Publication Details

Abstract

The paper focuses on the fact that, in recent political philosophy, we have witnessed a critical overturning of an earlier philosophical idealism that invoked friendship as the destination of the political and, in its place, of what I will call a non-philosophical understanding that has determined a certain war (pólemos), and the “friend-enemy” relation, as the permanent ground from which any critical or strategic understanding of the political must now depart. This tendency can most clearly be illustrated by Jacques Derrida’s commentaries on the German jurist Karl Schmitt and the German philosopher Martin Heidegger. In this article, I will address Derrida’s overt polemic and/or Auseinandersetzung with these two thinkers in his later writings. First, I will discuss his polemic with Schmitt from The Politics of Friendship (1990), and will conclude with some preliminary remarks on the culmination of this polemic in his reflections on Heidegger from the same period.