Derrida and the Political

By Ric Beardsworth

Book Overview

Jacques Derrida, one of the most influential, controversial and complex thinkers of our time, has come to be at the centre of many political debates. This is the first book to consider the political implications of Derrida's deconstruction. It is a timely response both to Derrida's own recent shift towards thinking about the political, and to the political focus of contemparary Continental philosophy.
Richard Beardsworth's study, Derrida and the Political, locates a way of thinking about deconstruction using the tools of political philosophy. Richard Beardsworth has provided students of philosophy, politics and critical theory with a thought-provoking, upper level introduction to Derrida'a work as a political theorist.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0415109671
• ISBN13: 9780415109673
• Release Date: October 1996
• Publisher: Routledge
• Length: 192 Pages
• Weight: 0.64 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 6.1" x 9.1"

Customer Reviews

Fine, fine work - One of the best intro books on Derrida's thought

A truly superb book on Derrida's thought. Informative, nuanced, and wide-ranging, it shows with great care and patience the underpinnings or matrix of Derrida's thought, and does not shy from drawing the conclusions regarding the precise limits of Derrida's thought that every other book on the topic has so far been afraid to address. This book is currently the very best introduction to Derrida on the market, and will probably remain so for some time to come, with Len Lawlor's recent extensively researched book on Derrida and Husserl serving to explain Derrida's work to a more advanced audience already famiiar with Derrida's procedures and interests. The two works could easily be considered as the bookends of scholarship on Derrida, with everything else of merit falling somewhere in between. The reason this book is to my mind the best intro on the market, despite its title, is because it very smartly assumes that the reader is coming from a literature department, which is indeed where Derrida's works are usually taught. The sheer clarity that it introduces as it guides the reader through Derrida's most fundamental expositions one by one through close readings of passages and explications of difficult ideas - particularly Derrida's now-famous exposure of the aporetic nature of philosophy's traditionally most guiding and central principles from the Greeks up 'til today, makes this book an excellent intro that will lead the reader to a very informed position on Derrida's thought. Highly recommended as an accompaniment to Derrida's Of Grammatology, which is a text where many students first encounter the details of Derrida's trenchant critique of metaphysics. It also makes for an excellent sourcebook to come back to in order to clarify Derrida's reasoning in his reading of several major texts. This is a brave book that does not shy from dealing with Derrida's own extreme erudition and his complex arguments. Also, it puts to shame every work ever written by Christopher Norris on Derrida, as the goal of Beardsworth's study is not to demonstrate that Derrida is correct, but to explain what he is trying to do. Its philosophical rigour and cogent explanations make it the book of choice, and once and for all put an end to Norris's notorious inability to understand where Derrida is coming from or where he is trying to go. As a sidenote, I entirely agree with the brief remarks made by the previous reviewer. This book does indeed mark the point at which Derrida's analysis of the concept of "the political" intersects with the future, because Derrida's intense and prolonged focus on this theme (for example in his still-unpublished Paris lectures from the 1980s on the role of nationalism in philosophy) is precisely what may allow us to reinvent the notion of the political. Aside from his many interviews, articles, and even interventions - for example: his arrest in Prague for attending an underground meeting, his support for wrongfully accused death-row inmates,

where we are

This book is a very worthwhile read...if not for the interesting investigation of Derrida's work, but as a great reminder of the importance of philosophy in the future. Philosophy remains necessarily political and it may only be in philosophy that we can try to organize the future.