[On October 2, the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory hosted a lecture by Geoffrey Bennington (Emory) entitled "Politics in Deconstruction" as part of the Fall 2018 Modern and Critical Theory Lecture Series. Below is a response to the lecture from Robin Sudanan Turner (French & Italian).] "If it worked, we wouldn't need it": On the Politics of Deconstruction Written by Robin Sudanan Turner (French & Italian) Prof. Geoffrey Bennington, professor of philosophy at the European Graduate School and Asa G. Candler Professor of Modern French Thought at Emory University, returned for his second consecutive year to the Modern Critical Theory Lecture Series on October 2, 2018^. He began his talk “Politics in Deconstruction” with citations of Rousseau’s The Social Contract (1762) which described the intrinsic failure of sovereignty in the political system. If the sovereign could be sovereign and self-same, he explained, politics would fall away because we would not need it. Politics exists because sovereignty is bound to fail. For instance, the existence of laws is indicative of the absence of justice. Moreover, the figure of the lawgiver, who symbolizes the creation of the legal system, is a foreign body. Therefore, the laws that are administered upon us are impossible to fully understand, given that they originate from a foreign body. Similarly, the executive body inevitably ends up supplanting the sovereign power, which it originally served, again resulting in the failure of the sovereign system. Sovereignty – its structure, implementation, and continued necessity in society – follows what Bennington phrases as the concept of “If it worked, we wouldn’t need it.” In a quick recap of his lecture from last year, Bennington reviewed the three “threads” or ways into understanding the general structure of the trace as Derrida outlines it: “The general structure of the unmotivated trace has communicate within the same possibility, and without one’s being able to separate them except by abstraction, the structure of the relation to the other, the movement of temporalization, and language qua writing” (Of Grammatology, 47). Bennington explained that at the core of Derrida’s thought from 1991 until his death in 2004 were three key strands: writing, temporalization, and the relation to the other (described by the term différance, coined by Derrida in his 1963 “Cogito et histoire de la folie”). In his lecture last year, he had focused on language qua writing, so this year he would look at the relation to the other. With respect to the latter, by using the example of ‘x’, Bennington shows that this letter derives its definition – either as a letter of the alphabet, an algebraic symbol that stands for another element, etc. –from its differentiation from others and its relationship with other system elements. This type of distinction refers back to the Derridian concept of hauntology, developed in Spectres of Marx (1993). Hauntology describes how the origin or, linguistically, the etymology of the word – or ‘x’ – depends on an exterior, already existent set of factors. Hauntology can be further extended to demonstrate the Derridian idea of the “necessary structural possibility.” The concept is best demonstrated by the example of the personal signature. The act of assigning a signature to mark the individual’s consent, acknowledgement, or presence, for example, can only function in the context that by some token, the signature contains the potential for it to be forged or imitated by another party. The ‘threat’ of imitation gives the value of the signature: there is never an absolute certainty that the signature is authentic, that it is produced in the same identical way, or that it is produced by the same individual. In other words, the signature is ‘haunted’ by this necessary structural possibility. The conditions of this relationship between the possible and the impossible can be thought of using the model of the relationship described by Aristotle as the accident and the essence. The connection between the accident and the essence is unnecessary and the state of accidental properties does not affect the essence. Similarly, the form of the signature may change, but the essence of the signature continuously relies on the set of conditions that it may not be an authentic signature but rather, an imitation. Bennington ended his lecture with a discussion regarding the trace of politics. Represented by ‘x’, politics becomes ‘digne de son nom’ or ‘worthy of its name’. Humans inherit the capacity or the methodology of thinking; ‘to be is to inherit’, according to Derrida. Names and concepts never come alone. They come into conceptualization with established definitions and conditions. ‘X’ – in this case democracy – is left to interpretation in individual reading. The concept of democracy as practiced involves multiplicity and dispersion and goes against the sovereignty described in classical philosophy. Democracy is never realized; it is a part of ‘avenir’ – the French word for future –, which can be also deconstructed into the phrase ‘a venir’ indicating ‘what is to come.’ The present form of the democracy is what society can achieve, not the vision of democracy in the future. The end of ‘x’ – the endgame of democracy – cannot be realized by a society.