1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910821405403321

Autore

Bennington Geoffrey

Titolo

Scatter 1 : The Politics of Politics in Foucault, Heidegger, and Derrida / / Geoffrey Bennington

Pubbl/distr/stampa

New York, NY : , : Fordham University Press, , [2016]

©2016

ISBN

0-8232-7055-6

Edizione

[First edition.]

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (315 p.)

Disciplina

320.01

Soggetti

Political science - Philosophy - History - 20th century

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Includes index.

Nota di contenuto

Front matter -- Contents -- List of Abbreviations -- Introduction: The Politics of Politics -- 1. Parrhēsia -- 2. Pseudos -- 3. Kairos -- 4. Mōria -- 5. Diakrisis -- 6. Axioma -- Appendix: Derrida’s Notes on Dignity -- Index

Sommario/riassunto

What if political rhetoric is unavoidable, an irreducible part of politics itself? In contrast to the familiar denunciations of political horse-trading, grandstanding, and corporate manipulation from those lamenting the crisis in liberal democracy, this book argues that the “politics of politics,” usually associated with rhetoric and sophistry, is, like it or not, part of politics from the start. Denunciations of the sorry state of current politics draw on a dogmatism and moralism that share an essentially metaphysical and Platonic ground. Failure to deconstruct that ground generates a philosophically and politically debilitating self righteousness that this book attempts to understand and undermine. After a detailed analysis of Foucault’s influential late concept of parrhesia, 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 the metaphysics of presence .It is suggested that Heidegger’s complex accounts of truth and decision must indeed be read in close conjunction with his notorious Nazi commitments but



nevertheless contain 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 teleology—into a deconstructive retrieval of the concept of dignity. This lucid and often witty account of a crucial set of developments in twentieth-century thought prepares the way for a more general re-reading of the possibilities of political philosophy that will be undertaken in Volume 2 of this work, under the sign of an essential scatter that defines the political as such.