Richard Beardsworth has here begun the difficult task of providing us with the markers for evaluating and thinking the meaning of deconstruction in relation to the presuppositions governing political philosophy in all its traditional guises.' Jay Bernstein, University of Essex Jacques Derrida is undoubtedly one of the most influential, controversial and complex thinkers of our time. This is the first book to consider the political implications of Derrida's philosophical project. It is a timely

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... esponse to the current political focus of Continental philosophy and to Derrida's own recent shift towards the political. Richard Beardsworth rejects readings that present Derrida's work as apolitical, relativist, liberal or tendentially anti-democratic. Rather than deducing an external political 'stance' from Derrida's writings, Beardsworth shows that deconstruction Recent decades have seen the emergence of a distinct and challenging body of work by a number of Continental thinkers that has fundamentally altered the way in which philosophical questions are conceived and discussed. This work poses a major challenge to anyone wishing to define the essentially contestable concept of 'the political' and to think anew the political import and application of philosophy. How does recent thinking on time, history, language, humanity, alterity, desire, sexuality, gender and culture open up the possibility of thinking the political anew? What are the implications of such thinking for our understanding of and relation to the leading ideologies of the modern world, such as liberalism, socialism and Marxism? What are the political responsibilities of philosophy in the face of the new world (dis)order? This new series is designed to present the work of the major Continental thinkers of our time, and the political debates their work has generated, to a wider audience in philosophy and in political, social and cultural theory. The aim is neither to dissolve the specificity of 'the philosophical' into 'the political' nor to evade the challenge that 'the political' poses 'the philosophical'; rather, each volume in the series will try to show how it is only in the relation between the two that new possibilities of thought and politics can be activated. Future volumes will examine the work of Gilles Deleuze, Luce Irigaray,