This book deconstructs the whole lineage of political philosophy,
showing the ways democracy abuts and regularly undermines the
sovereignist tradition across a range of texts from the Iliad to
contemporary philosophy. Politics is an object of perennial
difficulty for philosophy-as recalcitrant to philosophical mastery
as is philosophy's traditional adversary, poetry. That difficulty
makes it an attractive topic for any deconstructive approach to the
tradition from which we inherit our language and our concepts.
Scatter 2 pursues that deconstruction, often starting with, and
sometimes departing from, the work of Jacques Derrida by attending
to the concepts of sovereignty on the one hand and democracy on the
other. The book begins by following the fate of a line from Homer's
Iliad, where Odysseus asserts that "the rule of many is no good
thing, let there be one ruler, one king." The line, Bennington
shows, is quoted, misquoted, and progressively Christianized by
Aristotle, Philo Judaeus, Suetonius, the early Church Fathers,
Aquinas, Dante, Ockham, Marsilius of Padua, Jean Bodin, Etienne de
la Boetie, up to Carl Schmitt and Erik Peterson, and even one of
the defendants at the Nuremberg trials, before being discussed by
Derrida himself. In the book's second half, Bennington begins again
with Plato and Aristotle and tracks the concept of democracy as it
regularly abuts and undermines that sovereignist tradition. In
detailed readings of Hobbes and Rousseau, Bennington develops a
notion of "proto-democracy" as a possible name for the scatter that
underlies and drives the political as such and that will always
prevent politics from achieving its aim of bringing itself to an
end.
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