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The Scatter project, of which this is the second volume,¹ was originally conceived as calling for a more scattered (Kant would perhaps say “rhapsodic”) form of presentation than that of the standard academic monograph. This conception was not supposed to be merely provocative or whimsical, but was called for by the matter at hand, in which I try to demonstrate a persistent and indeed ineradicable plurality and variegation that resists conceptual reduction and that I associate with politics. The working model for that scattered form of presentation was, as had already been the case long ago with my “Derridabase,”² an electronic format that would exploit the possibilities of hypertext, and of other subsequent developments—notably the Internet—that had not been available when I wrote that earlier text. I imagined, for example, that direct links to sources could be provided for every footnote and reference, and that primary texts could easily be made available in their entirety, both in their original language and in any number of translations, with the thought that readers might well often choose simply to continue reading those texts for themselves rather than my commentary on them. The inner connections of the work were to be such that, although certain paths of reading would be indicated and perhaps encouraged by a hierarchical ordering of levels of argument and reading (as in the one—unsatisfactory—attempt at a print emulation of a small part of the project),³ other possibilities and links would remain open, and a system of cross-referencing would enable loops and other more complex patterns to emerge that would disrupt any obvious linear order and induce a certain disorientation in the reader. I imagined, too, that there might be an aleatory element that would make more or less random leaps, or even frustrate apparently attractive pathways through the material. One guiding idea was that the reader would never be able to know for sure that they had read the whole work, as it frayed out into other texts and in principle opened onto the whole universal library, at least as the Internet makes and will increasingly make that available, and as the work would itself be open to ongoing revision, correction, and perhaps wiki-like inputs and other interactive contributions from readers.

In the event, after some unsatisfactory experiments, and some only partially successful forays into electronic publishing,⁴ that version of the project has not been (publicly) realized, largely for technical reasons, and both volumes of Scatter are in the end more or less recognizable, and relatively self-standing, academic books. The intelligibility of Scatter 2 does not require the reader to be familiar with Scatter 1, although I regularly appeal here to its guiding notion of “the politics of politics,” by which I claim that the aspects of politics usually (I believe moralistically) deprecated as sophistry and rhetoric are, like it or not, irreducible, and that there is no politics unaffected by the politics of politics.⁵ From the hierarchy of levels of the original design for the Scatter project, however, I can rapidly state the “top-level” claims being made here, and although the lower-level organization is no longer conceived in quite the same way (without for all that being entirely linear: there is no really compelling need to read the “chapters” in the order in which they are presented here), the interested reader might nonetheless be able to reconstruct it to some extent. The argument of the book might be presented in a half-dozen propositions:

1 Philosophy has always had the greatest difficulty negotiating the relationship between metaphysics and politics.

2 “Sovereignty” is one traditional name for the—always already failing—metaphysical attempt to deal with that difficulty.

3 That intrinsic failing of sovereignty shows up most acutely around the concept of democracy.

4 Thinking about democracy in this light can help identify problems with teleological thinking more generally.

5 These problems are eminently amenable to deconstructive elaboration.

6 Deconstructive thinking can on those grounds be described as radically political.

Scatter 2 is not primarily concerned with the exposition of what Jacques Derrida wrote about politics (although much of the book begins—and sometimes departs—from Derrida’s work). While more generally urging the “political” virtues of deconstruction, it does not attempt to advance a politics in any programmatic sense, nor is it concerned to report on my own political opinions or feelings in these generally very dark times for many supposedly democratic institutions, nor to offer concrete analyses of current events.⁶ This measure of distance from political actuality does not mean that Scatter 2 accepts the eminently traditional subordination of politics to philosophy, or of practice to theory (nor indeed the reverse subordination), but that its effort is to deconstruct such oppositions in general or, better, to suggest that they are, from the start, in deconstruction.

Most of Scatter 2 is new and previously unpublished work. Portions of it are, however, based on articles I have published over the past fifteen years or so, listed below. I have also benefited immensely from the repeated experience of teaching much of this material (and more that has, a little to my regret, not made the final cut, especially on Machiavelli and Tocqueville) in graduate seminars at Emory University, New York University, and the European Graduate School, and presenting parts of it to academic conferences. A number of other related essays I had originally hoped to include in this volume will appear subsequently as a book entitled Down to Dust: Essays in the Deconstruction of Politics. My heartfelt thanks to many students and colleagues for their questions, comments, and objections. In all cases, earlier published versions, as listed below, have been (often quite extensively) revised, reorganized, expanded, rewritten, and reintegrated with a view to the relative gathering of this book, however scattered it also remains: “Beastly Sovereignty: Three Unequal Footnotes to Derrida,” Environmental Philosophy 16, no. 1 (2019): 13–33; “Demo,” in The Politics of Deconstruction, ed. M. McQuillan (London: Pluto Press, 2007), 17–42; “El Consejo de Hobbes,” trans. Matías Bascuñán, Pléyade 19 (January–June 2018), 67–89; “The Fall of Sovereignty,” Epoché 10, no. 2 (2006): 395–406; “For Better and for Worse (There Again …),” Discourse 30, nos. 1–2 (2008), 191–207, also published in Diacritics 38, nos. 1–2 (2009): 1–12; “Political Animals,” theory@buffalo 15 (2011): 8–26, also published in Diacritics 39, no. 2 (2011): 21–35; “Scatter,” Oxford Literary Review 30, no. 1 (2008): 1–43; “Sovereign Stupidity and Auto-Immunity,” in Derrida and the Time of the Political, ed. P. Cheah and S. Guerlac (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 97–113; “Superanus,” Theory and Event 8, no 1 (2005).

1 1. Scatter 1: The Politics of Politics in Foucault, Heidegger, and Derrida (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016).

2 2. In Geoffrey Bennington and Jacques Derrida, Jacques Derrida (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1991); trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993).

3 3. See my “Scatter,” Oxford Literary Review 30, no. 1 (2008): 1–43.

4 4. See http://bennington.zsoft.co.uk for some examples of electronic books, subsequently made available in print-on-demand form.

5 5. Scatter 1 attempted to clear some philosophical ground for the readings undertaken here, and notably it attempted to work out some differences between the (fundamentally Derridean) positions I adopt and those of Foucault on the one hand and Heidegger on the other, especially around the concepts of truth and the event. The opening section of Chapter 6 of Scatter 1 (238–249) offers a summary of Chapters 1–5, and may clarify some of the general issues in play here.

6 6. At the time of writing this preface (December 3, 2019), the sitting president of the United States of America was facing possible impeachment; the British parliamentary system was in electoral and Brexit-related turmoil; street protests were ongoing in Hong Kong, Santiago de Chile, Beirut, Bogota, and Baghdad, among other cities; and so-called strong men were in power in many supposedly “democratic” countries, according to a pattern of usurpation of sovereignty by executive power we will follow later in the company of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. By the time of copyediting (early March 2020), these concerns had been largely subordinated to the 2020 US presidential campaign, itself overshadowed by the global coronavirus pandemic and the associated stock market turmoil—all events with wildly uncertain outcomes not readily addressed within the temporality of academic publishing.