Retreating the Political
	Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy Edited by Simon Sparks Warwick Studies in European Philosophy

The relationship between philosophy and the political is as old as philosophy itself. Since Plato's discussion of the polis in the Republic, the philosophical has also been the political and vice versa. Yet today, what would it mean to re-treat this relationship and question the essence of the political philosophically?

Available here in English for the first time, each of these essays by Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy is concerned to reconsider and to reformulate this relationship. They force us to confront the fact that the political has become the unsurpassable horizon of our time. If, today, everything is political, how can we re-treat the political on the basis of its retreat from any specificity whatsoever? Drawing on the work of Marx, Freud, Heidegger, Arendt and Derrida, Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy ask how we can reinvent our philosophical concern with the political, how we can re-treat the political today.

Retreating the Political presents in one volume the work of two of the most important continental philosophers and will interest students of philosophy and contemp-orary political theory.

Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy are both Professors of the Faculté de Philosophie, Université des Sciences Humaines de Strasbourg and Visiting Professors at the University of California, Berkeley. Simon Sparks is a Leverhulme Trust post-doctoral research student also at Strasbourg.