Customer Reviews

Derrida and the Political (Thinking the Political)

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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. 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, his praise for Nelson Mandela - among Derrida's most sustained discussions on the concept of the political are his analyses of the strange yet pervasive worldwide phenomenon of pardoning and the need to forgive which erupted several years ago and culminated with the Pope's blanket apology to "the Jews" for two millenia of abuse and intolerance, his work on forgiveness as a concept, his work on globalization and the dangers of assimilation (both financial, cultural and linguistic) faced by non-Western cultures, his book The Politics of Friendship, his crucial ideas on the political that were first set forth in Memoires-for Paul de Man, his most radical critique of, and challenge to, Heidegger's thought in his book Of Spirit, and his Levinasian thoughts on the ethical relationship to the other in The Gift of Death. The concept of "hospitality" has also guided many of Derrida's recent reflections on the political, most particularly in reference to the highly charged debates around immigration in the European Union (cf. his The Other Heading), which has seen the much-discussed recent rise of fascism in organized political parties in several countries: in Austria, Denmark, France, and now Switzerland. That Derrida is himself a political intellectual is obvious, and that he is attempting to think through the philosophical concept of "the political" is the ultimate goal of Beardsworth's book to explain. Instances of Derrida taking overt political stances on various topics, from academic institutions to human rights, are legion. Cornell once invited him to speak on the noble notion and goals of the university, and he constantly referenced his talk to Cornell's infamous campus bridge, which is the choice site for several Cornell students to commit suicide each year. These shrewd interventions, delivered through his very public role as a professor of philosophy, have scandalized both individual universities and entire countries. As an Algerian Jew transplanted to the intellectual hothouse atmosphere of Paris where he took his higher education, Derrida made a name for himself early on as an individual thinker who refused to ally himself with any popular campus political factions such as Marxism, and is still famous in France for his determined attempt to destabilize French academic language so as to better think through what it stands for and what it unknowingly promulgates, while all the while promoting his own long-term political project to introduce philosophy classes into the curriculum of secondary schools - writing thousand-page reports on its necessity, reports that are just now beginning to see appearance in English translation.

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.