Scatter 1 posits a politics of politics that is an irreducible part of politics itself. It is argued that this dimension of politics, usually associated with rhetoric and sophistry, is, like it or not, part of politics from the start, and that those who denounce it do so on essentially metaphysical (Platonic) grounds. Failure to deconstruct those grounds generates a politically debilitating dogmatism and moralism that this book attempts to understand and undermine. After a detailed analysis of Foucault’s influential late concept of parrhēsia, which is shown to be both philosophically and polit ... More

Scatter 1 posits a politics of politics that is an irreducible part of politics itself. It is argued that this dimension of politics, usually associated with rhetoric and sophistry, is, like it or not, part of politics from the start, and that those who denounce it do so on essentially metaphysical (Platonic) grounds. Failure to deconstruct those grounds generates a politically debilitating dogmatism and moralism that this book attempts to understand and undermine. After a detailed analysis of Foucault’s influential late concept of parrhēsia, which is shown to be both philosophically and politically insufficient, close readings of Heidegger, Kierkegaard and Derrida trace complex relations between sophistry, rhetoric and philosophy, truth and untruth, decision, madness and stupidity, in an exploration of the possibility of developing an affirmative thinking of politics that is not mortgaged to metaphysics. It is suggested that Heidegger’s complex accounts of truth and decision, as they develop through the 1920s and ’30s and which must indeed be read in close conjunction with his notorious Nazi commitments, contain nonetheless essential insights that many strident responses to those commitments ignore or repress. Those insights are here developed—via an ambitious account of Derrida’s often misunderstood interruption of teleological concepts in general—into a deconstructive retrieval of the concept of dignity in preparation for the more general re-reading of the tradition of political philosophy that will be undertaken in Volume 2 of this work under the sign of an essential scatter that gives this project its overall title.