On the Genealogy of Moralism

by Simon Glendinning

Review: Geoffrey Bennington, Scatter 2: Politics in Deconstruction (New York: Fordham University Press, 2021), xvii + 303pp.

This essay is the first in a series or roundtable on Geoffrey Bennington’s Scatter project. The series continues with an essay by Peggy Kamuf. Check back soon for more.

The Tagline

In The Politics of Friendship Jacques Derrida followed the subterranean path or adventure of an ‘apostrophe’ that is found – or sort of found or possibly not found – in a text by Aristotle: ‘Oh my friends, there is no friend’.^[1] Derrida’s work in that book follows this path to unearth a genealogy of democratic politics in the European West as a politics of friendship – and hence as a democratic set-up that will be figured on this path as a community of friends. For those we are already close to with whom this idea takes hold, such a community remains still to come, as yet unattained (‘Oh my friends, there is no friend’). Nevertheless, democratic politics will remain, as Abraham Lincoln famously put it, always ‘dedicated’ to this (perhaps interminably) ‘unfinished work’.^[2] In Scatter 2 Geoffrey Bennington takes a similarly genealogical route into democratic politics, but this time into what, in the same heritage, both resists and opens politics to the thought of such politics as a politics of popular sovereignty. In Bennington’s text the equally strange hand-it-down-and-pass-it-on ‘tagline’ (62) is from Homer (although it is also approvingly cited or sort of cited or possibly miscited by Aristotle), and seems prima facie foreign to any democratic politics whatsoever, whether existing or to come: ‘The rule of many is not good, let there be one ruler’ (48). Like Derrida’s, Bennington’s is a stunning adventure into the archē of our political heritage and self-understanding.

Bennington begins by going back to Homer and showing that the tagline in its original location (where it already looks quotably epigrammatic) is far more complicated and ambiguous than its typical representation in contemporary political anthologies typically suggests. From this protean beginning, Bennington tracks the appearances and disappearances of the Homeric sentence across several centuries of Western political thought – indeed a journey that takes us from the Greek opening, thence on to its Christian and becoming-modern appropriations, a journey which virtually constitutes the entirety of Western political thought as such – a genealogy of the political world which we still inhabit (sort of).

Bennington’s text is not, however, a merely genealogical or historical survey. His reading presents the structural and systematic aporias which render every attempt to make rightful sovereignty (the good rule of the unified ‘one’ who is and should be the ‘one ruler’) immune to corruption or tyranny necessarily suffer from the possibility of its own autoimmune disorder. This develops into a compelling representation of democracy, and especially representative democracy, as political philosophy’s own secret ‘truth’: democracy conceived as the ‘least bad’ of the ‘least good’ regimes is that form (if that is the right word for something essentially without essential form) of ‘rule’ which (supposing no good or correct form could actually be realised) could not, in fact, be bettered (190–91). It also reveals that Western political philosophy (as engaged with rightful sovereignty) is not in fact primarily or purely ‘political’ at all – but, with its conceptual weight officially on the Good Rule of the One Lord, is first of all ‘theological’, and for a long stretch a specifically Christianising appropriation of the Greek (already theological) point of departure (91).

Bennington does not, with this reframing, aim to ‘deconstruct’ Western political thought, he does not undertake a deconstruction of politics but (as his subtitle suggests) an artful reading of the Homeric sovereignism of Western politics in (autoimmune) deconstruction. And it is quite brilliant. Not just a fascinating intellectual adventure but a work which both exhibits and contests the movements towards onto-mono-theological political structures (conceptions of the proper constitution of the state and of sovereign government), and their resistance to every ‘democratic’ politics that would complicate ideas of the rule of the ‘one’, and which makes democracy, for that originally-Homeric reason, ‘the very question of the political itself’ (156).

All this is introduced, with mesmerising skill in Part 1. Part 2 then goes back again to follow the path from antiquity in the thinking of democracy (or ‘proto-democracy’ as a conception of an irreducible plurality within any putatively singular polis or demos) which opposes the classic preference for the sovereign ‘one’ (204-5). Bennington’s discussion of the historical continuity in Western thought on this theme, where democracy is regularly and consistently denounced as a basically ghastly regime is superb. And he is intensely alive to the fact that this is not over. We should not forget (and I will come back to this at the end) that democracies in the European West today are still typically the object of scorn from academic political theorists of (double genitive) the European West; our democracies conceived so often as failing to attain a supposedly superior and attainable single (sovereign) democratic body, and our own societies regarded, as a result, moralistically, as composed of a shallow, materialistic and hedonistic motley of stupid pleasure-seeking egotists, people who want nothing more than to satisfy petty desires for ‘petty enjoyments’ (156; Bennington is citing Alain Badiou here, highlighting what he (Bennington) later calls Badiou’s ‘sneering moralism’ [157]) – something the ‘exceedingly serious’ political theorists think they can stand apart from and view from on high, just as they suppose they can ‘rise above the dirty and dishonest business of politics’ itself (5). What we should really want (so the contemporary moralists say) is, as ever, a community that really is one because it really is one, ‘one body’ (172). Plus ça change…

Scatter/Scatter, the book, the thing, is, first and foremost, the resolute refusal of such a unified telos in democratic (or indeed any other) politics, its systematic interruption – and that is so even if Bennington is willing to express a qualified ‘sympathy and solidarity’ for the ‘political ambitions’ of contemporary political theorists like Hardt and Negri who still hanker for (in their case) a ‘multitude’ that through ‘coherent formation’ (whereby, goodness me, it realises itself as ‘a Prince’) can produce ‘the common’ (46). Bennington does not betray himself at such moments. With respect to these academic theorists of politics, and whatever sympathy for them he can finally muster (scant), Bennington will still press his hard-won insight that their ‘ends’ will not be met by their conception of the ‘end’ – indeed that their desired ‘end’ (‘absolute democracy’) would, if it were attained, destroy the very thing they would want to save (democracy, with its essential resistance to attaining a condition of really being one). That’s not an insight he can put to one side for anyone: ‘The “conceptual bases” [Hardt and Negri] are working on are not new at all, but metaphysical, teleological, and thus condemned in spite of themselves to moralism’ (46).

Bennington’s opposition to the thought of any such telic finality comes to the fore, via Aristotle, through an affirmation that social plurality is strictly irreducible – a fact or Factum that, in fact, makes democracy privileged over any other political concept, a sort of originary form of all political states or States whatsoever, something that tolerates different possible ways of organising a plurality internally but with no ideally adequate or ‘absolute’ form of its own. As we have seen, Bennington pursues this into the Aristotelian thicket in which democracy appears as the paradoxically ‘least bad’ perversion of the ‘correct’ – a point that becomes even more powerful once it is seen that no ‘correct’ form is actually realisable and democracy then turns out to be the best or least bad overall of anything that might be actual. Indeed, this is the conceptual basis of his own opposition to every conceptual basis that would suppose it might anticipate an ideally adequate democracy. As a regime, democracy ‘itself’ is also best when it is not ‘true’: ‘the end of democracy is the end of democracy’ as Bennington so memorably puts it (200). Once more via a reading of Aristotle, Bennington concludes with an affirmation of democracy ‘failing’ (rather than ‘falling short’) as a sort of political virtue as well as something that calls for political progress without a final, ideally adequate end state. ‘Democracy can […] only succeed by failing’ (200).

‘Democracy is – sovereignty failing’ (203). Bennington’s vision is clear and compelling. Democratic politics can never be radically free of what in Scatter 1 was identified as ‘the politics of politics’ and that is a mark of its strength as well as its frustrating weakness – a weakness we think we should nevertheless overcome.^[3]

The Temptations of True Democracy

In the next stretch of Bennington’s grand tour, his patient tracking of the ‘immense afterlife’ of the Homeric tagline (48), he turns to a classical political theorist who was perhaps furthest from the temptations of moralism: Hobbes. Indeed, Bennington finds in Hobbes something like a proto-deconstructive reading of the autoimmune structures of political speech that call into question every moralism. At this point on the tour, Hobbes seems to me exactly the right thinker to focus on. As Derrida notes near the opening of The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume I, it is with Hobbes that modern, supposedly secular political theory really begins.^[4] Indeed, it is with Hobbes that the theory of sovereignty supposedly loses its medieval Christian character, ‘emancipated from theology and religion’ (BS, 53). Derrida goes on to show that this suggestion (which would, he admits, be a real problem for him if it was true) is not what happens in Hobbes at all: God remains not dead, and the political sovereign remains His recognised deputy. It’s all still onto-theology. Bennington does not run through this point, but it would have run on very nicely to a discussion (the discussion he actually goes on to) of Rousseau and the contract that founds a republic in which the sovereign takes its modern political form with the ideal of a unified collectivity of ‘the people’.

However – and this is where I hit something of a difficulty with Scatter 2 – Bennington does not route his reading tour via Hobbes on sovereignty. Instead, as I have indicated, there is a (very long) detour discussion of Hobbes on political speech (in three parts). The first part deals with political language, the second the idea of political animals that can talk, the third on political ‘councel’ (which is also about uses and abuses of language). It is all fascinating – but I couldn’t help but feel that it was an unnecessary diversion from the main argument, belonging more to Scatter 1 (on political rhetoric) than Scatter 2 (on sovereignty). At various points the text picks up the theme of sovereignty again and begins to get back to what I thought was the main business. And it typically does so in a way that takes a breath and helpfully summarises what has been said. But something is lost when sovereignty is lost as the central thematic focus. Hobbes certainly belongs here – but as the author of a theory of sovereignty, not the author of a theory of political speech.

The turn to Rousseau does more clearly continue the line of discussion on the deconstruction (or the autoimmunity) of sovereignty. And it ends with a conclusion which would only have been assisted with a different focus on Hobbes: that sovereignty has always been and still remains a theological concept not a political one, exposing it always to the politics of politics which ‘compromises the sovereignty [it] also makes possible’ (304). Indeed. It would have been a perfect complement to this point to reflect here on Derrida arguing in the course of his discussion of Hobbes in The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume I that it is not (for Derrida) a question of forging a politics beyond sovereignty (as Hardt and Negri think they can), or even of altogether abandoning the (sort of) Hobbesian thought of the state as a kind of ‘gigantic prosthesis’ (BS, 28). The question, Derrida suggests, is whether there might be a way of coming to terms with that, living that, in a better (one might say ‘least bad’) way. The task here being one of creating what Derrida calls (borrowing a form of words from Carl Schmitt) the ‘honest fiction’ of a sovereignty that does not constantly suffer from the hubris, the pride and vanity, the prideful human craving to be God – or his deputy; a human denial of the human that philosophy (and not just philosophy) should, indeed, still want to combat (BS, 75).

We in our time need already to atone for what we have done in the age of techno-scientific progress and the mastery of nature that inherited the mantle of Man understood as having deputised-by-God sovereign dominion over the earth. Removing the deputy badge and making ourselves sheriffs has only made matters worse – and now threatens to destroy everything. The shape, the ‘face’, of life with an internally pride-limiting ‘honest fiction’ of sovereignty – this is a form of earth-guardian-life to come that is, I think, making its way, even today, by those whose inventive political thinking is dedicated to building a new home for the ones who follow after Man and hence for those who follow after those who had taught and thought that the rule of an irreducible plurality is not good. The shape of such a life ‘remains’, Derrida suggests, ‘to be found out’ (BS, 75). We will be most ourselves and, doubtless most democratic too, I think, when what takes hold for us is the call to remain inventively working on it.

With this task in view – a task which is not in view in Bennington’s text, and I will come back to this – the path of the adventure could then have taken in Marx on democracy too. In the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Marx claims, in a way rather like Aristotle as affirmed by Bennington, that all States are, formally speaking, democracies since all States are historically self-organised, self-determined modes of existence for human beings in society. ‘Democracy is human existence’, says Marx, and different forms of the State are particular modifications of this universal form.^[5] Marx too thus belongs within the history Bennington is telling; yet another thinker who gives the thought of democracy a problematically teleological reading – a reading of true sovereignty attained. For Marx, the history of the (capital ‘S’) State is the history of human society becoming actually – in its actual content – what it always has been formally. On this conception, there is an ideally adequate democratic (small ‘s’) state to be had (without a capital ‘S’ State), though one that is yet to be attained. Once more, if the end of democracy is the end of democracy, then this communist desire remains more than a little problematic. Indeed, Bennington’s reading of democratic autoimmunity serves as a standing warning concerning all those who, still today, claim to speak to the task of creating or building a ‘real’ or ‘true’ or ‘absolute’ democracy.

Taking in another modern political disaster, the closing stage of Bennington’s tour brings us back to where we began – opening his own book’s ending with the fleeting appearance of the tagline from Homer during the Nuremberg trials, an appearance which has by now assumed what one might call its stably ‘anthologized’ reading (281). Bennington notes in passing that it was an American court. There is considerable academic literature on this fact that Bennington passes by. It was a tricky business deciding on whether a trial concerning the (il)legality of Nazi activities could be legitimately conducted. Indeed, there was serious disagreement between British and American jurists about whether any trial could have legal force, since those on trial were doing no more than applying the law as it was then constituted in Germany. The American interpretation won the day, although the decision cannot be supposed purely legal.

The fascinating beyond-legal issues about legal decisions set aside, however, Bennington’s discussion sticks to the recovered Homeric path, and passes on fairly quickly to Erik Peterson, a ‘near-contemporary’ of the Homer-citing lawyer at Nuremberg (286), who Bennington also finds citing the Homeric tagline, this time in an encounter with Carl Schmitt, the text returning here to the question of political theology and its afterlife that could have been pursued via Hobbes.

Concluding Unscientific Postscript

Finally, at the end of it all there is a ‘Postscript’. Following a sequence of chapters which was, when it got to Hobbes, already feeling a little less sure of its direction, the book goes out, not with a bang, but with a rhyme: scatter/matter. This seems to me unworthy to be this great book’s ending, even in a PS. Is Bennington suggesting that, in the end, he is the genuinely ‘new’ heir to materialism, the true ‘new materialist’ (46, fn. 43)? Well, I may be totally behind the curve on this one but, frankly, I am not much interested in this revival of the niceties of nineteenth century political faith and the preference for materialism over idealism that was central to it. Does anyone still care that much about such things? I confess, what I was hoping for at the end of it all would have been a return to the question of what we should think of the condition of our democracies today, what lessons, to put it incredibly crudely, are to be learned from this education in the history of political sovereignty in the European West. I have already mentioned Derrida saying (in passing) that there might be a future for sovereignty beyond the modern understanding – indeed he affirms that ‘there is no contrary to sovereignty’, no politics, no rule, that could be a ‘non-sovereignty’ pure and simple (BS, 76). I am not asking for ‘prescriptions’ or for a political programme. But couldn’t one say…something?

I say ‘prescriptions’ here because it is Bennington’s word for what he wants to avoid. Right at the start of the book, he suggests this:

The traditional ways of trying to resolve or pass through that aporia [namely, the way that metaphysics and politics ‘can each very plausibly claim priority over the other’] 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 (8).

Later (although not much later) he wonders at Rawls’s hope of avoiding ‘unduly foisting our deep metaphysical views on others’ in our political-philosophical thinking, and Bennington notes how difficult if not impossible it might be not to transgress that hope, so that ‘our earnest and liberal attempt to avoid such doctrines’ cannot really be sustained (30). But Bennington also seems to hope to avoid something like this when he says that Scatter 2 is not at all in the business of issuing ‘prescriptions as to how we should conduct our political affairs’ (8). Fine. But why does he say that? And what can one hope to gain from political-philosophical thinking when it is shorn of that kind of (all-too-familiar) moralistic political-theoretical prescription posing? Perhaps the end was the place to start explaining why, all along, the inquiry takes the course it does, and what Bennington takes us to have been reading in his extraordinary tagline-tracking, and what we might ‘take away’ from it. There are so many things he says about democracy, about sovereignty failing, about the least bad, about the moralism endemic in academic political theory, and so on. Where does that leave or lead us today? I wanted him to leave us with a sense of where this leaves us.

One place it could leave us would circle right back to Scatter I. As I have indicated, in that text we were treated to a quite brilliant take-down of certain strands of our contemporary political culture, a take-down that remains as timely today as it was in 2016 when it was first released. There, Bennington took super-lucid aim at those in our increasingly self-obsessed political arenas who – on the left or right – claim to rise above the crowd and ‘speak truth to power’ or speak their minds without suppressing their principles or prefer principle to electoral success or who put rhetoric aside in favour of plain speech (S1, 2). Bennington can see that we today still love best the ones who – like ourselves (as we like to think of ourselves) but only more so – are properly political actors and not just parroting actors in politics.

But – and this was the central lesson of Scatter 1 – what if rhetorical strategies of one kind or another are completely unavoidable? What if there cannot even be ‘politics’ without that dimension we would like so much to rid it of, ‘the politics of politics’? What if the Parrhesia – the open speech, free speech, or fearless speech – that Foucault wanted to champion cannot be straightforwardly opposed to guileful rhetoric? What if the possibility of what Heidegger called the ‘distorted view’, the pseudēs doxa, is not an extraneous addition that plain-speaking ‘telling it like it is’ might radically free itself from, but haunts all political speech? In Bennington’s breathtaking first Scatter book, he had exposed and exploded ‘the myth of “plain speaking” that claims to eschew all rhetoric’ (242). We learn to see, to recognise and come to terms with ourselves as a zōon logon echon (an animal with the capacity for speech) that is ‘from the start’ a zōon rhetorikon echon. Indeed, what is the secret aspiration of all political rhetoric itself if not the appearance or figure of the straight-talking (strong) man or (warrior) woman?

Is the aspiration to speak truth to power, then, suspect? For sure, not all speech-making is equally corrupt fake news. And Bennington does not suppose that ‘all politics is equally corrupt or that there is no point fighting against corruption’ (S1, 45). On the other hand, Bennington does invite us to consider that the increasingly moralistic politics of so much contemporary academic ‘theory’ is caught up not (as it supposes) in the affirmation of attained truth but in a sort of implicit decision. Not just a decision for or against something – for or against Heidegger and his disastrous political decision, for example, or a decision for or against the Nuremberg trials, for or against the death penalty, for or against the political party form of electoral and representative politics, and so on – but an implicit stand on the place of decision itself in politics: namely, that it arises (or at least should arise) on the firm ground of theoretically attained truth. Sensitive to what an explicit (or at least openly stated) decision on political decisions might be that was ‘worthy of the name’ [digne de ce nom] (to use the idiom that the later Derrida so frequently had recourse to), Bennington leans into this political theory theatre with characteristic sureness. Instead of seeing the ground of decisions as a bedrock of attained theoretical truth, he unpicks any claim simply to speak the truth in politics by disclosing such speaking as resting on a prior decision-structure altogether beyond assessment in terms of the truth of one’s attained theoretical positions and judgements. Bennington’s extraordinary tracking of the Homeric tagline history in Scatter 2 relates the underground passage of decisions that open the political world of the modern European West – especially concerning the history of what it means for ‘one body’ (whether of an individual person, or a war chief King or a battling warrior Queen, or of the people, or of a coherent multitude (‘Prince’) of the common) to decide – which, finally, one cannot simply ‘avoid’ at all. As important as being for or against particular in-the-world political decisions may be, Bennington opens our eyes to the formation of that political world and the formative decisions concerning our own being (the proper of Man, conceived onto-theologically) that have constructed it.

Looking for the Strongman

Against the smug moralism of academic theorists of the end of democracy, Bennington does not advocate a calculating pragmatism, still less a quietist renunciation of politics that gives up on or even denounces all aspirations to overcome the inadequacies of our existing democracies. Not at all. Instead, he takes up and follows a call to preserve the promise held within the ‘sovereign concepts’ of our political heritage, and a retrieval of that promise beyond their metaphysical (and especially teleological) instantiations (S1, 272). Indeed, throughout the richly rewarding texts of both Scatter 1 and Scatter 2 – and it really is worth saying that the depth, breadth, and bristling erudition of these two volumes is simply breathtaking – Bennington appears always on the hunt of a democratic politics worthy of the name. Not a politics that is free from ‘the politics of politics’ but certainly free from the self-righteous moralism of those who think they themselves can stay above the fray, truth-speakers blessedly free of its corruptions.

Nevertheless, as I say, a sense of what a politics freed of that moralising might look like is elusive. And this side of things is worth briefly reflecting on because moralism in academia remains the most significant and powerful voice in the cultural life of universities in the European West even today, certainly more powerful than any of those who would recoil from it. Since the early 2020s the moral register of this contemporary voice has been given the (now) pejorative and disparaging label ‘woke’. However, what is (hopelessly) loosely identified in that way today reaches considerably further back in time, back to what Richard Rorty called the ‘retreat […] to theory’ that began to overtake the academic Left in the 1960s.^[6] Indeed, for a long time now it has not been the old school humanist scholars but the new school political theorists who are the most powerful gatekeepers of disciplinary orthodoxy and authority in universities in the European West, perhaps especially in the United States. In his book on this development, Achieving Our Country, published in 1998, Rorty explored the emergence in American academia of what he calls a ‘spectatorial Left’ (AC, 38), a Left whose intensely militant academic activism is mostly concerned with ‘naming the system’ rather than ‘reforming the laws’ (AC, 78). For this new ‘academic Left’ (AC, 15), since the problems it names are systemic through and through, since there is ‘something deeply wrong’ about contemporary democratic society itself and as a whole, social injustices are simply not amenable to ‘correction by reforms’ (AC, 66). Because Bennington will inevitably get caught up in any ‘et. al.’ or ‘ilk’ that might be in play when the name called out in this context is Derrida’s, it is significant that Rorty does not shy from claiming that among the most important contributors to the spectatorial view of this new academic Leftist vanguard is, indeed, Derrida (AC, 96).

There are nuances in Rorty’s polemic that are not typical of academic anxieties that spike when Derrida is invoked. For example, and perhaps somewhat surprisingly, Rorty himself thinks that Derrida’s ‘criticisms of Enlightenment rationalism are largely right’ (AC, 96) – and we should not forget that he was elsewhere genuinely complimentary about Bennington’s reading of Derrida too.^[7] Nevertheless, Rorty regards the influence of Derrida’s work as contributing to a new and baleful ‘temptation’ in contemporary academia: what he calls ‘the temptation to Gothicize – to view democratic politics as ineffectual, because unable to cope with preternatural forces’ (AC, 97). Derrida is not supposed singularly responsible for cultivating this view of democratic politics in America. But (even if Derrida is regarded as ‘largely right’) Rorty is adamant that Derrida’s text has been especially conducive to a disastrous deformation of academic life in his (Rorty’s) country. From Rorty’s perspective, the perspective of ‘the old, reformist Left’ in the United States (AC, 56), the new academic vanguard has effectively locked itself into the cloisters of the academy, its activism now so radical that it has become loftily remote, above the fray, simply ‘unable to engage in national politics’ at all (AC, 91). Inhabiting ‘a Gothic world in which democratic politics has become a farce’ (AC, 95), this in-part-Derrida-inspired ‘academic Left’ is ‘not the sort of Left which can be asked to deal with the consequences of globalisation [. . .] It would have to talk much more about money, even at the cost of talking less about stigma’ (AC, 91)

Rorty’s own worries about the writings of ‘postmodernist professors’ (AC, 91) – and it is in the vagaries of such catch-alls that even rigorous Bennington risks getting snaffled by a sometimes cartoonish Rorty – whose views have been Gothicised by Derrida cannot be dismissed as reactionary, conservative, or right-wing. Rorty’s Left credentials are impeccable. And we should not forget that Rorty’s text not only pre-dates the distinctively conservative accusation that academics have ‘gone woke’ but also pre-dates the electoral success of Donald Trump – an electoral success which owed a good deal to his being able to position American universities as inimical to American dreams; Trump being able to count on a recognisable contrast between worldviews inside and outside the academy, and in particular that (here in Rorty’s words) ‘outside the academy, Americans still want to feel patriotic’ (AC, 99).

As we have seen, Bennington (English by birth but now also an American citizen) has his own way of locating the separation of the culture of academic theory from public life in America (and surely not only there): the temptation, as Bennington sees it, is not to Gothicism but to ‘what I call “moralism”’ – a sense of the possession of ‘theoretical truths’ (S1, 15) untainted by worldly seductions ‘that seems to me to be endemic in contemporary discussion of politics’ in academia (5). Nevertheless, if it is right to think that Bennington too can be read as seeing the ground of a cleavage in American cultural life in view with that ‘endemic’ temptation, one would do well to recall Rorty’s extraordinary prediction of an electorate that will have had enough of being told what to think or care about by grandstanding ‘postmodernist professors’ – an electorate that will wind up, Rorty says, ‘looking around for a strongman to vote for’ (AC, 90). They too will come to think that there should be ‘one ruler’.

Rorty’s book took its title from a text published in 1963 by the Black writer and activist James Baldwin, a text in which Baldwin states that, despite ongoing social problems of painfully profound concern, the hope of ‘achieving our country’ was still alive for him (AC, 13). Rorty felt that this hope was draining away from an increasingly Gothicised academia in America. I take Bennington to have related concerns with its increasingly endemic moralised condition. In the wake of this divorce of academic engagement from the mainstream of American life, Rorty felt ruefully sure that if the American middle class came to feel that things were not working for them economically, America will have lost the cultural ballast from its intellectuals that is required to sustain public confidence in democracy itself:

At that point something will crack. The non-suburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for – someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots . . . [And] once a strongman takes office, nobody can predict what will happen. In 1932, most of the predictions made about what would happen if Hindenburg named Hitler chancellor were wildly overoptimistic. One thing that is very likely to happen is that [. . .] all the sadism which the academic left has tried to make unacceptable to its students will come flooding back. All the resentment which badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet. (AC, 90)

Today we can no longer hide from the fact that the democratic set-up whose near-global triumph Francis Fukuyama had heralded so enthusiastically in the wake of the fall of the Berlin Wall has, as Derrida put it in 1993, ‘never been so critical, fragile, threatened, even in certain regards catastrophic’.^[8] In our now unequivocally post-Wall times, it will belong to the tasks of political thinking in universities today to help make sense of the troubled condition of our democracies – trying to make sense of a democratic world that, so it seems, is fast falling apart.

It is against this darkening world horizon that this devoted reader of Bennington’s work finds himself wanting, still, a little more. It’s all very well feeling (even highly qualified) ‘sympathy and solidarity’ for the ‘political ambitions’ of professors who appeal to the transformative power of ‘the multitude’ in the creation of an ‘absolute democracy’, but to what end? What can their moralism contribute to the destiny of our democracies in these troubled times. If we are thinking with Bennington, and I am, then the last thing that needs to take hold is another not-new ‘new’ conception of the proper end of democratic politics (even if that is an Idea in the Kantian sense). Rather, what needs to take hold in our time is, I think, the Derridean lesson that thinking concerning the history and future of our democracies ‘must be freed not only from the Idea in the Kantian sense but from all teleology, all onto-theo-teleology’ – freed, then, from all moralism in Bennington’s sense.^[9] On the other hand, while, for sure, yes, we should accept that there is no ‘absolute democracy’ – one might still hope that another word is possible. What, if anything, can we say about what remains to come?

PS

Obviously, this would not be a word that would concern a future ideal democracy to come as something anticipated with a given content. But it could still be one which concerns itself with the future of what Derrida had called ‘the European, and uniquely European, heritage of an idea of democracy’:^[10] In Derrida’s hands, that concern takes its cue from the idea that democracy is strictly and not just contingently inseparable from the expression ‘democracy to come’ – that democracy is not merely presently futural but essentially so. On this Derridean construal, the basic task of political thinking will be to secure a future for the call that recalls us to democracy as ‘the only system that welcomes in itself, in its very concept, that expression of autoimmunity called the right to self-critique’ (R, 96-7, emphasis mine). Instead of the idea of an ideal concept of democracy which anticipates its own end, we affirm instead that the idea of democracy retains within itself, in its most ‘ideal’ concept, a space left vacant for inventive political thinking to come, and hence for the advent of what, in every here and now, can only appear as a ‘democracy to come’ absolutely beyond the horizon of all present anticipation, beyond all present future-projecting visions of a yet-to-be-created ideal or true or absolute democracy to come. This call to interminable self-critique is the absolute other of the idea of an absolute democracy.

PPS

There are no ‘prescriptions’ here whatsoever (and does Rorty really envisage a Leftist humanities professoriate proposing concrete ‘reforms’ on taxes, healthcare and industrial policy?). However, the idea of a regime that grants (promises) its citizens a right to propose and oppose positions on anything and everything nevertheless finds in the Derridean inheritance of the European idea of democracy its ‘ideal’ (least bad) affirmation. Reflecting ‘theoretically’ on what might take hold were such an ideal actually to take hold might also afford an opening onto what we might attain as a genuinely attainable future democracy. Perhaps we might begin here with what Nietzsche (of all people?) explicitly called ‘a democracy to come’: a future regime that would, as he puts it, ‘secure and guarantee [for each in the all] as much independence as possible in their opinions, way of life and occupation’.^[11] Note that the content of what is ‘to come’ in such a ‘democracy to come’ is given here as precisely not given, it is beyond anticipation or prediction. And that is good. Indeed, it is ideal: replacing a philosophy of political moralism that, above the fray, carries an ideal telos, with a philosophy of political modesty that, freed from all teleology, gives (the maximum possible) strength and speed to the unpredictable adventures and productions of each singular life.

PPPS

Finally, we might note that universities in democracies today are already most themselves, they already assert themselves most faithfully, when they are most faithful to this other democratic set-up, affirming themselves best when they affirm a non-neutral role in helping this other idea of democracy to take hold. There is, of course, considerable (and understandable) resistance to the idea of university non-neutrality. But we should not back down from the thought that the proper business of the university is inseparable from an ethos that seeks to go beyond what is already supposed known or what is already thought right to believe, and hence welcomes best what remains to be thought in every domain. In this way, the institutional space that a society carves out in the midst of economic conditions that it can only remain entangled with, is formally suited concretely to contribute to a better democratic world to come — and it does so altogether without moralism.

PPPPS

Yes: another word is possible.

1. Jacques Derrida, Politics of Friendship, translated by George Collins (London: Verso, 2005), xi. ↑

2. Abraham Lincoln, ‘Gettysburg Address’ (19 November 1863). ↑

3. Geoffrey Bennington. Scatter 1: The Politics of Politics in Foucault, Heidegger, and Derrida (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016); hereafter S1. ↑

4. Jacques Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume I, translated Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009); hereafter BS. ↑

5. Karl Marx, Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), 31. ↑

6. Richard Rorty, Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth Century America (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1998); hereafter AC. ↑

7. See Richard Rorty, ‘Is Derrida a Quasi-Transcendental Philosopher?’, Contemporary Literature Vol 36, No. 1 (1995), 173-200. At one point in his review essay Rorty remarks, somewhat mischievously, that ‘Bennington is big on rigor’ (187). But he also says, without any mischief at all, that ‘Bennington’s account of what Derrida is up to is better in almost all respects – more intelligent, more plausible, more readable, and less pretentious – than any other I have read’ (174-5). Indeed. ↑

8. Jacques Derrida, Spectres of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International, translated by Peggy Kamuf (Abingdon: Routledge, 2006), 85. ↑

9. Jacques Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, translated by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 87; hereafter R. ↑

10. Jacques Derrida, The Other Heading: Reflections on Today’s Europe, translated by Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 78. ↑

11. Friedrich Nietzsche, Human All Too Human, Part II, translated by Paul V. Cohn (New York: Macmillan, 1913), 344-5. ↑