(which can range across the entire political spectrum from extreme left to extreme right) that in some significant sense “everything is political.”30
Bennington forges a third way that lines up neither with the position that “only this is essentially political,” nor with the position that “everything is political,” but with the proposition that “politics is always already the politics of politics.”31 This “always already” (retrospectively proleptic, nachträglich) politics is deconstructive and christened “scatter.” Scatter subsumes what is “secretly at work from the start, from the ancient materialists to Plato and Aristotle and on through Bodin, Hobbes, and Rousseau to Kant and Hegel and beyond.”32 It disqualifies the possibility of any political philosophy setting itself apart from the fray of sophistics, legislative deliberation, or for that matter, politicking or political chatter (what Heidegger in Being and Time called Gerede [idle talk]).33 And yet, insofar as politics speaks in specific idioms, or remains distinguishable as praxis, it stops short of being assimilated (as contamination or common property) into “everything.” Instead, it “scatters” through the recursive effect of “distortion and deceit,” moving from the logos into political sophistry, rhetoric, the noble lie, the expressive order of pseudos, possible error, dissimulation.34 In its arrival at spurious truths and anacolutha (disrupted incoherence), “the politics of politics” harks back to Hannah Arendt’s essay “Lying in Politics: Reflections on the Pentagon Papers,” published in 1971, though newly resonant in the context of the 2016 election in the United States. During this period, fact-checking and trial-by-YouTube (and by Google) emerged as the political techne du jour, the informal court of appeals relied on in the face of spectacularly flagrant, exponentially elevated instances of public lying in political discourse and insidious infiltrations of fake news (not its Trumpist appropriational travesty: “fake news”), into mainstream media reportage.35 Noting how the Pentagon Papers turned the political credibility gap into an “abyss,” illuminating the fragility of facts and the proliferating modalities of “deception, image-making, ideologizing, and defactualizing,” Arendt wrote:
Truthfulness has never been counted among the political virtues, and lies have always been regarded as justifiable tools in political dealings. Whoever reflects on these matters can only be surprised by how little attention has been paid, in our tradition of philosophical and political thought, to their significance, on the one hand for the nature of action and, on the other, for the nature of our ability to deny in thought and word whatever happens to be the case. This active, aggressive capability is clearly different from our passive susceptibility to falling prey to error, illusion, the distortions of memory, and to whatever else can be blamed on the failings of our sensual and mental apparatus.36
Bennington extends Arendt’s politics of lying to the “politics of politics,” suturing deception to “the autoimmunity of the political, in a nonmoralistic way.”37
In Derrida’s ascription, autoimmunity is a variant of aporia (in Greek, literally “impasse,” “puzzlement,” “doubt”), identified by him in Force of Law not only with something “mystical” (related to Pascal’s “mystical foundation of authority”)38, but also with the figuration of the impossible: the crossroads leading in mutually exclusive directions, the double bind, non-passage, the blocked transverse.39 Derrida distinguishes among three types of aporia in Force of Law: First is the “the epokhe of the rule,” aligned with a restitutive “fresh judgement” in the application of the law to the decision, such that the decision singularly reinvents the law in each iteration.40 Second is “the haunting of the undecidable,” in which “the decision to calculate is not of the order of the calculable.” In this type, the deconstruction of “a determining certainty of a present justice” operates by virtue of an “‘idea of justice’ that is infinite, infinite because irreducible, irreducible because owed to the other—owed to the other, before any contract, because it has come, it is a coming [parce qu’elle est venue].”41 Third is the aporia of obstruction, tied to a kind of madness brought on by a decision taken “in the night of nonknowledge and nonrule. Not of the absence of rules and knowledge but of a restitution of rules that by definition is not preceded by any knowledge or by any guarantee as such.”42 The pure performative of decision opens out to the à-venir, a space of “to come” that non-messianically harbors the emanicipatory ideal (which Derrida, in direct tribute to the Enlightenment, insists will never be outmoded). This a-venir is carefully distinguished from the future, which in Derrida’s view is simply another temporality of the present, where there can be no justice.
The aporia upholds what Bennington refers to as “sovereign” concepts (the concept digne de ce nom, “worthy of the name”), but it is also what defenestrates them:
If they are to be worthy of their name (if we are to take them at all seriously as putatively sovereign, with all the solemn dignitas that sovereignty implies), [they will] always fall foul of aporias and paradoxes, succeed only in failing or in falling … their ‘dignity’ is therefore a little overblown in the metaphysical construal of them.43
Such phrases leave one to ponder the exceptionalism of “a space of ‘to come’” and by extension of aporetic politics. Does the à-venir reside in a decision that is aporetic insofar as it is calculatedly incalculable? Impossibly possible? Determinately indeterminate? Conditionally unconditional? Bennington indirectly responds to such queries when, after noting Derrida’s admission (in Rogues) that the definition of “démocratie à venir” is coyly withheld, he refers it to the negative theology of the unnameable (“As if I had given in to the apophatic virtue of some negative theology that does not reveal its name”).44 Left with what he calls the “promissory dimension” of a deconstructive “democracy to come,” Bennington gestures “abyssally” towards “the possibility of a complex kind of ‘second-level’ reinscription of dignity itself in its relation to its name, or in the ‘worthy’ relation anything whatsoever might have to its name,” a possibility ascertainable in the “intimate” yet “potentially conflictual relation between the ‘digne du nom’ structure and the regulative Idea.”45 Immediately though, Bennington abandons the “regulative Idea” on Derrida’s behalf, suggesting that too much “rule” lurks in the word “regulative,” along with more of an “architectonic of Kantian critique” than Derrida would have allowed.46 In the place, then, of a relation between scattered politics and the law, we have deconstructed regulation and a notion of the event that disrupts (courtesy of the indignity of the anacolutha) the fulfillment of sovereign teleology:
An event worthy of the name would explode and scatter the name of which it is worthy, in being worthy of it. This eventness in general (in its singularity), openness to the coming of which seems in Derrida to be the only truly unconditional good, the “non-ethical opening of ethics,” the very thing that will pry unconditionality away from sovereignty, is what affects the “digne de ce nom” structure in general with the structures of interruption and always-necessarily-possible indignity.47
“Scatter” ostensibly undoes the unconditionality of the sovereign name to create the conditions for an “unconditional good.” Bennington sets great store by a “demi-” qualification that supposedly modifies all of Derrida’s “‘unconditional’ terms, including democracy.” But, like other qualifications that “open up a space” or dissolve an impacted substantive or universal abstraction (truth, reason, ethics, metaphysics, theology, sovereign authority …), the half-unconditional condition subsides all too easily into another aporia, into a promissory à-venir that, if not exactly futural or messianic, returns us to states of suspension, or the long wait. Prospectivity becomes the condition of “a politics of politics,” consigning us to wait for the “unconditional riposte to sovereignty in its narrower political sense,” in a volume to come of Scatter.48 We are left wondering how the aporetic structure of à-venir
