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).
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.
