Online research in philosophy

Retreating the Political presents many of the key issues at the heart of Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy's work. Published here for the first time in English, we see some of the key motifs that have characterized their work: their debt to a Heideggerian pre-understanding of philosophy; the centrality of the "figure" in western philosophy and the totalitarianism of both politics and the political. Through contemporary readings of the political in Freud, Heidegger and Marx they reveal how philosophy relies on (...) the political for its representation and reinvention and how it has done so ever since Socrates' meditation on the polis. (shrink)

Philosopher, literary critic, translator (of Nietzsche and Benjamin), Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe is one of the leading intellectual figures in France. This volume of six essays deals with the relation between philosophy and aesthetics, particularly the role of mimesis in a metaphysics of representation, and is introduced by Jacques Derrida.