Derrida and the Time of the Political

“Derrida and the Time of the Political undoes once and for all the unproductive opposition between deconstruction and politics that has dominated the United States academy. This is a stellar collection. The pieces are diversified, not a commemorative gesture but a critical engagement. Careful theoretical parsing combines with detailed political awareness to make this book an authoritative document for understanding not only the later Derrida and political deconstruction but the problems and engagements of our time.” - Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, University Professor and Director of the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society, Columbia University

“Derrida and the Time of the Political is the best edited volume available on Derrida and politics.” - Lasse Thomassen, Radical Philosophy Review

“[An] indispensable collection. . . What is particularly remarkable about this collection is the fact that its introduction is one of the very finest, most penetrating, reliable, and lucid presentations of Derrida’s thought in general to have been published to date. This single fact merits inclusion of this volume in every serious general and academic collection; the introduction by Cheah and Guerlac will guide readers to the appropriate texts in Derrida’s oeuvre and to the relevant essays in the volume. Highly recommended. General readers, upper-division undergraduate students and above.” - N. Lukacher, Choice

“The Introduction provides a thorough, thoughtful overview of the question of the political in Derrida’s writings and of the successive ways it was treated or approached in the decades before his death. It also quite convincingly gives an account of the way in which those motifs in his thought that might most obviously be related to political concerns (democracy, sovereignty, justice, law, hospitality and so on) are intimately connected to his more ‘philosophical concerns’. . . . [T]his is a provocative volume that deserves recognition as a major milestone in the longstanding debate about the political dimension of deconstructive thought.” - Ian James, French Studies