Retreating the Political

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*?

This collection of essays presents, for the first time in English, some of the key issues at the heart of Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy's work. Including several unpublished essays, *Retreating the Political* offers some highly original perspectives on the relationship between philosophy and the political. The authors 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?

The authors ask if we can speak of an *a priori* link between the philosophical and the political; they investigate the significance of the 'figure' - the human being as political subject - in the history of metaphysics; and they inquire how we can 're-treat' the political today in the face of those who argue that philosophy is at an end.

*Retreating the Political* brings together some of their responses to these investigations. We see as a result some of the key motifs that have characterized their work: their debt to a Heideggerian pre-undersanding 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 reinvention and representation and how it has done so since Socrates.