ABSTRACT
The Straussians’ interventions set out above can be read as being closely related to Strauss’s response to the abyssal condition. This is not to posit a simple, causal relationship between Strauss’s thought and the invasion of Iraq, nor to claim that Strauss would necessarily have agreed with each and every policy aim pursued by these Straussians, but rather to suggest that certain assumptions central to Strauss’s thought can be discerned animating the logic underpinning the interventions enacted by these Straussians. The concept of deconstruction and/as resistance can be shown to challenge at least three such fundamental assumptions: the friend/enemy binary, the figure of the regime and the logic of justice as the reason of the strongest. These assumptions perform the function of foundational premises upon which the Straussian project rests; they provide its momentum and make possible the project of opinion construction it propounds. Challenging them therefore disrupts the entire basis and rationale of the project, exposing its contingent and politicised nature, and undermining the processes of opinion construction central to it, thereby resisting its totalising designs. Consequently, it unsettles the logics upon which their interventions vis-à-vis the invasion of Iraq depended for their intelligibility and internal consistency. The deconstructive gestures set out here are, thus, not simply of philosophical significance, but are also intended to expose and disrupt the premises upon which these Straussians’ foreign policy activities relating to the invasion of Iraq depended.
