In today’s episode of the Telos Press Podcast, David Pan talks with Aryeh Botwinick about his article “Contra Originalism: The Elusive Text” from Telos 195 (Summer 2021). An excerpt of the article appears here. In their conversation, they discussed the doctrine of originalism in constitutional theory, the role of the Bible in Western legal and constitutional history, the relation between originalism and skepticism, Derrida’s weak messianism, the way that Derrida’s skepticism undermines itself through the category of the gift, the relationship of originalism to the paradox of sovereignty, and the reason why Hobbes’s statement that “life is motion” is the only defensible phrase. If your university has an online subscription to Telos, you can read the full article at the Telos Online website. For non-subscribers, learn how your university can begin a subscription to Telos at our library recommendation page. Print copies of Telos 195 are available for purchase in our online store.
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As an occasional feature on TELOSscope, we highlight a past Telos article whose critical insights continue to illuminate our thinking and challenge our assumptions. Today, Robert Ramos looks at Jonathan Blair’s’s “Context, Event, Politics: Recovering the Political in the Work of Jacques Derrida” from Telos 141 (Winter 2007). |
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In “Context, Event, Politics: Recovering the Political in the Work of Jacques Derrida,” Jonathan Blair asks us to reconsider the standard narrative that has been used to categorize and also mischaracterize Derrida’s work. This is the position that Derrida’s early work begins with the institution of deconstruction and that at a point in the late 1980s Derrida’s thinking experienced a shift or a turn from deconstruction and to an explicit focus on the ethical and the political. Against this narrative, Blair argues that the question of politics appears as early as 1970. 
