Volume 45, Number 11 · June 25, 1998
The Politics of Jacques Derrida
By Mark Lilla
BOOKS DISCUSSED IN THIS ARTICLE
History of Structuralism
by François Dosse, translated by Deborah Glassman
University of Minnesota Press, two volumes, 458 and 517 pp., $85.00
The Other Heading: Reflections on Today's Europe
by Jacques Derrida, translated by Pascale-Anne Brault, by Michael B. Naas
Indiana University Press,, 129 pp., $19.95
Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International
by Jacques Derrida, translated by Peggy Kamuf
Routledge, 198 pp., $18.99 (paper)
Force de loi
by Jacques Derrida
Paris: Editions Galilée, 146 pp., 135 FF (paper)
Moscou aller-retour
by Jacques Derrida
La Tour d'Aigues: Editions de l'Aube, 157 pp., 89 FF (paper)
Politics of Friendship
by Jacques Derrida, translated by George Collins
Verso, 308 pp., $20.00 (paper)
Cosmopolites de tous les pays, encore un effort!
by Jacques Derrida
Paris: Editions Galilée, 58 pp., 66 FF (paper)
The history of French philosophy in the three decades following the Second World War can be summed up in a phrase: politics dictated and philosophy wrote. After the Liberation, and thanks mainly to the example of Jean-Paul Sartre, the mantle of the Dreyfusard intellectual passed from the writer to the philosopher, who was now expected to pronounce on the events of the day. This development led to a blurring of the boundaries between pure philosophical inquiry, political philosophy, and political engagement, and these lines have only slowly been reestablished in France. As Vincent Descombes remarked in his superb short study of the period, Modern French Philosophy (1980), 'taking a political position is and remains the decisive test in France; it is what should reveal the ultimate meaning of a philosophy.' Paradoxically, the politicizing of philosophy also meant the near extinction of political philosophy, understood as disciplined and informed reflection about a recognizable domain called politics. If everything is political, then strictly speaking nothing is. It is a striking fact about the postwar scene that France produced only one genuine political thinker of note: Raymond Aron.
Review, 7206 words
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