Читать книгу Scatter 2 - Geoffrey Bennington - Страница 9

Et toutefois il n’est point d’héritier si prodigue et nonchalant que quelquefois ne passe les yeux sur les registres de son père, pour voir s’il jouit de tous les droits de sa succession, ou si l’on a rien entrepris sur lui ou son prédécesseur.

—ETIENNE DE LA BOÉTIE, De la servitude volontaire

Non seulement il n’y a pas de royaume de la différance mais celle-ci fomente la subversion de tout royaume.

—JACQUES DERRIDA, “La différance”

“To be … means … to inherit,” writes Jacques Derrida famously in his book Specters of Marx.¹ At the very least, this means that we can think only to the extent that we grow up into a language we inherit and do not choose, and which we are obliged to use, even if our fondest desire were to contest it and do it down. No one can create ex nihilo the language in which they live and move, nor the concepts they reach for to do their thinking.² This sense of the irreducibility of inheritance means, as Derrida had famously already asserted in Of Grammatology, that we have a fundamentally passive relation to the language we speak, that we always find ourselves “in a text already,” and that, as he said even earlier, we are always condemned to making a “false start,” always already belated and after the beginning. Being has always already begun; language is always already there before us.³ That text in which we find ourselves is, for us at least, maximally the text, the tradition, that has come to be called “Western metaphysics.” Our best efforts to think, and to think something new, contestatory, and even revolutionary, are irreducibly rooted in that tradition.

But, as Derrida also shows in the same passage from his book on Marx, inheritance is not the same as mechanical causality: however much the tradition precedes me and perhaps unconsciously or even nightmarishly weighs on me, I am not exhaustively determined in what I say and think by my inheritance of that tradition. Inheritance is inheritance (rather than fate) to the extent that I can also resist, modify, and to some extent refuse what I am inheriting.⁴ The possibility of that resistance is built in to the traditionality of the tradition from which I am inheriting, built into what makes it a tradition and not a natural law (or law of nature). One name for the place of that possibility of resistance is simply—reading. By reading the tradition from which I inherit, I have a chance of not being exhaustively determined and pre-dicted by it. This situation is complicated, certainly, by the fact that the concept of reading, like every other concept, is itself inherited from the tradition, so that I also have to read that traditional concept, and perhaps resist its traditional determinations (as, say, interpretation, hermeneutics) if I am to produce a resistant reading more generally. Like Scatter 1, Scatter 2 is not essentially a work of scholarship but a book of reading(s) and a book about reading.⁵

Thinking (or reading) reading in this way is not a simple matter (we shall see that it engages with difficult questions about, among other things, context, history, and (un)readability), but one of the first features of a reading that resists its traditional determinations might be simply a kind of (willed and therefore not completely naive) “naivety”: one thing I will try to do in this volume is to read quite directly a number of texts that are extremely “well known,” and to read them, insofar as I am able, as though for the first time. My suspicion is that texts such as Plato’s Republic, Aristotle’s Politics, Hobbes’s Leviathan, or Rousseau’s Social Contract are “well known” in part just to the extent that they are not, or no longer, being read in the sense advanced here and are generally taken to be the more or less transparent vehicles of now familiar concepts and positions that can henceforth be referred to without extensive engagement with the texts themselves. This claim to “naivety” itself has a political and even militant dimension: it wants to say that these texts, however difficult, however overwritten by the tradition(s) of reading we also inherit, are nonetheless still, at least minimally, freshly readable for us, in principle for anyone, here today: feel free just to read, I say, in the face of all the complex machineries of scholarship and disciplinarity that can certainly inform reading, but that also police it, and sometimes function as an obstacle to it. Not, of course, that we can simply ignore or dismiss those complex machineries and (this time really naively) claim some direct or transparent access to “the texts themselves”—on the contrary; but, as Derrida also said in the Grammatology, such machineries can function as a guardrail and help avoid rash or unwarranted and arbitrary claims, but they have never of themselves “opened a reading” (227).

This means that, whatever else I am interested in in the attempt to read (with and against the tradition, then), I cannot fail to be interested in what the texts I read have to say about reading, and how they attempt more or less energetically—as all texts do—to guide and control my reading of them in terms of what is sometimes, lazily, called “authorial intention”—lazily and insufficiently, because our best evidence for authorial intention is still and always textual, and therefore that evidence itself always calls for further reading. In the pages that follow, I shall read in some detail the very interesting and often perplexing things that, among others, John of Salisbury and Thomas Hobbes have to say about reading, and attempt to fold the implications of what they wrote into my own ongoing attempt to understand what I am doing as I read. For now, let us simply note the following “primal scene,” primal—as it happens—both for the question of reading in general, and for the specific parts or strands of the tradition of Western metaphysics I will be attempting to read here:

Glaucon and the rest entreated me by all means not to let the question drop, but to proceed in the investigation. They wanted to arrive at the truth, first, about the nature of justice and injustice, and secondly, about their relative advantages. I told them, what I really thought, that the enquiry would be of a serious nature, and would require very good eyes. Seeing then, I said, that we are no great wits, I think that we had better adopt a method which I may illustrate thus; suppose that a short-sighted person had been asked by some one to read small letters from a distance; and it occurred to some one else that they might be found in another place which was larger and in which the letters were larger—if they were the same and he could read the larger letters first, and then proceed to the lesser—this would have been thought a rare piece of good fortune.

Very true, said Adeimantus; but how does the illustration apply to our enquiry?

I will tell you, I replied; justice, which is the subject of our enquiry, is, as you know, sometimes spoken of as the virtue of an individual, and sometimes as the virtue of a State.

True, he replied.

And is not a State larger than an individual?

It is.

Then in the larger the quantity of justice is likely to be larger and more easily discernible. I propose therefore that we enquire into the nature of justice and injustice, first as they appear in the State, and secondly in the individual, proceeding from the greater to the lesser and comparing them.⁶

In this quite complex and general scene of reading, I have chosen to negotiate the irreducible relation of inheritance to the tradition by reading texts in “political thought” or “political philosophy.” Like all other concepts, that of “politics” is inherited, and it remains indelibly marked by thinking around the Ancient Greek polis. But it seems a promising place for the kind of resistant reading just sketched out, insofar as it has always been a troublesome and unruly concept in the tradition, equaled in its unruliness perhaps only by the concept of poetry, or of literature more generally. From at least Plato on, the relations not only of philosophy and poetry but also those of philosophy and politics have been complex, mysterious, and conflictual. As we shall see in some detail with reference to, among others, Aristotle, Hegel, and Spinoza, as well as Derrida, there is indeed a real and perhaps irreducible aporia in the way that metaphysics and politics can each very plausibly claim priority over the other, so that philosophy (metaphysics) can always claim (and often has claimed) to turn away from or rise above the dirty and dishonest business of politics, but politics can always laugh right back at philosophy and anything philosophy might say about it, denouncing philosophy as a pipedream, an ivory tower fantasy, something that is “all very well in theory but useless in practice,”⁷ something that belongs more to the “golden age of the poets” as Spinoza puts it in a text to which we shall return.⁸ The aporia, then, is part of the tradition we are reading, and the traditional ways of trying to resolve or pass through that aporia seem often dogmatic and unsatisfactory, and thereby most often generate what I call “moralism,” that seems to me to be endemic in contemporary discussion of politics, and to be itself a significant symptom of the aporia I am identifying. Scatter 2 attempts, often with some discomfort, to dwell with and in that aporia, to read some of its instantiations, but certainly does not claim to resolve it, and still less to issue prescriptions as to how we should conduct our political affairs.

At the beginning of the tradition we will be reading, there is already what amounts to a preemptive attempt to resolve the question of the relationship between politics and philosophy once and for all. This too is an extremely “well-known” moment that is perhaps more often mentioned than actually read, accepted as the cliché it has become. As will often be the case in what follows, and in the interests of what I was just calling “reading,” I give a lengthy quotation rather than a summary, in this case with some salient Greek terms and a few interspersed comments: my wager in this case is that “everybody knows” the Platonic proposal or fantasy of the “philosopher king,” but for just that reason I imagine pretty much everybody has stopped reading it, and forgotten, for example, contextual or “co-textual” features involving, among other things, humiliation, laughter, and violence (not to mention the really quite minimally “dialogic” quality of the exchanges here, with Socrates’s poor interlocutor reduced largely to tendentially monosyllabic assent):

“It wasn’t our aim to demonstrate that these things were possible.”

“True enough.”

“Suppose a painter paints a picture which is a model of the outstandingly beautiful man. Suppose he renders every detail of his painting perfectly, but is unable to show that it is possible for such a man to exist. Do you think that makes him any the worse a painter?”

“Good heavens, no.”

“Then what about us? Aren’t we in the same position? Can’t we claim to have been constructing a theoretical model of a good city [a model or paradigm in words: paradeigma epoioumen logō agathēs poleōs]?”

“We certainly can.” …

“In which case, do you think our inability to show that it is possible to found a city in the way we have described makes what we have to say any less valid?”

“No,” he said.

“Well, that’s how things are. So if you want me, as a favor to you, to do my best to show how, exactly, and under what circumstances, it would be most possible, then you in return, for the purposes of this demonstration, must make the same allowances for me.”

“What allowances?”

“Is it possible for anything to be put into practice exactly as it is described? Or is it natural for practice [praxin] to have less hold on truth than theory [lexeōs] has? I don’t care what some people may think. What about you? Do you agree, or not?”

“I agree,” he said. (472d–473a)

In this passage, there is first a defense of theoretical or speculative thinking, of words rather than deeds, independent of any considerations of realizability whatsoever. But then the divide between what the translator here has (in perhaps slightly anachronistic terms) as “theory” and “practice” is shifted or narrowed: the slightly different point now is to say that all we need for the theoretical speculation to be justifiable is for there to be some possible practical approximation to the ideal city or “city of words” (in the first part of the argument we didn’t care if any of this were possible at all, but now we want it to be at least partially possible):

“Then don’t keep trying to compel me to demonstrate that the sort of thing we have described in a theoretical way [to logō] can also be fully realized in practice [to ergō]. If we turn out to be capable of finding how a city can be run in a way pretty close to what we have described, then you can say that we have discovered how what you are asking for can be put into practice. Or won’t you be satisfied with that? I know I would.”

“So would I.” (473a)

And now we try to find the point of difference between the “theoretical” model (the talk, as it were) and actual instantiations (the walk), and use the model or the theory to identify what improvements might be made to the practice. So whereas the model originally had no responsibility to any possible practical realization, now the suggested improvement has to be at least possible, and thus bridge the apparent gulf just opened up between the theoretical and the practical. The bridge between those two domains (which we might call the metaphysical and the political) will be just that, a bridging suggestion that yokes the two together in one unifying figure:

“The next step, apparently, is for us to try to discover, and point out, what the failings are in cities nowadays, which stop them being run in this way, and what is the minimum change which could help a city arrive at political arrangements of this kind. Ideally a single change. Failing that, two. And failing that, as few as possible in number and as small as possible in impact.”

“Absolutely,” he said.

“All right, then. There is one change which I think would allow us to show that things could be different. It is not a small change or an easy one, but it is possible.” (473b)

The single change to be proposed (and part of the bravura of Socrates’s coming proposal is that it is single, that there really only needs to be one, albeit radical, change)—a change that involves a complex twist whereby the yoking of the philosophical and the political will itself be not just theoretically proposed but proposed as needing to be practically imposed and enforced—is in fact so outrageous that it will be ridiculed and its proponent will possibly be the object of physical attack by what is, not coincidentally, presented as an angry mob:

“What is it?”

“We’ve been using the analogy of waves. Well, now I’m coming to the largest wave. But I’ll make my suggestion anyway, even if it is literally the laughter of the waves which is going to engulf me in ridicule and humiliation. Listen carefully to what I am about to say.’

“Tell me.”

“There is no end to suffering, Glaucon, for our cities, and none, I suspect, for the human race, unless either philosophers become kings in our cities, or the people who are now called kings and rulers become real, true philosophers—unless there is this amalgamation of political power and philosophy, with all those people whose inclination is to pursue one or other exclusively being forcibly prevented from doing so. Otherwise there is not the remotest chance of the political arrangements we have described coming about—to the extent that they can—or seeing the light of day. This is the claim which I was so hesitant about putting forward, because I could see what an extremely startling claim it would be. It is hard for people to see that this is the only possible route to happiness, whether in private life or public life.”

And Glaucon said, “Really, Socrates! Here’s what you can expect after a suggestion like that. You’re facing a large and ugly crowd. The cloaks come off—practically hurled off. They’re stripped for action. All that’s needed is a weapon, any weapon, and they’ll have launched themselves at you, bent on mayhem. Can you hold them off, find an argument to escape by? If you can’t, you’ll get what you deserve: utter humiliation.”

“It’s your fault. You got me into this.” (473c–474a)

The moment at which the fusion of philosophy and politics is supposed to occur (still hypothetically, though not thereby merely theoretically) is, we might say, a quite explosive moment, one at which the supposedly serene domain of metaphysics is drawn by force (by the pull of praxis) into the confrontational and potentially violent zone of politics. The resulting space, cleared by that explosion and littered with its debris and fallout, might just be the space of what I call “scatter.”

The effort to negotiate the tradition from which we inevitably inherit here chooses, then, the concept of politics as a promising concept through which that inheritance might be critically examined, read, and possibly resisted. But of course philosophy has already put in place all manner of safeguards that, as it were, resist our resistance in this domain, especially in the form of the slightly shady subdiscipline of philosophy called “political philosophy.” We will soon enough be exploiting ambiguities in the name of that subdiscipline: for the purposes of this introductory sketch, suffice it to say that within political philosophy the greatest metaphysical pull, as it were, and the greatest resistance to the type of reading I hope to carry out, will be exercised by the concept of sovereignty, and the most promising zone of resistance to that concept will be given by the concept of democracy. We will regularly—often, although not agreeing in all the details, in the company of Jacques Derrida—identify democracy as a place where trouble (indeed what I call scatter) is happening. On an initial approach, this may appear to be simply because of the traditional opposition or antagonism between the One and the Many. But a crucial supplementary feature that “scatter” is attempting to capture is that the “one” and the “many” in play here are not merely numerical terms: as we shall see, the concept of the One is struck by an ambiguity between (at least) a numerically adjectival (“only one”) sense and a qualitatively adjectival (“at one (with itself), unified”) sense (the concept of God will most often be charged with, yes, uniting those two senses into one); and conversely, that the “many” in play in and around democracy is not just a numerical multiplicity, but a manifold, a multiplicity not just multitudinous but multifarious, a many that is not made up simply of a large number of countable units, but a many that is intrinsically diverse, variable and variegated, motley, not readily graspable in terms of any form of identity at all.

To read the complications of the One, especially in its annexation by the (otherwise unmanageably voluminous) Christian tradition,⁹ I will follow the guiding thread provided by the afterlife of a line from Homer’s Iliad twice quoted by Aristotle—once quite famously, once much less so. For the complications of the variegated, scattered many, we will regularly encounter invocations of the biblical episode of the Tower of Babel, Babel being an exemplary story of scatter and scattering,¹⁰ and I will also often appeal to a term, or a family of terms, often used with a negative connotation by Plato, namely poikilos, poikilia, or to poikilon. In its fullest extension, to poikilon denotes not only what is multicolored, variegated or diverse, but it also communicates, with its connotations of indirection, slyness and cunning, with what in the first volume of this work I termed “the politics of politics,” namely an irreducibly indirect and even devious aspect of politics, usually held at bay by metaphysics with the help of terms such as rhetoric, oratory, and sophistry. I believe that this “politics of politics,” which in Scatter 1 I argued is co-originary with politics, such that there is no conceivable politics unaffected by the politics of politics, ought to disallow—though not at all in a spirit of relativism—the kinds of appeal to the concept of truth rather differently proposed by Foucault or Badiou, and so also disallow the moralism still today endemic in political philosophy (and indeed in political discourse more generally).

The effort to read the tradition in this way will, then, involve at least the following elements: (1) an effort to track something of the internal construction of that very tradition itself as metaphysics of presence or as ontotheology; (2) an effort to show how politics, even as relatively contained by metaphysics in the terms of “political philosophy,” has a number of disruptive effects in that construction (most notably via the concept of democracy); (3) an effort to show (or at least enact, perform) how the type of reading undertaken here itself produces, intrinsically as it were, political effects (for example, within the eminently metaphysical institution of the university and the disciplinary boundaries that currently define the study of philosophy, literature, and history); and (4) a suggestion that the effect of a deconstructive approach to the tradition might be said to operate a more general and radical “politicization” of metaphysics itself, via the irreducible and originary relation to alterity that Derrida variously calls by the nicknames “trace,” “différance,” “arche-writing,” or (the one at least apparently closest to “scatter”), “dissemination.” This last suggestion will at least implicitly contest the current dominance of historicism in the humanities and the recent return in force of “ontology” as an object of apparently widespread philosophical and political desire. At least insofar as it continues to put unanswered questions to these two tendencies, deconstruction, which is nowadays often—with a surprising degree of bad faith and indulgence in circular argument—written off to history, as, for example, “what they used to do back in the 1980s,” remains as topical and vital as ever, whatever the vagaries of intellectual fashion.

1 1. SM 94/54. Arguably this is itself an affirmative reading of Marx’s famous remark, “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.” A reading that would somewhat contest whether Marx’s next sentence necessarily follows: “The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.” The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, (New York: International Publishers, 2017), 15.

2 2. RES 33/19: “Who, besides God, has ever created, literally ‘created,’ a concept?” The implied difference is perhaps primarily with Deleuze, as suggested in passing in Derrida’s short piece written after the former’s death in 1995: “I have never felt the slightest ‘objection’ arising in me, not even potentially, against any of his works, even if I happened to grumble a bit about one or another of the propositions found in Anti-Oedipus … or perhaps about the idea that philosophy consists in ‘creating’ concepts” (CFU 236/193).

3 3. “If writing is inaugural, it is not so because it creates, but because of a certain absolute freedom of speech to bring forth the already-there in its sign, to take its auspices. A freedom of response that acknowledges as its sole horizon the history-world and the speech that can say only: Being has always already begun” (ED 23/12). And later, interestingly, in view of what awaits us, “Language has begun without us, in us before us. This is what Theology calls God” (PSY 561/2: 166)). On the “false start,” see the very early PG, and my discussion in “Write, He Wrote,” in Not Half No End: Militantly Melancholic Essays in Memory of Jacques Derrida (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), 120–134.

4 4. The fuller passage reads: “Inheritance is never a given, it is always a task. It remains before us just as unquestionably as, before even wanting or refusing it, we are heirs, and heirs in mourning, like all heirs. In particular of what is called Marxism. To be, this word in which earlier we saw the word of spirit, means, for the same reason, to inherit. All the questions about being or about what is to be (or not to be) are questions of inheritance. There is no backward-looking fervor in recalling this, no traditionalistic flavor. Reaction, the reactionary or the reactive are simply interpretations of the structure of inheritance. We are heirs: that does not mean that we have or that we receive this or that, that some inheritance enriches us one day with this or that, but that the being of what we are is first of all inheritance, whether we like it or know it or not.” (SM 94/54).

5 5. See too Scatter 1 (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016), 247, for the claim that deconstructive reading is not hermeneutics.

6 6. Plato, The Republic, 2.368c–370c. I quote The Republic primarily in the translation by Tom Griffith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), with reference to earlier versions by Paul Shorey and Benjamin Jowett, and to the recent version by Chris Emlyn-Jones and William Preddy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013).

7 7. As in Kant’s famous 1793 essay “On the Common Saying: ‘This May Be True in Theory, but It Does Not Apply in Practice,” trans. H. B. Nisbet, in Kant: Political Writings, ed. H. Reiss, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 61–92.

8 8. Spinoza, Tractatus Politicus, trans. R. H. M. Elwes, in A Theologico-Political Treatise and A Political Treatise (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 1951), 287.

9 9. For an impressive scholarly account of some of this history, see Gwenaëlle Aubry, Dieu sans la puissance: Dunamis et Energeia chez Aristote et chez Plotin (Archéologie de la puissance I) (Paris: Vrin, 2006), and Genèse du dieu souverain (Archéologie de la puissance II) (Paris: Vrin, 2018).

10 10. See Derrida’s exemplary reading of this episode in “Des tours de Babel,” PSY 203–237.