Book Description
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.
About the author
Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy are both Visiting Professors at the University of California, Berkeley, and authors of The Experiences of Freedom and The Birth to Presence. Editor Simon Sparks is a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the Universite des Sciences Humaines de Strasbourg.
