Pheng CHEAH, Suzanne GUERLAC (dir.), Derrida and the Time of the Political
Durham, Duke University Press, 2009, 352 p.
ISBN 978-0-8223-4350-9
RÉSUMÉ
An intellectual event, Derrida and the Time of the Politicalmarks the first time since Jacques Derrida's death in 2004 that leadingscholars have come together to critically assess the philosopher'spolitical and ethical writings. Skepticism about the import ofdeconstruction for political thought has been widespread among Americancritics since Derrida's work became widely available in English in thelate 1970s. While Derrida expounded political and ethical themes fromthe late 1980s on, there has been relatively little Anglo-Americananalysis of that later work or its relation to the philosopher's entirecorpus. Filling a critical gap, this volume provides multipleperspectives on the political turn in Derrida's work, showing howdeconstruction bears on political theory and real-world politics. Thecontributors include distinguished scholars of deconstruction whosethinking developed in close proximity to Derrida's, as well as leadingpolitical theorists and philosophers who engage Derrida's thought fromfurther afield.
The volume opens with a substantial introductionin which Pheng Cheah and Suzanne Guerlac survey Derrida's entire corpusand position his later work in relation to it. The remaining essaysaddress the concerns that arise out of Derrida's analysis of politicsand the conditions of the political, such as the meaning and scope ofdemocracy, the limits of sovereignty, the relationship between theethical and the political, the nature of responsibility, thepossibility for committed political action, the implications ofdeconstructive thought for non-Western politics, and the future ofnationalism in an era of globalization and declining state sovereignty.The collection is framed by original contributions from Hélène Cixousand Judith Butler.
LISTE DES COLLABORATEURS
Étienne Balibar, Geoffrey Bennington, Wendy Brown, Judith Butler, PhengCheah, Hélène Cixous, Rodolphe Gasché, Suzanne Guerlac, Marcel Hénaff,Martin Jay, Anne Norton, Jacques Rancière, Soraya Tlatli, Satoshi Ukai
BIOGRAPHIE
Pheng Cheah is Professor of Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of Inhuman Conditions: On Cosmopolitanism and Human Rights and Spectral Nationality: Passages of Freedom from Kant to Postcolonial Literatures of Liberation and co-editor of Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation. Suzanne Guerlac is Professor of French at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of Thinking in Time: An Introduction to Henri Bergson and Literary Polemics: Bataille, Sartre, Valéry, Breton, co-winner of the Modern Language Association's Scaglione Prize.