Jacques Derrida fo llows Nietzsche and Heidegger in elaborating a critique of 'Western metaphysics,' by which he means not only the Western philosophical tradition but 'everyday' thought and language as well. Western thought, says Derrida, has always been structured in terms of. ![]() Jacques Derrida’s “Force of Law” (in “Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice”) is crucial to thinking the nexus between deconstruction and critical legal theory, and is must reading for anybody interested in the critical field. Deconstruction often involves the analysis of certain binary dichotomies or dialectical oppositions (spirit/matter, mind/body, culture/nature etc.) which inhabit Western metaphysical thought (e.g. Hegel’s “Phenomenology of Spirit”). Deconstructive analysis attempts to show that these binary dichotomies or dialectical oppositions implicitly privilege one term over the other (for example, in Hegelian “Phenomenology,” spirit is privileged over matter, mind over body, culture over nature etc.), and then further shows how that binary dichotomy or dialectical opposition is subverted and overturned by re-privileging the supplementary, deprivileged term over the privileged dominant term (as in Marx, Nietzsche, or Freud, matter is privileged over spirit, body over mind, nature over culture etc. In “Force of Law,” Derrida argues that Western political theory is based on a binary dichotomy or dialectical opposition which implicitly privileges the sovereign state or rule of “law” over the primordial (“natural”) state of “force” or “violence,” by suggesting that the establishment of a sovereign state and its rule of law necessarily involves the repression or sublimation of the use of force or violence as a solution to conflict. The sovereign state then claims to stop the self-perpetuating cycle of violence (the Hobbesian “war of each against all”) which is ‘the state of nature’ prior to law by inaugurating the sovereign rule of law and establishing a sovereign state. But the sovereign state and its rule of law, Derrida argues, are necessarily based upon a founding act of violence (a coup d’etat, a revolution etc.) which establishes the sovereign rule of law, and also relies upon the sovereign’s monopoly on violence to sustain and enforce the sovereign rule of law. Therefore the sovereign state and its rule of law, instead of opposing the rule of force or violence, necessarily perpetuate it, since they rely upon the sovereign’s ability to exercise superior violence to enforce the rule of law and to censor or repress challenges to the sovereign rule of law. Create windows 10 usb install. Derrida then analyzes Walter Benjamin’s “Critique of Violence” to show that this deconstructive aporia also inhabits Benjamin’s thinking of a “divine” or “messianic” violence (the revolutionary violence of the general strike) as an alternative to sovereign state violence, which disturbingly resembles the ‘Nazi’ theory of sovereign violence (Carl Schmitt) that Benjamin ostensibly opposes. Derrida’s critique could also be made of Giorgio Agamben’s opposition to “the state of exception” in contemporary political theory, which, while brilliantly analyzing the current slide toward a sovereign state of exception or state of martial law in the contemporary ‘war on terror,’ has no alternative to that state of sovereign violence except the revolutionary violence of the general strike, which is also only too likely to instigate another regime of violence. See the edited collection, “Towards a Critique of Violence,” ed. Moran and Salzano, for an interesting early Agamben essay on this subject.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |