The Democricy to Come

Geoffrey Bennington

July 16: Rain. Squalls.1

I
I dont know whether to laugh or cry about it, butforeseeably
enough, all too foreseeablyit starts with a typographical error. It
suffices to change a single letter to alter the title of this whole
conference, La dmocratie venir (which is itself, of course, a literal
quotation from Jacques Derrida), to obtain the title I chose for this
lecture, La dmocritie venir. When I gave that title to Marie-Louise
Mallet, I did indeed foresee the possibility that this slight change would
go unnoticed, or look like a typo I had made in error: I really mean
dmocritie, I added in my email. In spite of these precautions, and
those she duly took in her turn, the printers were without mercy,
and dmocritie became dmocratie again in the printed program
(and indeed on the Cerisy website), so that it must have looked for all
the world as though I had been content merely to repeat orworse
appropriate the general title, to claim the whole thing for myself.
Theres a supplementary chance or irony in this case: I was preparing
to talk about a tradition of thought for which the figure of written
letters often imposed itself as a metaphor for atoms, the ultimate
elements whose combination it would be enough to vary in order to
produce all that exists, just as it is enough to vary the combination
of letters to produce all the words in a language or all the books in a
library of Babel. In On Generation and Corruption, Aristotle presents
this well-known analogy between atoms and letters as already at work

The Oxford Literary Review 39.1 (2017): 116134

DOI: 10.3366/olr.2017.0213
Edinburgh University Press
www.euppublishing.com/olr
Geoffrey Bennington 117

in Leucippus and Democritus,2 and Lucretius mentions it at least four

times in De rerum natura (I, 817ff; 9112; II, 688ff, 1010ff.), often to
pull the very text of his poem into the processes he is describing: for
example,

Why, even in these our very verses here

It matters much with what and in what order
Each element is set: the same denote
Sky, and the ocean, lands, and streams, and sun;
The same, the grains, and trees, and living things.
And if not all alike, at least the most
But what distinctions by positions wrought!
And thus no less in things themselves.3
This analogy is not simple, however: when Aristotle takes it up
again in the Metaphysics, he brings out three different aspects. Atoms
are distinguished by three types of difference, which Aristotle calls
shape, arrangement and position [schema, taxis, thesis], translating
the atomists own terms rhythm [rhusmos, an Ionian variant of the
word rhuthmos, which does not yet have its prosodic or musical sense4 ],
inter-contact [diathik] and turning [trop], and illustrating these
different differences with this same analogy of letters:

These philosophers say the differences in the elements are the causes
of all other qualities. These differences, they say, are threeshape
and order and position. For they say that what is is differentiated
only by rhythm and inter-contact and turning; and of these
rhythm is shape, inter-contact is order, and turning is position; for
A differs from N in shape, AN from NA in order, Z from N in
position. (A 985b, 1320, altering the last example slightly for ease
of typographical presentation.)

So our typographical error would, for the atomists, be essentially an

issue of rhythm.
I dont know whether to laugh or cry about this typo, this atomic
substitution, which changes the rhythm and transforms dmocratie
into dmocritie and vice versa: for, says Aristotle at the end of the
same passage from On Generation and Corruption already mentioned,
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Tragedy and Comedy are composed of the same letters. For the
moment at least, lets go with comedy and laughter because, in spite
of a remark of Derridas in Politics of Friendship to the effect that
there is something tragic about democracy (the two laws of democracy,
which demand equality of all and respect for the irreducible singularity
of each, are there presented as tragically irreconcilablethough he
immediately adds that this is even more unthinkable than tragedy5 )
in spite of this tragedy there is also, lets not forget, something
indubitably and affirmatively comical about politics and especially
perhaps about democracy, as is particularly obvious in the recent
political history of two great democracies one might have thought, or
might have thought themselves, exemplary (Im thinking of the recent
[2000] presidential elections in the USA and France): this comic aspect
comes, if we are to believe Hegel, from the risible contrast between
the ideal universality of the Demos and the particularity of its concrete
existence, between its necessity and its contingency.6
What a farce; what a riot. Democritus is indeed often associated
with laughter, or described as the laughing philosopher: perpetuo
risu pulmonem agitare solebat Democritus, writes Juvenal for example
(Satires, X, 33; with other references at DK A21). Lets laugh just a
little longer together before we scatter to the four winds.
It happens that this typo story also has a story behind it, which
I did not know when I gave my title. One of the sources used by
scholars in their effort to reconstitute the thought of Democritus is
a text published in France in the seventeenth century, under the title
Paroles dor du philosophe Dmocrate [Golden words of the philosopher
Democrat]. These eighty-six maxims coincide often enough with the
Democritean fragments gathered by the compiler Stobaeus (5th century
AD) for them to be generally considered authentic.7 But this play
between Demokritos and demokratos does not originate in the French
seventeenth century: already in a different fragment from Stobaeus
(DK B178), which does not appear in the Philosophe Dmocrate, the
manuscript has the same error: From Democratus [Demokrtou]:
Worst of all things is frivolity as the educator of youth, for it
breeds those pleasures from which wickedness comes. This initially
typographical (or at least literal, stochastic) proximity, in which
changing a single letterchanging the rhythm of a single alphabetical
Geoffrey Bennington 119

atom, thensuffices to transform in an apparently quite contingent

way Democritus into a democrat, might even inspire us to seek some
support on the conceptual level: for in another fragment from Stobaeus
(again not included in the Golden Words. . . where there is nothing very
political), also attributed to Demokratos, Democritus apparently said,
still addressing us quite directly today: Poverty under democracy is
as much to be preferred to so-called prosperity under an autocracy as
freedom to slavery (DK B251).
In spite of the happy accident of this proximity, in which one
might be tempted to see an example of what Jacques Derrida calls
a certain interlacing of necessity and chance8 an interlacing that
was already the whole question for the atomists, for whom the
distinction between necessity and chance is very delicatethe point
is not to claim that Democritus really was a democrat (although
such praise of democracy is certainly quite rare in ancientor, come
to that, modernphilosophy). Nor is it to go looking in the rich
moral doctrine of the atomists, and especially Epicurus. The point
is rather to appeal to Democritus and the thinking of which he is,
as it were, the father (Democritus the father, as Derrida himself
says in Mes Chances (24/363), although in all rigor, as Derrida is
obviously the first to know, atomism itself has an earlier father in
Leucippus, and more importantly it should push us to rethink the
very schema of paternity, of filiation, the father-son relation that still
dominates our understanding of the history of ideas) in order to
develop the following question: can one begin to think politics on
the basis of the fundamental motif of atomism, namely the motif of
dispersion, of what I shall more often prefer to call scatter? I shall
try to show that once we suspend or interrupt, or register the chance
and necessity of the suspension or interruption (two words that are
certainly insufficient as we shall see) of the teleologies that organize
all classical political thought (by which I mean all political thought
that is organized around the major motifs of the metaphysics of
presence as delimited by Derrida in now-classical texts, and among
which the motif of teleology seems to me to be fundamental)I shall
try to show, then, that this suspension or interruption necessarily or
fatally gives rise to a scatter with complex political stakes that call for
thought. As the best resources for thinking scatter affirmatively are no
120 Oxford Literary Review

doubt to be found in the materialist tradition (matter is scatter, the

rhyme here is also a kind of rhythm), then an investigation of that
tradition will be unavoidable. The point is not, however, simply to
invoke the (paternal) authority of that materialist tradition, insofar as
the necessity and urgency of rethinking the political in which we find
ourselves comes in part from a crisis within that tradition itself, at
least in its more modern developments. So if my claim wants to be
a materialist claim in a certain sense, as indeed it does, it wants to
be a materialist claim without yet knowing where that wanting can
go, whether it will be found intrinsically wanting, or indeed whether
the word materialism (still less atomism) will still do. (But let
me say immediately that this will not be what is sometimes called
textual materialism.9 ) It follows that these remarks, insofar as they
are polarized (another word that certainly wont do either) by a
thought of scatter, of matter thought as scatter, will themselves be a
bit scattered, a bit rhapsodic, as Kant might have said. That scatter
will have to be thought less as a scatter of elements or atoms (the
point will not be to recommend anything like the atomysticism often
criticized by Derrida), unless perhaps we take seriously the way atoms
figure in modern physics, in which they are anything but un-splittable,
and so anything but a-tomic. This does not simply mean pushing
the a-tomic to ever more subatomic levels (discovering other more
elementary particles: electrons, neutrons, quarks, muons. . . ) but
Ill come back to this briefly in conclusiondiscovering, via string
theory, something of the order of a differential rhythm without atoms.
Materialism, then, in the sense of a scatter without atomic elements,
to be thought of according to a certain rhythm: Ill be suggesting that
this is one way of approaching Derridas thought in general, and more
especially his thinking around democracy. In other words, Id like to
suggest that the thought of a democracy to come is at least in a
relation of (rhythmic) solidarity with the thought of a democricy to
come, even if Derrida himself, who does indeed mention Democritus
and the atomist tradition here or there (and indeed especially the
concept of rhythm itself, for example in The Double Session10 ), never
does so in an obviously political context. He does however assert, in
one of his rare somewhat sustained discussions of this thinking, that
the Democritian tradition, in which the names of Epicurus and his
disciples are inscribed, has been subjected since its origin, and first
Geoffrey Bennington 121

of all under the violent authority of Plato, to a powerful repression

throughout the history of Western culture.11 So the point will be
to continue what Derrida earlier in the same text calls a diversion
[dtournement] of atomism (354), a supplementary clinamen affecting
the primary clinamen that Epicurus supposedly brought to the thought
of Democritus himselfEpicurus who contests more often than one
might think his supposed master, to the point that the young Karl
Marx can assert in his doctoral thesis that they stand diametrically
opposed in all that concerns truth, certainty, application of this science,
and all that refers to the relationship between thought and reality in
general.12

II
Lets begin with the question of teleology, because the original scandal
of atomism is that it contests teleology or thinks it can do without
it. Aristotle already criticizes the atomists for ignoring final causality,
which is according to him the first (because final) causality of nature as
well as of art, in which spontaneity and chance (automaton and tuche)
are possible, but always secondary, disturbances.13
The same problem, and the same indignation, reappear in Kant, in
whomas I try to show in detail elsewhere14 the whole problem of
teleological judgment is as it were haunted by atomist thought, most
often in the figure of Epicurus (it would only be a slight exaggeration to
assert that the whole of Kants thought is dictated by the desire to avoid
the philosophical distress or depression that would result from having
to embrace Epicurus). In the antinomy of teleological judgment in
the third Critique, namely the antinomy in the investigation of nature
between a principle (or at least a maxim) of mechanical causality and
a principle or maxim of final causality, Epicurus and Democritus are
mentioned and immediately dismissed in that they dont even represent
mechanical causality, but something that falls short of causality as such,
their doctrine being absurd simply because it tries to make chance
into a cause. For in spite of appearances (in spite of the antinomy
of teleological judgment, which is itself perhaps merely apparent,
according to Kant himself15 ), what Kant calls mechanical causality is
already fundamentally teleological, and the law of nature is already
called for and drawn forward by and for the moral law. The same
Epicurus who has an honourable place in the antinomy of pure reason
122 Oxford Literary Review

in the first Critique (so long as we take his theses to be mere hypo-
theses, Epicurus opens the broadest field for the investigation of nature
(B 499n)) is here violently rejected (along with Democritus) as absurd,
on the grounds that his doctrine explains strictly nothing when it comes
to causality:

The system of accidentality, which is ascribed to Epicurus or

Democritus, is, if taken literally, so obviously absurd that it need
not detain us [. . . ] Epicurus kind of explanation, on which the
difference between a technique of nature and mere mechanism
is completely denied, and blind chance is assumed to be the
explanation not only of the correspondence of generated products
with our concepts of ends, hence of technique, but even of the
determination of the causes of this generation in accordance with
laws of motion, hence of their mechanism, and thus nothing is
explained, not even the illusion in our teleological judgments, and
hence the putative idealism in them is not demonstrated at all.
(72,73)

This gesture of rejection is also to be found in Kants political thought.

In the Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose,
Kant envisages (the better to dismiss it, as in the third Critique), an
Epicurean hypothesis that would attempt to explain the formation of
states on the basis of simple mechanical principles:

Whether we should firstly expect that the states, by an Epicurean

concourse of efficient causes, should enter by random collisions (like
those of small material particles) into all kinds of formations which
are again destroyed by new collisions, until they arrive by chance
[von ungefhr] at a formation which can survive in its existing form
(a lucky accident which is hardly likely ever to occur); or whether we
should assume as a second possibility that nature in this case follows
a regular course in leading our species gradually upwards from the
lower level of animality to the highest level of humanity through
forcing man to employ an art which is nonetheless his own, and
hence that nature develops mans original capacities by a perfectly
regular process within this apparently disorderly arrangement; or
whether we should rather accept the third possibility that nothing
Geoffrey Bennington 123

at all, or at least nothing rational [nicht Kluges], will anywhere

emerge from all these actions and counter-actions among men as
a whole, that things will remain as they have always been, and that
it would thus be impossible to predict whether the discord which
is so natural to our species is not preparing the way for a hell of
evils to overtake us, however civilised our condition, in that nature,
by barbaric devastation, might perhaps again destroy this civilised
state and all the cultural progress hitherto achieved (a fate against
which it would be impossible to guard under a rule of blind chance,
with which the state of lawless freedom is in fact identical, unless we
assume that the latter is secretly guided by the wisdom of nature)
these three possibilities boil down to the question of whether it is
rational to assume that the order of nature is purposive in its parts
but purposeless as a whole.16

But it turns out that Kants teleological thought never really manages to
exorcise this materialist figure: in spite of the fact that Kant denounces
the absurd nature of the Epicurean explanation, his own thinking
of teleology merely accentuates the irreducibility, in the very being-
teleological of teleology, of a cut or an interruption that threatens the
coherence of that thinking, and which leaves open, as it were, the
place of Epicurus or Democritus. For Kant, teleology is only really
teleological if it is finalized by a supreme telos, the end of all ends,
the ultimate end of ends or the final goal17 but this final end is final
only if it is radically cut from that of which it is the end. At the end
of his discussion of ends, Kant finds himself obliged, if not to concede
that Epicurus was right, then at least to recognize that Epicurus might
as well have been right in his explanation of nature, because teleology,
in the end, in its final end (that is, a certain version of God), depends
on none of what in nature might encourage us to see in it the work of
a purposive intelligence, and rests in the end only on a promise (of the
moral law) which can never simply be kept, and that defines what Kant
calls faith.
Teleological thought is thus, finally, organized around its own cut
(mutatis mutandis, the structure of the without of the pure cut that
Derrida discusses in the context only of the aesthetic judgment18 )
a cut that both guarantees and undermines the being-teleological of
teleology. This is why one cannot rely on this motif of a cut or
124 Oxford Literary Review

an interruption to contest teleology: cut and interruption, in spite

of some seductive appearances, themselves remain teleological and
thereby metaphysical. And it is precisely these motifs that organize
the conceptual space of political thought. Let me suggest the following
definition, which runs the risk (a risk we have to take) of extending
the political sphere to conceptuality in general: any concept that is
affected by this (interrupted) teleology is political. All classical political
concepts answer to this description, which can perhaps most easily be
laid out on the basis of Kants thinking of perpetual peace: perpetual
peace if brought about would be death, the peace of the graveyard,
and so the only chance for peace would be that it not arrive at its
apparent end, that it be inhibited with respect to that end, that it
hold itself back, postpone its perpetuity in perpetuity. I have argued
elsewhere that the concept of sovereignty itself (in Bataille or Schmitt
but also in Bodin or Rousseau) is organized according to the same logic:
sovereignty is a concept that is not simply impossible, but that has
meaning only in its inability to be realized, such that a fully sovereign
sovereignty would not in fact be sovereign, and that therefore any
sovereigntyincluding the most legitimate one cares to imagine
is compromised in its very essence: the sovereign, one might say, is
he who is never completely or sovereignly sovereign. Which is why
the various figures of sovereignty are haunted by death, by figures of
interruption and cutting, precisely.19 We could come up with many
examples that all point in the same direction (if youll allow me that
overly teleological expression), and which can be summed up in a
slogan Ive often used: the end of politics is the end of politics. Qua
teleological, political concepts are all constitutively failing, originarily
found wanting.20 This is the real reason why the different forms
of constitution identified in the tradition exist only in corrupt or
deviant forms (thats politics). The inevitable becoming-deviant of the
correct forms (namely monarchy, aristocracy, and the form Aristotle
calls simply by the generic name politeia), which means they all tend
to fall into their deviant counterparts (tyranny, oligarchy, democracy),
answers precisely to this perverse and disconcerting logic.21

III
What about the concept of democracy in this context? Democracy
stands a little apart from other political concepts, in that it indeed
Geoffrey Bennington 125

answers to this logic of failing concepts, but pushes that logic to a

certain limit. Lets take as signs of this slightly eccentric status some
famous remarks by Plato and Aristotle. Plato, in very well-known
passages, mercilessly lampoons democracy, and one can say without
undue simplification that his critique bears precisely on the motif
of diversity and scatter that interests us here. Democracy looks very
attractive, because of its diversity, precisely, its multifariousness, its
motley and many-coloured, poikilon and pepoikilmenon, shimmering
and seductive character (especially for women and children (Republic
557c)), but it is this same diversity that makes of democracy not
so much a form of regime or a constitution among others, but a
bazaar [pantopolion] of constitutions (557d): one can find all forms
of constitution in democracy (including itself), such that democracy
occupies a strange place in the list of possible constitutions, both one
item on the list and the list itself. That simply is the definition of quasi-
transcendentality according to Derrida,22 and we are trying to show
that the concept of democracy has precisely this quasi-transcendental
status with respect to the field of the political. Against the scattered
character of democracy, Socrates proposes a principle of unity (Republic
462 a-c) according to which the best state would be the most unified,
would most resemble a single individual. Aristotles critique of Plato
bears essentially on this point: where Socrates says that the best city is
the one that most resembles an individual, Aristotle sees the ruin of the
city:

Yet it is clear that if the process of unification proceeds with too

much rigour, there will be no polis left: for the polis is by nature a
plurality [plethos], and if its unification is pushed too far, the polis
will become a family, and the family an individual: for we can affirm
that the family is more unified than the polis, and the individual
more unified than the family. Consequently, even supposing that
one were in a position to operate this unification, one should refrain
from doing so, because it would lead the polis to its ruin. The polis is
composed not only of a plurality of individuals [pleionon anthropon],
but also of specifically distinct elements. . . even in poleis founded
on the liberty and equality of the citizens [i.e. democracies], this
differentiation must exist. (1261a 1733; cf. too, 1277a 510)
126 Oxford Literary Review

And just a little later:

The error of Socrates must be attributed to the false notion of unity

from which he starts. Unity there should be, both of the family and
of the state, but in some respects only. For there is a point at which
a state may attain such a degree of unity as to be no longer a state, or
at which, without actually ceasing to exist, it will become an inferior
state, like harmony passing into unison, or rhythm which has been
reduced to a single foot. (1263b 305)

Notice not only this precious reference to rhythm, but also the beyond
a certain point, where the logic of failing teleology that interests us here
emerges: there must be a certain unity of the city (else it would face its
ruin by absolute scatter back into nature), but not too much unity
(else the state is ruined by being reduced to a single individual). Given
time, it might be possible to show that the principle of impossibility
of such a unification in the shape of a single individual is initially
provided by sexual difference, the trace of which is legible wherever
Plato discusses democracy, which is a feminine (and thereby animal)
figure of politics,23 and which marks the initial association from
which Aristotle builds up his account at the beginning of the Politics.
Following this path (in Hegel too) would lead us rapidly back to the
question of nature and matter, the reinscription of which gives us
perhaps the best prospect of avoiding the endemic moralism that is
the bane of political thought today.
Now as, within the space of the political, it is democracy that most
clearly names the scatter-effect in politics, it has to be seen as a limit
case, or even the frontier of politics as such: democracy includes all
forms of regime in the sense that it names more clearly than others the
tendential scatter without which there would be no political space as
such. So democracy has a definite conceptual privilege: later Aristotle
will say that The reason why there are several sorts of constitution is
that every polis includes a plurality of elements (1289b 27); as this
plurality of elements always tends toward the limit case of democracy,
democracy will name better than other terms the political as such.
And this same status, at the very edge of the political (the frontier that
both encloses the conceptual space of the political and simultaneously
opens it to its outside) no doubt dictates the extreme distrust of classical
Geoffrey Bennington 127

political philosophers towards democracy. Democracy (as could easily

be shown not only in Aristotle, but also in Hobbes or Spinoza or
Rousseau) would name both what opens politics (in all senses of the
verb) and (qua regime name) one way among others of mastering or
managing that opening. This double status helps us to think the affinity
noted by Derrida himself between democracy and deconstruction, and
perhaps better to understand how he can find a self-deconstructing
force in the very motif of democracy, the possibility and duty for
democracy to de-limit itself.24 Insofar as democracy opens politics, it
exposes it to something that is not simply political,25 but at the same
time allows something of politics to infiltrate all thinking, and so it
would not be wrong to think that deconstruction thus operates a sort
of radical politicization of thought as such.
So it does seem that democracy (that old name. . . ) indeed has a
slightly special status in that it opens (better than do other names, in
any case) onto the thought of a scatter that would be the condition of
politics as such, a scatter that all political concepts would be designed
to bind or even repress, especially by trying to place that scatter
in a teleological perspective, including the teleological perspective of
the classical concept of democracy itself. If Derrida can speak of a
self-delimitation of democracy, this is precisely because democracy
nonetheless offers some resistance to the teleological schemas that still
dominate political conceptuality qua metaphysical conceptuality. If
democracy demands a certain today or here and now,26 this is because
democracy cannot ever quite be thought teleologically, even in the
form of the Kantian regulative Idea.27 The drama (tragedy or comedy)
of democracy, already a deviant form according to Aristotle, would be
that democracylike perpetual peace or sovereigntycannot simply
aim to get to the end of itself without tipping catastrophically into its
contrary. As a perversion of the politeia, democracy remains subject to
supplementary perversions: especially (this is something of the comedy
described by Hegel that we mentioned at the beginning) in that an
absolute democracy (in which the demos as such is sovereign) collapses
by that very fact into monarchy and even demagogic tyranny, before
falling out of politics back into the scatter of a state of nature. This is
also, via slightly different argumentative routes, why Kant will say that
democracy is essentially despotic, and Rousseau in the Social Contract
(Part III Chapter 4) that it is not a suitable form of government for
128 Oxford Literary Review

humans.28 As is the case with other political concepts, but as it were

at a higher level (in that democracy, as we saw, names something of
the essence without essence of politics as such), democracy is itself, is
democratic, is worthy of its name, only insofar as it holds itself short
of itself, does not fulfil its telos, remains unworthy of its name, without
it ever being possible to know what the right measure of this holding
back is. Which is why politics is not a science, and why the to-come
of democracy cannot be thought simply in the form of the future.

IV
Our minimal change in one letter or the rhythm of one atom is
thus trying to mark, right on the word democracy, the trace of that
logic of scattering that results from the ruin or internal catastrophe of
teleological thought, even or especially in those like Kant who defend
it most vigorously. In pushing democracy towards democricy, then,
the point is not to give politics a new foundation (especially not a
scientific foundation), but to try, as it were, to exasperate the concept
of politics as such, and to do so in the name of politics and in the name
of democracy.
From the start, Ive been speaking of scatter as though this word
or this concept went without saying, as though I knew what it was.
But it seems that scatter, in naming something like the general milieu
of conceptuality as such, produces some trouble for thought. The
reason for this is clearly enough that scatter radically resists teleological
comprehension. I said at the beginning that matter is scatter: this is
certainly the case with Kant, but also with Hegelin Glas, Derrida
cites at length a passage from the Introduction to the Philosophy of
History in which Hegel shows that, essentially scattered, matter has
no essence, or has an essence only by passing into its opposite, i.e.
spirit. And Derrida comments: Weight and scatter, the essence of
matter, cannot qualify an essence. Matter has no essence, its essence
is its opposite, its essence is not to have an essence. Scatter [. . . ] has
no essence. Therefore is not.29 We would also need to pursue the
famous discussion in the Greater Logic of diversity and difference,
commented on in Glas in the crucial context of sexual difference.30
On the hypothesis that under the name differance (for which scatter
would then be another non-synonymous substitution) Derrida is
trying to think at least the chance that the supposed logical necessity of
Geoffrey Bennington 129

these Hegelian deductions is not rigoroustrying to think the chance

of chance itself, as it were, a certain non-necessity of necessitywe
would need to take up again this motif of scatter in a way that is no
longer strictly logical.
Which is exactly what Derrida does himself, for example in his
little text on the architect Bernard Tschumi.31 One finds here an
explicit reflection on the very tense (irresolvable, non-dialectisable)
relation between scattering and gathering: hold together scattering and
gathering, associate and dissociate association and dissociation, also
means thinking a certain holding back of scatterall scatter is relatively
gathered, all gathering relatively scattered. And this is where we can
return in conclusion to the motif of rhythm from which we set out. For
the rhuthmos of the atomists, before giving rise to the modern concept
of rhythm, names something like the relative gathering of a scatter
as I have just described it, the thinking of which, I am suggesting, is
the only means we have of approaching our questions once teleology
is deconstructed, or rather, as soon as (that is, since always, from
the very beginning), teleology has gone into deconstruction. For before
being stabilised by metaphysical interpretations, beginning with Plato
and Aristotle, rhuthmos would be neither form, nor of course pure
flux, but something like a provisional holding back of flux, a return
of flux on itself, a little whorl or eddy in the current, the minimal
trace of a machine in nature.32 And it is indeed by insisting on this
rhythmic motif that we might have a chance of saving atomism from
the atom, and therefore from atomysticism. If we wanted to get some
scientific sanction here (but the status of such a sanction is difficult to
determine: at any rate the point is not at all to subordinate the kind of
reflection we are engaged in here to some supposed truth of science, but
rather to look for figures that give food for thought, without thereby
reducing science to fabulation or a storehouse of figures, or forgetting
its specific exigencies) we might look to string theory. This theory really
is a theory in the common sense of the word, in that it advances
well beyond or below any currently possible observation, as indeed
the atomists did from the start: neither Democritus nor Epicurus nor
Lucretius ever saw an atom, just as no contemporary physicist has
ever seen a stringas postulated by the theory it is many orders
of magnitude too small to be observed by any instrument currently
availableso that atomism is never quite to be taken literally, as it
130 Oxford Literary Review

were.33 String theory suggests that at a level lower than that of the atom,
below that of the sub-atomic particles, matter consists not of simple or
elementary particles at all (as atomism in general would have us believe,
according to the atomystical temptation), not ultimate points with no
internal structure, but of oscillating strings.34 I have neither the space
nor the competence to expound this theory for itself: among other
things, it demands the existence of several extra dimensions (perhaps
as many as twenty or so) beyond the four accessible to us in our lived
space-time.35 But lets bet that such supplementary dimensions would
be necessary for us to think what is given us to think here and now,
already, to come, and indeed to think that strange twist of time that
Derrida calls -venir.
To-come: just as in Derrida the point is not to announce nor simply
to promise the coming of a democracy (even though. . . ), the point
here is not to celebrate scatter as such, not for example to recommend
a greater degree of scatter that we should encourage or try to bring
about (even though. . . ). Just as the thought of differance, in spite
of widespread misunderstandings in the domain of theory, never
asserted the excellence of a larger difference (which is why Derrida
states clearly from the start that differance cannot be infinite, or that
infinite difference is finite:36 it follows that the right difference is not
always a big difference): scatter is thinkable only as relatively gathered.
The right measure (the right rhythm) of this scatter and gather is never
givennot given here and now, not given in advance, not even in the
form of a regulative Idea, but has to be invented each time, singularly,
necessarily playing with chance, as it comes.

Notes
1
Ptolemaeus, Fragment Democritus B14.7 (Diels-Krantz). This lecture was
originally presented on July 17 2002 in the closing session of the Cerisy conference
La dmocratie venir: autour de Jacques Derrida, and was published in its original
French form in the volume of the same title edited by Marie-Louise Mallet (Paris:
Galile, 2004), pp. 599613. In the interests of readability I have occasionally
modified the text a little in translating it into English, and added a couple of later
remarks in square brackets.
2
The original version of this text used a French edition based on the Diels-
Krantz Fragmente der Vorsokratiker: Jean-Paul Dumont, ed., Les coles prsocratiques
Geoffrey Bennington 131

(Paris: Gallimard, 1991), which provides many helpful scholarly details. For
English translations of the fragments themselves, I have used Kathleen Freemans
Ancilla to the Pre-Socratic Philosophers (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1948), and for the Aristotle references not included in the Ancilla, the
translations provided in Jonathan Barnes, ed., The Complete Works of Aristotle,
2 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984). Here the reference is to
Aristotles On Generation and Corruption, 315b, 615.
3
Lucretius, On the Nature of Things, tr. William Ellery Leonard (London: Dent,
1916) II, 101218.
4
See Pierre Sauvanet, Le rhythme grec dHraclite Aristote (Paris: PUF, 1999), and
Emile Benveniste, La notion de rhythme dans son expression linguistique, in
Problmes de linguistique generale, I (Paris: Gallimard, 1966, 327335).
5
Jacques Derrida, Politiques de lamiti (Paris: Galile, 1994), p. 40; tr. George
Collins as Politics of Friendship (London: Verso Books, 1997), 22.
6
This Demos, the general mass, which knows itself as lord and ruler, and is also
aware of being the intelligence and insight which demand respect, is constrained
and befooled through the particularity of its actual existence, and exhibits the
ludicrous contrast between its own opinion of itself and its immediate existence,
between its necessity and its contingency, its universality and its commonness.
G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, tr. A.V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1977), 745, p. 451. [More recent political events in France and
the USA, and indeed the UK, of course put even more pressure on the tragi-comic
possibilities of democracy.]
7
Cf. Pierre-Marie Morel, Atome et ncessit: Dmocrite, Epicure, Lucrce, (Paris:
PUF, 2000), 53; Jean Salem, Latomisme antique: Dmocrite, Epicure, Lucrce,
(Paris: Le Livre de poche, 1997), 5960. These fragments correspond to DK
B35115; Dielss original collection explicitly included these fragments under
the title Goldne Sprche des Philosophen Demokrates; later editions of DK
use the title Denksprche des Demokrates and include a long note discussing
the authenticity of these fragments. [See more recently Guillaume Navaud, Les
Maximes de Dmocrate et Callimaque, Revue des Etudes Grecques 119 (2006),
11438.] This little collection, some of whose fragments look more like platitudes
than words of gold, might repay a reading I cannot attempt here: for example,
the eighteenth fragment of these words of gold asserts that Speech [logos] is often
more persuasive than gold, which opens an abyss: if speech is worth more than
gold, one might wonder what exactly the value of a golden word would be. Would
it be worth more or less than a word that was only a word? A question I leave open
here.
132 Oxford Literary Review
8
Jacques Derrida, Mes chances: Au rendez-vous de quelques strophonies
picuriennes, Tijdschrift voor Filosophie, 45:1 (1983), 340 (10); tr. Irene Harvey
and Avital Ronell in Jacques Derrida, Psych: Inventions of the Other, I, ed. Peggy
Kamuf and Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007),
34476 (350).
9
Derrida was always very clear about the problems involved in rapidly invoking some
supposed materialism of the signifier: see for example De la grammatologie (Paris:
Minuit, 1967), 20, 45, 1389.
10
La dissmination, especially 312 and note 64 (tr. Barbara Johnson as Dissemination
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 279 and note 76).
11
Mes Chances, 24/362. See too the very careful remarks about materialism in
Positions, Ed. de Minuit, 1972, 8791 (tr. Alan Bass as Positions (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1981), 647). Plato is reported by Diogenes Laertius
to have wanted to burn all of Democrituss writings. (DK A1)
12
Karl Marx, The Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy
of Nature (184041), in The Collected Works of Marx and Engels, 50 volumes
(London: Lawrence and Wishart, 19752005), Vol. I, 38.
13
See also Generation of Animals, 789 b 23: Democritus, however, neglecting the
final cause, reduces to necessity all the operations of nature, and, for the general
account of nature and causality, Physics Book II.
14
See my Frontires kantiennes (Paris: Galile, 2000). [English version Kant on the
Frontier: Philosophy, Politics, and the Ends of the Earth (New York: Fordham
University Press, 2017).]
15
See the Critique of Judgment, 71.
16
Kants Political Writings, ed. Hans Reiss, tr. H.B. Nisbet, 2nd enlarged edition
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 48.
17
I leave aside here the important distinction Kant tries to make between a letzter
Zweck and an Endzweck: see Frontires kantiennes, 201204 [17680].
18
Cf. Jacques Derrida, La vrit en peinture (Paris: Flammarion, 1979), tr. Geoff
Bennington and Ian McLeod (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987).
19
See my Superanus, originally presented in French to the Journes de Castries, July
2001, English translation in Theory and Event 8:1 (2005), unpaginated e-journal.
20
We would need to confront this description, which I believe can be generalised to
all concepts as such, with the motif of being worthy of the name, as it is often
found in Derridas later writings. According to the description here, even a concept
worthy of the name can never quite be worthy of its name: in this case, even a
sovereignty worthy of the name is unworthy, and the same goes for democracy. [See
my Scatter I: The Politics of Politics in Foucault, Heidegger, and Derrida (New York:
Geoffrey Bennington 133

Fordham University Press, 2016), Chapter 6, where I argue that any X worthy of
its name is an X that has gone through the ordeal of the necessarily-possibly-
not structures that Derrida develops most famously in readings of Lacan and
Austin.]
21
See my Demo, in Martin McQuillan, ed., The Politics of Deconstruction (London:
Pluto Press, 2007), 1742.
22
Or perhaps more accurately, a definition of the transcendental as always already
quasi-transcendental. For the claim that the transcendental is already (only) quasi-
transcendental, see my X in Interrupting Derrida (London: Routledge, 2000),
7692 (8990).
23
See for example Republic 562e-563d, where democratic liberty and licence even
affect domestic animals.
24
Politiques de lamiti, 129/105 (tr. slightly modified).
25
[This gives a chance that politics also be something other than what I have
more recently called the politics of politics. See Scatter I: there, I argue for the
irreducibility of the politics of politics, which does not of course mean that politics
is or must be reduced to its politics, simply that that dimension of politics cannot
be moralistically wished away.]
26
Immediately after the sentence I quoted about the self-deconstructive force of
democracy, Derrida goes on: Democracy is the autos of deconstructive self-
delimitation. A delimitation not only in the name of a regulative idea and an
indefinite perfectibility, but each time in the singular urgency of a here and now.
27
Understanding why scatter cannot be thought according to the Kantian Idea (or the
Husserlian Idea of the Kantian Idea) is crucial for understanding deconstruction.
See my essays Almost the End and An Idea of Syntax, in Interrupting Derrida.
28
See Aristotles Politics, 1291b 301292a 38 and 1274a 5 for descriptions of the
becoming-demagogic of democracy. In Perpetual Peace, Kant writes: Of the three
forms of the state, that of democracy is, properly speaking, necessarily a despotism,
because it establishes an executive power in which all decide for or even against
one who does not agree; that is, all, who are not quite all, decide, and this is
a contradiction of the general will with itself and with freedom. (Kants Political
Writings, 101)
29
Glas (Paris: Galile, 1974), p. 31a. New translation by Geoffrey Bennington and
David Wills forthcoming from University of Minnesota Press.
30
Glas, 189a; see too Positions, 60 and n. 6 [44 and n. 13].
31
Point de foliemaintenant larchitecture, in Psych. See too, already in the
Grammatology, Scatter, as law of spacing, is thus both pure nature, the principle of
life and the principle of death of society (De la grammatologie, 388).
134 Oxford Literary Review
32
See too Michel Serres, La naissance de la physique dans le texte de Lucrce (Paris:
Minuit, 1977), 190, and Edgar Morin, La Mthode I, La nature de la nature (Paris:
Seuil, 1977), 199, where the eddy is the figure of a simple machine in nature.
33
So one might be tempted to say that in this way all atomism is logical atomism:
but the logic of atomism in its rhythm is that it also carries off the concept of atom
that supports logical atomism. This would not be difficult to show in the case of
the often very amusing paradoxes that emerge from Russells Philosophy of Logical
Atomism for example.
34
Cf. Brian Greene, The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the
Quest for the Ultimate Theory (New York: Vintage Books, 2000), 136. Greene
repeats a little somnambulistically the classical analogy of atoms and letters: The
ancient Greeks surmised that the stuff of the universe was made up of tiny
uncuttable ingredients that they called atoms. Just as the enormous number of
words in an alphabetic language is built up from the wealth of combinations of a
small number of letters, they guessed that the vast range of material objects might
also result from combinations of a small number of distinct, elementary building
blocks (7). And a little later, suggesting that perhaps it is the oscillating strings that
might be the true ultimate elements (for there is still some atomysticism at work
in this thought): Using our linguistic analogy, paragraphs are made of sentences,
sentences are made of words, and words are made of letters. What makes up a
letter? From a linguistic standpoint, thats the end of the line. Letters are letters
they are the fundamental building blocks of written language; there is no further
substructure. Questioning their composition has no meaning. Similarly, a string
is simply a string. . . (141). Compare Sauvanets slightly different interpretation:
In all likelihood, we must then understand that the letters of the alphabet that
differ in their rhythm are themselves composed of primary atoms, exactly as in
typography there are letter components, or as letters are displayed in pixels on
a computer screen (43; my translation). If patience allowed, this might be the
place to revisit the Sokal affair and the question of the use of scientific analogies in
philosophy.
35
Greene, Ch. 8, More dimensions than meet the eye.
36
De la grammatologie, d. de Minuit, 1967, 191; La voix et le phnomne, PUF,
1967, 114; translated by Leonard Lawlor as Voice and Phenomenon (Evanston, IL:
Northwestern University Press, 2011), 87.