Geoffrey Bennington

It is argued that attempts to archive Derrida’s work and treat it in the standard terms of intellectual history are short-circuited by arguments within his work that undermine the coherence of the concept of archive as it is deployed in such historical descriptions. Drawing on a range of Derrida’s early and late writings and more especially his readings of Freud, it is suggested that Derrida’s claim that psychoanalysis ought to provoke a revision of the terms historians use to discuss it is a fortiori valid for deconstruction.

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 Boétie, 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.

Derrida's earlier work has a good deal to say about the question of metaphor. Very strikingly in view of Derrida's later thematic interest in the question of animality, metaphor is also presented in a piece on Edmond Jabès as an “animality of the letter,” as “the primary and infinite equivocality of the signifier as Life”. “White Mythology” argues for a certain irreducibility of “metaphor in the text of philosophy”. The trajectory of Derrida's thought here is especially difficult to capture, but seems to be circling around the question of being itself and to involve a crucial detour via Heidegger, and more notably his notion of the als‐Struktur. This point of Derrida's thinking must also be thought beyond the reach of any ontology and of any “thinking of being,” to which the early remarks on metaphor might seem to be leading us, but which the thought of dissemination always resists.

Le dernier Lyotard se détournerait de toute apparence du politique vers l’enfance et l’écriture. Et pourtant, nous essayons de montrer qu’à force d’approfondir la question du différend, du « différend même », de la phrase-affect et d’élaborer le rapport entre phonè et logos, Lyotard se retrouve encore et toujours à la racine du politique (chez Aristote, chez Hobbes), là où zoon politikon et zoon echon logon nous posent encore des questions, là où se trouve l’origine du langage, au plus près de ce qu’une « nature » nous réserve encore de surprises.

"I shall speak of ghost, of flame, and of ashes." These are the first words of Jacques Derrida's lecture on Heidegger. It is again a question of Nazism—of what remains to be thought through of Nazism in general and of Heidegger's Nazism in particular. It is also "politics of spirit" which at the time people thought—they still want to today—to oppose to the inhuman. "Derrida's ruminations should intrigue anyone interested in Post-Structuralism..... This study of Heidegger is a fine example of how Derrida can make readers of philosophical texts notice difficult problems in almost imperceptible details of those texts."—David Hoy, London Review of Books "Will a more important book on Heidegger appear in our time? No, not unless Derrida continues to think and write in his spirit.... Let there be no mistake: this is not merely a brilliant book on Heidegger, it is thinking in the grand style."—David Farrell Krell, _Research in Phenomenology_ "The analysis of Heidegger is brilliant, provocative, elusive."—Peter C. Hodgson, Religious Studies Review

When he died in 2004, Jacques Derrida left behind a vast legacy of unpublished material, much of it in the form of written lectures. With _The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume 1_, the University of Chicago Press inaugurates an ambitious series, edited by Geoffrey Bennington and Peggy Kamuf, translating these important works into English. _The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume 1_ launches the series with Derrida’s exploration of the persistent association of bestiality or animality with sovereignty. In this seminar from 2001–2002, Derrida continues his deconstruction of the traditional determinations of the human. The beast and the sovereign are connected, he contends, because neither animals nor kings are subject to the law—the sovereign stands above it, while the beast falls outside the law from below. He then traces this association through an astonishing array of texts, including La Fontaine’s fable “The Wolf and the Lamb,” Hobbes’s biblical sea monster in _Leviathan_, D. H. Lawrence’s poem “Snake,” Machiavelli’s _Prince_ with its elaborate comparison of princes and foxes, a historical account of Louis XIV attending an elephant autopsy, and Rousseau’s evocation of werewolves in _The Social Contract_. Deleuze, Lacan, and Agamben also come into critical play as Derrida focuses in on questions of force, right, justice, and philosophical interpretations of the limits between man and animal

Following on from _The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume I_, this book extends Jacques Derrida’s exploration of the connections between animality and sovereignty. In this second year of the seminar, originally presented in 2002–2003 as the last course he would give before his death, Derrida focuses on two markedly different texts: Heidegger’s 1929–1930 course _The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, _and Daniel Defoe’s _Robinson Crusoe. _As he moves back and forth between the two works, Derrida pursuesthe relations between solitude, insularity, world, violence, boredom and death as they supposedly affect humans and animals in different ways. Hitherto unnoticed or underappreciated aspects of _Robinson Crusoe _are brought out in strikingly original readings of questions such as Crusoe’s belief in ghosts, his learning to pray, his parrot Poll, and his reinvention of the wheel. Crusoe’s terror of being buried alive or swallowed alive by beasts or cannibals gives rise to a rich and provocative reflection on death, burial, and cremation, in part provoked by a meditation on the death of Derrida’s friend Maurice Blanchot. Throughout, these readings are juxtaposed with interpretations of Heidegger's concepts of world and finitude to produce a distinctively Derridean account that will continue to surprise his readers