewed by dialectical materialists):

I tried to distinguish différance … from Hegelian difference. At precisely the point where Hegel, in the Greater Logic, determines difference as contradiction* only in order to resolve, interiorize, sublate it, according to the syllogistic process of the speculative dialectic, into the self-presence of an onto-theological or onto-teleological synthesis.

*[Derrida’s note, presumably added after the interview:] Difference as such is already implicitly contradiction … (Der Unterschied überhaupt ist schon der Widerspruch an sich.) In no longer allowing itself to be simply subsumed under the generality of logical contradiction, différance (process of differentiation) allows one to take differentiating account of heterogeneous modes of conflictuality or, if you like, contradictions. If I have more often spoken of conflicts of forces than of contradiction, this is first of all through critical suspicion of the Hegelian concept of contradiction (Widerspruch) which, moreover, as its name suggests, is designed to be resolved within dialectical discourse, in the immanence of a concept capable of its own exteriority, and capable of having its outside-itself close to itself. (POS 59–60/44 and 101n13)

And in the other reading—or reconstruction—of this moment in Hegel, in the more specific—but probably decisive³⁰—context of the determination of sexual difference as opposition, in Glas:

Sexual difference is overcome when the brother leaves, and the other (sister and wife) remains. There is no longer any sexual difference as natural difference. “The sexes overcome their natural difference.” Once overcome, sexual difference will have been merely a natural diversity. The opposition between difference and qualitative diversity is a hinge of the Greater Logic. Diversity is a moment of difference, an indifferent difference, an external difference, without opposition. While the two moments of difference (identity and difference, since identity differs, as identity) relate only to themselves and not to the other, while identity is not opposed to difference nor difference to identity, there is diversity. Diversity is, then, a moment of both difference and of identity, it being understood, quite explicitly, that difference is the whole and its own moment. Which is true too, then, of sexual difference: it is identity, identity is difference, itself the whole and its own moment.

In overcoming natural difference as diversity of the sexes, one moves to difference as opposition. In Sittlichkeit, sexual difference finally becomes a true opposition: which it was, moreover, called, destined to be.³¹

The “resistance” of difference to dialectical treatment has, ex hypothesi, an indefinite, diverse, or scattered number of possible names, and incalculable consequences. I believe that the names “democracy” and “matter” can help us to think through some of them. I want to say that in the area of political philosophy, “democracy” uneasily names something of the order of multiplicity, dispersion, or what I shall often prefer to term simply scatter. And scatter will sometimes best be thought of in terms of matter. “Scatter,” I shall argue, in what I will suggest is a more Aristotelian spirit than Derrida recognizes, is at one and the same time the possibility of the political (the political bond always gathers a dispersion, on pain of not being political) and, simultaneously, the necessary possibility of its end (the dispersion constantly unbinds the bond and scatters, otherwise the political would become absorbed by the One and cease being political).

Although, as we shall see, this (muted, modest) stress on difference cannot be reduced simply to the motif of numerical multiplicity or plurality, of the Many (still less the Two) as opposed to the One (for scatter, as we said, will turn out to involve a multitudinous but also always a multifarious or variegated multiplicity), the simple fact of plurality does give us some initial opening onto the political aspect of our exploration. Here is a typically trenchant statement from Hannah Arendt from the opening page of her unfinished work Was ist Politik?:

Politics is based on the fact of human plurality. God created man, but men are a human, earthly product, the product of human nature. Because philosophy and theology are always concerned with man, because all their pronouncements would be correct if there were only one or two men or only identical men, they have found no valid philosophical answer to the question: What is politics?

In Arendt’s diagnosis, this means that “even in Plato” the great thinkers’ political philosophies never reach the same depth as the rest of their works because of a failure to “sense the depths in which politics is anchored” (Der fehlende Tiefsinn ist ja nichts anderes als der fehlende Sinn für die Tiefe, in der Politik verankert ist).³²

We might suspect that this slightly dismissive comment about political philosophy is itself part of the problem Arendt is trying to diagnose. Compare, especially for the “even in Plato,” the more judicious assessment proposed by Derrida near the beginning of an as yet unpublished seminar from 1970–71:

It is not simply true that philosophy has always made the political object into a particular object inscribed in the broader field of ontology or morality. Or rather that gesture, that narrow determination has a history in which we shall need to find our bearings. Since, as everybody knows, it is as pro- and explicitly political that philosophy opened itself with Plato, since philosophy was initially one with [confondue avec] politics or the political [la ou le politique] as such, something must have become organized, some determinate process must have been instituted such that the political came later to occupy only a specific and derivative domain in ontology or the Encyclopedia. Plato’s Politeia is a book of general ontology.… Aristotle’s Politics is already a specialized treatise. This discrepancy does not necessarily have to be interpreted in terms of an evolution. There has no doubt always been a double register for reading the political in philosophy, for reading political philosophy in philosophy. On the one hand, in the philosopher’s very consciousness, the task of philosophy has always been, consubstantially, congenitally and coextensively, a political task in the broad sense, the program of an ideal organization of the city. That’s an invariable that can also be followed from Plato to Husserl. And in this sense it is not a subversive proposition but one in conformity with most traditional philosophical consciousness to say that philosophy is political through and through.³³

Granted the complications this would bring to Arendt’s rather high-handed dismissal of the general quality of political philosophy, let us recognize her intriguing passing comment that will be precious for our attempt to think through scatter, in which Arendt asserts that “Men [sic] organize themselves politically according to certain essential commonalities found within or abstracted from an absolute chaos of differences [in einem absoluten Chaos oder aus einem absoluten Chaos der Differenzen]” This “chaos of differences,” prior to (as it were) the “abstraction of commonalities” will certainly resonate with our notion of scatter. After a brief excursus on how unhelpful it is to try to think politics on the basis of family and kinship (to which we will return later), Arendt offers two principal, perhaps contradictory reasons for the supposed general failure of political philosophy, and again both of these reasons will resonate with our analyses, and, given the complication introduced by the Derrida seminar comments, will have broader effects on philosophy in general that Arendt intended:

There are two good reasons why philosophy has never found a place where politics can take shape. The first is the assumption that there is something political in man that belongs to his essence.³⁴ This is simply not so; man is apolitical. Politics arises between men [in dem Zwischenden-Menschen], and so quite outside of man. There is therefore no real political substance. Politics arises in what lies between men and is established as relationships [als der Bezug]. Hobbes understood this.

The second is the monotheistic concept of God, in whose likeness man is said to have been created. On that basis there can, of course, be only man, while men become a more or less successful repetition of the same. (95)

The issue of monotheism will indeed be detaining us at length soon enough. For now, let’s pursue a little the thought that politics emerges from plurality (or more radically from the “chaos of differences”). The claim that this originary plurality or scatter communicates with the notion of democracy (as we shall see) brings us close, on this point at least, to some assertions by Jacques Rancière, who also interestingly relates it to the metaphysical desire we have already identified to bring politics to an end, to think politics as politics on the way to its end (both finis and telos):

The art of politics is the art that consists in suppressing the political. It is an operation of self-subtraction. Perhaps the “end of politics” is then merely its fulfilment, the ever young fulfilment of its agedness. And it is perhaps this duplicity of the techne politike that philosophy has never ceased theorizing, beyond the opposition of the “ancients” and the “moderns.” It is this ever-young end that it has always placed close to the thought of foundation.

And just a little later:

To designate, with Leo Strauss, the Republic or the Politics as works and paradigms of political philosophy, is perhaps to erase the originary tension of the relation between philosophy and politics: the coinciding of the desire to “do in truth the things of politics” claimed by the Gorgias and the desire to put an end to politics, to hear nothing more about it. In any case to put an end to the political as it presents itself, in its spontaneous, democratic state: the anarchic self-regulation of the multiple by majority decision.³⁵

These are precious comments, but still fall short of what is at stake here, and notably of what I proposed in the first volume of this work to call “the politics of politics.” At least insofar as it is under the sway of theory, of theōrein, and is the product not in fact of the bios politikos but of the bios theōrētikos (as Spinoza sardonically points in a remark at the opening of the Tractatus politicus to which we shall be returning in due course), political philosophy attempts to reduce the politics out of politics, and it does this almost inevitably by trying to treat politics as the object of a theory (rather than the object of a politics). The failure (already in Plato) of this attempt to be purely theoretical would, on my hypothesis, already mark political philosophy as itself political, but perhaps no longer simply as philosophy (Machiavelli is the most obvious proper name to attach to this problem). This failure involves an exposure of political philosophy to politics (I am going to claim that this is a kind of transcendental exposure), an exposure that my “politics of politics” doublet is attempting to capture, and which will resonate in due course with what Derrida calls “autoimmunity.” Neither Arendt nor Rancière really comes close to what I have called “the politics of politics,” the somewhat diabolical doubling whereby, among other things, any political philosophy is (also) political philosophy. This does not simply make it the least philosophical and most “everyday life” kind of philosophy, as Strauss thought, but as it were infects philosophy, like a virus, with the necessary possibilities of what philosophy from its Platonic inception needs always to eliminate and expel as sophistry and rhetoric. This “politics of politics” resonates with another slogan I have often used, namely that, in the conceptual schemas of political philosophy, “the end of politics is the end of politics.” The (not entirely philosophical) “politics of politics” works against the (very philosophical) “end of politics” by interfering with the teleological structures that are endemic in political philosophy. The politics of politics is both a condition of possibility and a condition of impossibility of politics: it is what endlessly prevents politics from reaching its end(s),³⁶ maintains politics as politics, endlessly (though as we shall see, not entirely aimlessly: skopos need not be the same as telos).

The thought that politics is always already engaged in the politics of politics also distinguishes Scatter 2 from the interesting and compelling but insufficiently thought through (insufficiently deconstructed) positions of Foucault and, in his wake, Agamben, both of whom want to displace the focus of political thought away from the theme of sovereignty toward that of what Foucault calls “governmentality,” and what Agamben (for once recognizing the problems in Foucault’s periodizing) tracks throughout the tradition in terms of economia and dispositio. Foucault’s position is clear and, shall we say, trenchant:

I wonder if this [the view of power as dividing those possessing it from those subjected to it, mutatis mutandis the “repressive hypothesis”] is not linked to the institution of monarchy.… Political theory has remained obsessed by the person of the sovereign. All these theories are still posing the problem of sovereignty. What we need is a political philosophy that is not constructed around the problem of sovereignty, and therefore of law, and therefore of interdiction; we have to cut off the king’s head and this has not yet been done in political theory.³⁷

Agamben’s learned genealogical complication of this, especially in the volume The Kingdom and the Glory (the most interesting and least dogmatic of his Homo Sacer series) leads to a conclusion he puts more bluntly in the collective volume Democracy in What State?, summarizing The Kingdom and the Glory:

In a recent book I tried to show that the central mystery of politics is not sovereignty but government; not God but his angels; not the king but his minister; not the law but the police—or rather, the governmental machine they form and propel.

Our Western political system results from the coupling of two heterogeneous elements, a politico-juridical rationality and an economic-governmental rationality, a “form of constitution” and a “form of government.” Incommensurable they may be, but they legitimate and confer mutual consistency on each other. Why does the politieia get trapped in this ambiguity? What is it that gives the sovereign, the kyrion, the power to ensure and guarantee the legitimacy of their union? What if it were just a fiction, a screen set up to hide the fact that there is a void at the center, that no articulation is possible between these two elements, these two rationalities? What if the task at hand were to disarticulate them and force into the open this “ungovernable” that is simultaneously the source and the vanishing point of any and all politics?³⁸

Assuming that this is even intelligible (but let’s concede that what seems unintelligible here—a legitimating incommensurability—comes from the tradition Agamben is exploring rather than from his analysis of it), and that Agamben has correctly identified something like an aporia affecting the whole tradition, we might reasonably suspect that simply “cutting off the king’s head,” as Foucault wishes or fantasizes, would be part of the problem rather than its solution (we shall see that sovereignty in fact always entails a certain “paregisuicide,” that means that the severed head of the sovereign is, as it were, part of the logic of sovereignty itself and certainly not its overcoming), and that its displaced version in Agamben (tearing down the screen, exposing the fiction, showing that the Wizard of Oz is no wizard at all or perhaps more pertinently that the Emperor has no clothes) is a rather simplistic and pious approach to what is a more intractable aporia than can be dealt with in these brisk terms of a “task at hand.” We shall see in the course of our own readings that in Rousseau, for example (a major figure in the elaboration of Agamben’s conclusion), something of this tension (between sovereign and government) is in fact clearly “articulated” in terms of a quite lucid logic of supplementation, usurpation and, indeed, execution. And, again as we shall see, we might say the same for Aristotle’s complex analysis of the figure of the One Best Man or Absolute Monarch which, like its counterpart in a radical form of Absolute Democracy, already quite lucidly shows up “the source and the vanishing point of any and all politics.”

The politics of politics bespeaks, in the language of the always-already,³⁹ what metaphysics can only apprehend as a fall or a corruption. This language of a purity subsequently corrupted or infected, a language which is metaphysical through and through, survives in many contemporary discussions, and no doubt always goes along with an inadequate understanding of temporality and historicity. To put it crudely, the tensions between metaphysics and politics we have been following thus far might be at least in part produced by the fact that the theoretical or contemplative time of metaphysics is, tendentially, of the order of eternity (as Badiou would confirm) or some phantasy of infinite time—philosophy in principle demands all the time in the world, even if in practice it (luckily) never has that time available to it—whereas political time is the time of decision and action, of finding the right time or kairos, an always finite time that draws metaphysics down and away from its lofty aspirations and back into the realm of politics. Like Hegel interrupted by the surrounding clamor of life and thus unable to revise his book as much as a strictly philosophical approach would demand, philosophy in general finds itself short of time and therefore back in a context that is always at least in part political.

As an example of the persistence of this type of metaphysical schema in recent—and otherwise politically sympathetic—thinking about politics, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri assert in their Multitude that by going “back to the eighteenth century” we can find a time when “the concept of democracy was not corrupted as it is now.”⁴⁰ One page later, however, we are told that “we have to find a way to free ourselves of the tenacious ghosts of the past that haunt the present and cripple our imagination,” (308), and then one page later again, “As the Federalists said in the eighteenth century, the new times require a ‘new science’ of society and politics.… A new science of global democracy would not simply restore our political vocabulary from the corruptions it has suffered” (309). A little later still: “Now, with the cold war over and the first experiments of global order completed, we cannot help but recognize the planet as a sick body and the global crisis of democracy as a symptom of corruption and disorder … the corruption of life in its entirety” (352–353).⁴¹ One of the points of scatter is that there was no time before the “corruption,” and there can be no time after it. This does not mean that all politics is equally corrupt or that there is no point fighting against corruption in the narrower sense, simply that there is no horizon of purity or noncorruption to be aimed for. This means that the superficially attractive claim that “sovereignty in all its forms inevitably poses power as a rule of the one and undermines the possibility of a full and absolute democracy” (353) itself repeats the problem it is claiming to address by the adoption of a language of sovereignty (“full and absolute”) in the attempt to contest that same language.

In any case, the tension we are pursuing is certainly not resolved by Hardt and Negri, who are still trying to develop a “new science” that reflects a “new ontology” (312). The “mosaic” they promise (xvii), which might sound like a version of scatter, is still too ontological, too beholden to a metaphysical notion of truth.⁴² Their proposal to “combine Madison and Lenin” (355) dreams that it can combine a revolutionary abolition of sovereignty with “institutional procedures that guard against dramatic reversals and suicidal errors” (355). But that promise of truth is in fact, quite traditionally, the end of politics. Further, their invocation of the kairos as “the moment when the arrow is shot by the bowstring, the moment when a decision of action is made” (357), cannot, as they think, be coordinated with the thought that “the constituent power of the multitude has matured to such an extent that it is becoming able, through its networks of communication and cooperation, through its production of the common, to sustain an alternative democratic society on its own” (ibid.). The motif of “maturing” precisely presupposes the “linear accumulation of Chronos” to which they want (but fail) to oppose the thought of kairos. This temporal configuration then becomes straightforwardly Pauline, and the cutting, interruptive potential of kairos is blunted by the thought of a “fullness of time.” So the authors’ (rather loose) philosophical ambition for their work (“This is a philosophical book … Our primary aim is to work out the conceptual bases on which a new project of democracy can stand” [xvi–xvii]) remains in thrall to just the kind of “tenacious ghosts of the past that haunt the present and cripple our imagination” that we saw them warn against. Whatever the sympathy and solidarity one may feel for their political ambitions, the “conceptual bases” they are working on are not new at all, but metaphysical, teleological,⁴³ and thus condemned in spite of themselves to moralism.

As it happens, Hardt and Negri open the main text of their most recent book, Assembly, with an epigraph from Homer that they proceed to ignore in the body of their text, as though it were self-explanatory. As we shall now go on to see, this line from Homer has a long and distinguished afterlife in the Western tradition from Aristotle onward, and indeed it will provide the principal guiding thread for the rest of the Scatter 2.

1 1. Alain Badiou, La relation énigmatique entre philosophie et politique (Paris: Germina, 2011).

2 2. Jacques Rancière, La mésentente (Paris: Galilée, 1995); trans. Julia Rose, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999). Rancière wants to distinguish his mésentente from Lyotard’s différend, but it seems more plausible to me to see in the former a specific case of the latter.

3 3. Nichomachean Ethics, 1095b17–18.

4 4. Gorgias, in Plato, Lysis, Symposium, Gorgias, trans. W. R. M. Lamb (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1925), 500c.

5 5. See also Metaphysics 994b for this argument (still a central tenet of Kant’s “teleological judgment”), whereby teleology always entails that there be one supreme or final end that “finalizes” all others.

6 6. Nicomachean Ethics, trans. and ed. Roger Crisp (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 1094a18–1094b7. I have also consulted the translations by W. D. Ross (as revised by J.O Urmson in The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation, ed. Jonathan Barnes, 2 vols. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984); by Hugh Tredennick (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1933); by C. D. C. Reeve (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2014); and the French translation by Jules Tricot (Paris: Vrin, 1990).

7 7. Aquinas states in his prologue that “the whole that is the political community is superior to all the other wholes that human reason can know or constitute.” Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on Aristotle’s Politics, trans. Richard J. Regan (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2007), 2. Aquinas then asserts that “we distinguish practical from theoretical sciences in that the latter are directed only to the knowledge of truth, while the former are directed to action. Therefore, politics is necessarily included in practical philosophy …” (ibid.). But according to a potentially fractal structure that will be precious to us, politics is nonetheless on the theoretical side, as it were, of the practical, the “moral” as opposed to the “mechanical” branch of the practical in general. Hannah Arendt also appears to accept that this is a fairly straightforward distinction in Aristotle (and Plato), albeit one with the unfortunate effect that politics is “deprived of all dignity” and that the “end of politics” is, paradoxically, the withdrawal from politics into, precisely, the bios theōrētikos. See, for example, the essay “The End of Tradition” in The Promise of Politics, ed. Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken Books, 2005), 81–84.

8 8. Trans. Benjamin Jowett, in The Complete Works of Aristotle. I have also consulted the translations by H. Rackham (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1932), as well as Reeve’s and Jules Tricot’s (see note 6).

9 9. Leo Strauss, The City and Man (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), 25.

10 10. Leo Strauss, “On Classical Political Philosophy,” in What Is Political Philosophy? And Other Studies (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1959), 78–94, at 93–94.

11 11. Ibid., 78.

12 12. So Scatter 2 will not, for example, aim to follow either the philosophical proposals for a workable democracy made by Joshua Ober in Demopolis: Democracy before Liberalism in Theory and Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), nor the more popularizing defense of an Athenian model of direct democracy in Roslyn Fuller, Beasts and Gods: How Democracy Changed Its Meaning and Lost Its Purpose (London: Zed Books, 2015), nor other often admirable and disquieting books convincingly diagnosing shortcomings or crises in current democratic politics, such as Sheldon S. Wolin, Democracy Inc.: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (New York: Zone Books, 2017), and Bonnie Honig, Public Things: Democracy in Disrepair (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017), and other still more recent books, by historians or political scientists, with titles like How Democracies Die (New York: Crown Publishing, 2018), by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, or How Democracy Ends (New York: Basic Books, 2018), by David Runciman.

13 13. For a preliminary attempt to understand this kind of space on the basis of Derrida’s reading of Rousseau’s construal of the relation between north and south, and notably my suggestion that the “horn torus” might be an interesting figure for thinking polar but nonoppositional structures, see my “Fractal Geography,” in Reading Of Grammatology, ed. Sean Gaston and Ian McLachlan (London: Continuum Books, 2011), 137–145.

14 14. Théorie du discours philosophique II: La forme du texte philosophique: les conditions d’inscription du texte de philosophie politique (l’exemple du matérialisme), Session I, 5. I am grateful to Thomas Clément Mercier, who drew this seminar (later parts of which contribute significantly to Derrida’s 1987 text Khôra) to my attention.

15 15. “Opposing the contemplative life to the political as ‘two bioi’ … Aristotle deflected politics and philosophy from their trajectory … The political is neither a bios nor a zōē, but the dimension that the inoperativity of contemplation … ceaselessly opens and assigns to the living.” The Kingdom and the Glory: For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government, trans. Lorenzo Chiesa with Matteo Mandarini (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011), 251.

16 16. Giorgio Agamben, Stasis: Civil War as a Political Paradigm (Homo Sacer II, 2), trans. Nicholas Heron (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015), 27.

17 17. Michel Foucault, Le gouvernement de soi et les autres: Cours au Collège de France, 1982–3, ed. François Ewald and Alessandro Fontana (Paris: Seuil, 2008), 265; The Government of Self and Others: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1982–1983, trans. Graham Burchell (London: Palgrave/Macmillan, 2010), 288.

18 18. John Rawls, “Justice as Fairness: Political not Metaphysical,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 14, no. 3 (Summer 1985): 223–251. In general, given our stress on reading, the Anglo-American tradition is always likely to be less germane to our endeavor than the continental (for reasons that are at least akin to those we pursue later in Hobbes). For an exceptionally happy bridging of those two traditions, however, see Simon Glendinning’s forthcoming work Europe: A Philosophical History.

19 19. Rawls does not think that his version of liberalism tolerates (or should tolerate) only liberalism; in his later The Law of Peoples (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), he thinks that liberal peoples should also tolerate what he calls “decent peoples” (who need not be liberal to qualify as “decent”), but it is quite clear that (quite apart from the—I prefer to imagine unconscious—condescension implied by the use of the evaluation “decent”) this is still being thought with a telos of liberalism, as for example in “Liberal peoples must try to encourage decent peoples and not frustrate their vitality by coercively insisting that all societies be liberal. Moreover, if a liberal constitutional democracy is, in fact, superior to other forms of society, as I believe it to be, a liberal people should have confidence in their convictions and suppose that a decent society, when offered due respect by liberal peoples, may be more likely, over time, to recognize the advantages of liberal institutions and take steps toward becoming more liberal on its own” (62: Rawls goes on to describe a “hypothetical decent hierarchical people … an idealized Islamic people named ‘Kazanistan’ ”). See Derrida’s comments on the essentially Christian (and in his view intrinsically condescending) value of “tolerance” (not explicitly with reference to Rawls), in Jacques Derrida and Jürgen Habermas, Philosophy in a Time of Terror (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 124–130; Le “concept” du 11 septembre: Dialogues à New York (octobre-décembre 2001) avec Giovanna Borradori (Paris: Galilée, 2004), 183–189, and Habermas’s measured defense of the concept (40–42/75–78). See also FS, 36–37.

20 20. Jean-François Lyotard, La condition postmoderne (Paris: Minuit, 1979), 106; trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Brian Massumi as The Postmodern Condition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 65–66: “I have shown … that consensus is only a particular state of discussion, not its end. Its end, on the contrary, is paralogy … search for dissent.”

21 21. See my Kant on the Frontier: Philosophy, Politics, and the Ends of the Earth (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017).

22 22. This is perhaps most dramatically illustrated by the initially puzzling place of the Phenomenology of Spirit, which “occupies a double position in the encyclopedia-system: In a certain way the phenomenology is a foundational part for the system while being at the same time an affiliated component within the system.” See Heidegger’s illuminating discussion in the 1931–32 lecture course Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (GA 32), trans. Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988); the quotation is at 9.

23 23. Herbert Marcuse, Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2000), 86–87. I have taken the liberty of substituting “spirit” where Marcuse uses “mind” for Hegelian Geist.

24 24. G. W. F. Hegel, The Science of Logic, trans. and ed. George di Giovanni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 14.

25 25. See Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy: “Hegel was not simply put aside. On the contrary, a start was made from his revolutionary side, described above, from the dialectical method. But in its Hegelian form, this method was unusable. According to Hegel, dialectics is the self-development of the concept. The absolute concept does not only exist—unknown where—from eternity, it is also the actual living soul of the whole existing world. It develops into itself through all the preliminary stages which are treated at length in the Logic and which are all included in it. Then it ‘alienates’ itself by changing into nature, where, unconscious of itself, disguised as a natural necessity, it goes through a new development and finally returns as man’s consciousness of himself. This self-consciousness then elaborates itself again in history in the crude form until finally the absolute concept again comes to itself completely in the Hegelian philosophy. According to Hegel, therefore, the dialectical development apparent in nature and history—that is, the causal interconnection of the progressive movement from the lower to the higher, which asserts itself through all zigzag movements and temporary retrogression—is only a copy [Abklatsch] of the self-movement of the concept going on from eternity, no one knows where, but at all events independently of any thinking human brain. This ideological perversion had to be done away with. We again took a materialistic view of the thoughts in our heads, regarding them as images [Abbilder] of real things instead of regarding real things as images of this or that stage of the absolute concept. Thus dialectics reduced itself to the science of the general laws of motion, both of the external world and of human thought—two sets of laws which are identical in substance, but differ in their expression in so far as the human mind can apply them consciously, while in nature and also up to now for the most part in human history, these laws assert themselves unconsciously, in the form of external necessity, in the midst of an endless series of seeming accidents. Thereby the dialectic of concepts itself became merely the conscious reflex of the dialectical motion of the real world and thus the dialectic of Hegel was turned over; or rather, turned off its head, on which it was standing, and placed upon its feet.”

26 26. See Derrida’s seminar on Theory and Practice, trans. David Wills (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019).

27 27. G. W. F. Hegel, The Encyclopedia Logic: Part I of the Encyclopaedia of Philosophical Sciences with the Zusätze, trans. T. F. Geraets, W. A. Suchting, and H. S. Harris (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1991). Throughout I have substituted the traditional rendering of Unterschied as “difference” for the term “distinction” used in the translation. In view of our earlier remarks on polar structures, it is interesting that in his remarks and additions to these paragraphs Hegel does indeed discuss magnetic polarity: see too Lyotard’s repeated reference to a moment in Marx’s Critique of Hegel’s Doctrine of the State, where Marx argues that “real extremes” would not answer to Hegel’s interpretation of difference: “true, real extremes, would be a pole as opposed to a non-pole, a human as opposed to a non-human sex.” Karl Marx, Early Writings, trans. Rodney Livingstone and Gregor Benton (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1975), 134, discussed by Lyotard in Discours, figure (Paris: Klincksieck, 1971), 138–141. See my “Figure, Discourse,” Contemporary French Civilization 35, no. 1 (2011): 53–72.

28 28. This “holding short” or “holding back” can seem to bring Derrida’s différance close to the Pauline catechon, “the restrainer,” who or which holds back both the coming of the Antichrist and the second coming of the Messiah. This motif has been more or less persuasively deployed in political thinking, notably by Paulo Virno, Roberto Esposito, and Peter Szendy, and is something to which we will return elsewhere.

29 29. POS, 55/40–41. Given this very trenchant statement, it is striking that in her claim that everything has now been “definitively” deconstructed and that it is time to move on to something else, Catherine Malabou can suggest imperturbably that the replacement of the notion of différance by her own concept of plasticity—qua putative “motor scheme” of our time and the very thing we therefore need to move on to—should be thought of precisely as a “dialectical sublation” of différance, thus rather disarmingly showing that her own position at least has not in fact yet been deconstructed. See her “Postface” to the second edition of L’avenir de Hegel: Plasticité, temporalité, dialectique (Paris: Vrin, 2012), 264–265.

30 30. See the initially surprising suggestion by Alain Badiou (after a number of almost equally surprising suggestions about Plato, Hegel, and Nietzsche): “Derrida transformed the classical approach to rigid metaphysical oppositions to a large extent because of the growing and irreducible importance, in our experiences, of their feminine dimension.” La relation énigmatique entre philosophie et politique (Paris: Germina, 2011), 26 (my translation). See below some further remarks about sexual difference in Aristotle and Arendt; see also Emanuela Bianchi, The Feminine Symptom: Aleatory Matter in the Aristotelian Cosmos (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014).

31 31. GL 189a; English from the new translation by Geoffrey Bennington and David Wills, Clang (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, forthcoming).

32 32. “Introduction into Politics,” in The Promise of Politics, 93. German text in Was ist Politik?, ed. Ursula Ludz (Munich: Piper Verlag, 2017), 9.

33 33. Théorie du Discours Philosophique, session I, 6.

34 34. The German text reads: “Der erste ist: I) Zoon politikon: als ob es im Menschen etwas Politisches gäbe, das zu seinder Essenz gehöre,” more accurately translated as: “The first is: I) zoon politikon: as though there were in man something political, that belonged to his essence.”

35 35. Jacques Rancière, Aux bords du politique (1992) (Gallimard, Folio Essais, 2004), 3; trans. Liz Heron as On the Shores of Politics (London: Verso Books, 1995), 11–12. See too, from the slightly later “Dix thèses sur la politique” (1996), not included in the English volume: “Democracy is the specific situation in which it is the absence of entitlement that entitles the exercise of the arkhé.… But this situation of exception is identical to the very condition of any specificity of the political in general.… Democracy is thus in no way a political regime.… Democracy is the very institution of politics.… The whole of politics … is at stake in the interpretation of democratic ‘anarchy.’ ” Aux bords du politique, 231 and 248. Rancière is perhaps remembering Marx’s trenchant and much-debated claim in his early Critique of Hegel’s Doctrine of the State that “democracy is the essence of all political constitutions.” In Marx, Early Writings, 88. As for Badiou, whose hostility to democracy is well known, it is interesting to track a shift in his thinking from Peut-on penser la politique? (Paris: Seuil, 1985), in which he aligns political judgment—as do Lyotard and others—with the Kantian reflective judgment (75–76), to Abrégé de métapolitique (Paris: Seuil, 1998), in which the idea that politics comes under the reflective rather than the determinative judgment is attributed (26) to a now vilified liberal parliamentarian position that views politics as the domain of opinion (in Platonic fashion tarred with the brush of sophistry [ibid., 23]), rather than (as increasingly with Badiou) with truth, the concept of which here subsumes the concept of justice (ibid., 111). Compare Derrida’s position on this issue as discussed in Scatter 1 (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016), 5–6 and 158–166. By the time of Eloge de la politique (Paris: Flammarion, 2017), politics for Badiou is reduced to a quite simple and scarcely even dialectical opposition between capitalism and communism, which are supposedly now the only two possibilities (22–23). The final explicit “éloge” of politics-as-communism in the book is striking both for its humanism and its religious quality: “Of all the enterprises—artistic, scientific, amorous or political—that humanity has proved to be capable of, communism is no doubt the most ambitious, the most global, and the one that will radiantly raise the human race above the laws of competition, of survival at any price, of private interest, of constant hostile distrust of others, which are all laws of raw life, animal laws, natural laws. The new communism … is, finally, the exit from humanity’s stone age.… Every truth, that of a theorem finally clearly understood, like that of a successful and promising political meeting, is a work of eternity, an eternity the affect of which is a shared kind of beatitude” (139–140, my translation). In general, Badiou is perhaps rashly confident that he can unproblematically detach the “fabular content” from metaphysical and Christian sources and continue to use the same vocabulary without detriment to his thinking: see Saint Paul: La fondation de l’universalisme I (Paris: PUF, 1999), 6; and Second manifeste pour la philosophie (Paris: Flammarion, 2010), 122–123n4 on his attachment to religious concepts (or concept-names), and 119–120: “Descartes spoke of the ‘creation of eternal truths.’ I take up the same program without the help of God.”

36 36. To this extent, “the politics of politics” is close to what Chantal Mouffe calls “the democratic paradox,” and would certainly agree with her claim that “To imagine that pluralist democracy could ever be perfectly instantiated is to transform it into a self-refuting ideal, since the condition of possibility of a pluralist democracy is at the same time the condition of impossibility of its perfect implementation.” Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox (London: Verso Books, 2000), 16. See also, as part of her critique of Rawls, 32: “pluralist democracy becomes a ‘self-refuting ideal’ because the very moment of its realization would coincide with its disintegration.” I think that this logic of “self-refuting ideals” is much more broadly generalizable, and that it is in fact inscribed in the very logic of Ideas in the Kantian sense.

37 37. “Entretien avec Michel Foucault,” in Dits et écrits (Paris: Gallimard, 2001), 2:150 (my translation).

38 38. Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou, et al., Democracy in What State?, trans. William McCuaig (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 4.

39 39. See Derrida’s precious clarification of this pervasive deconstructive motif in Heidegger: The Question of Being and History, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 42: “The signification of ‘always already’ is the historical translation or rather the historical foundation of the signification ‘a priori.’ The always modifies the already in such a way that the already does not depend on this or that contingent situation, but has a value of unconditioned universality. The always wrests the historicity of the already from empiricity.”

40 40. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: Penguin Press, 2004), 307. Subsequent page references will be given in the text.

41 41. In their earlier Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), Hardt and Negri had argued for a nonmoral use of the term “corruption” (although they recognize that current usage of the term has itself become corrupt compared to an older usage). There, they claim that “It is important to make clear that we in no way intend our definition of imperial sovereignty as corruption to be a moral charge. In its contemporary and modern usage, corruption has indeed become a poor concept for our purposes. It now commonly refers only to the perverted, that which strays from the moral, the good, the pure. We intend the concept rather to refer to a more general process of decomposition or mutation with none of the moral overtones, drawing on an ancient usage that has been largely lost.… We have to forget all the commonplace images that come to mind when we refer to imperial decadence, corruption, and degeneration. Such moralism is completely misplaced here” (201–202). Quite apart from the fact that it is quite impossible to wish moralism away by trying to stipulate the content of an inherited concept in this way, it seems clear that the way “corruption” is being used in the final pages of Multitude does not obey the strictures enounced here in Empire.

42 42. See too the more recent Assembly (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), which not only reaffirms its commitment to ontology (their word for “the world as it is” [xviii]) and truth (“truth is not given but constructed, not substance but subject” [ibid.; the reference to Hegel is explicit at xiii]), but is happy to project (with an implicit reference to Gramsci) a “new Prince … emerging on the horizon, a Prince born of the passions of the multitude,” and then tries, quite characteristically, to have its metaphysical cake and eat it too: “This Prince thus appears as a swarm, a multitude moving in coherent formation” (xxi).

43 43. In Empire, Hardt and Negri lay explicit claim to a “new materialist teleology,” drawing initially on Althusser’s reading of Machiavelli (Empire, 63–64) and clarify their position on this in a much later note at 368: “Obviously when we speak about a materialist telos we are speaking about a telos that is constructed by subjects, constituted by the multitude in action. This involves a materialist reading of history which recognizes that the institutions of society are formed through the encounter and conflict of social forces themselves. The telos in this case in not predetermined but constructed in the process. Materialist historians such as Thucydides and Machiavelli, like the great materialist philosophers such as Epicurus, Lucretius, and Spinoza, have never negated a telos constructed by human actions. As Marx wrote in the introduction to the Grundrisse, it is not the anatomy of the ape that explains that of humans but, vice versa, the anatomy of humans that explains that of the ape (105). The telos appears only afterwards, as a result of the actions of history” (Empire, 470). Scatter thinks that this account of teleology is still perfectly Hegelian, and that a more careful reading of the Marx passage would in fact provide for something more complicated than that “the telos appears only afterwards.” Marx goes on to qualify the sense of the anatomy argument: “Although it is true, therefore, that the categories of bourgeois economics possess a truth for all other forms of society, this is to be taken only with a grain of salt. They can contain them in a developed, or stunted, or caricatured form etc., but always with an essential difference. The so-called historical presentation of development is founded, as a rule, on the fact that the latest form regards the previous ones as steps leading up to itself, and, since it is only rarely and only under quite specific conditions able to criticize itself—leaving aside, of course, the historical periods which appear to themselves as times of decadence—it always conceives them one-sidedly.” Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, trans. Martin Nicolaus (London: Penguin Books, 1973), 106.