ABSTRACT
Having explored Strauss’s political philosophy and traced a series of connections between it and the interventions of this group of Straussians in the fields of intelligence production, think tanks and the media, enacted in the service of realising the preconceived policy aim of the invasion of Iraq, the political thought of Jacques Derrida will now be turned to in order to pose a series of challenges to these interrelated issues. The following chapters provide three gestures of critique, the first highlighting an alternative response to the post-9/11 security environment, the second challenging the logics upon which the Straussian project depends, and the last exploring some of the potential problems with Derridean thought in this context. More specifically, Chapter 4 will explore some of the ways in which Derrida’s thought poses a series of challenges to the creation and dissemination of salutary opinions upon which the Straussian interventions were predicated. Given their common inheritance of a preoccupation with the abyssal condition from Nietzsche and Heidegger, amongst others, Derrida’s thought has significant purchase in the context of interrogating Strauss’s political philosophy and the Straussians’ mobilisations of it outlined above. The chapter provides an exploration of Derrida’s commentary surrounding the question of terrorism in the context of 9/11, the “rogue” state, the invasion of Iraq, and the conduct of intellectuals and those in the media. While by no means an exhaustive exposition of Derrida’s explicit interventions, it shows that Derrida’s thought is by no means a- or non-political, and that it may be utilised in challenging the Straussian logic.
