Derrida, Sovereignty and Violence (original) (raw)

The late thought of Jacques Derrida identifies a number of doubles: law and justice, absolute and conditional hospitality, democracy and democracy-to-come. Justice, for example, is the larger principle to which the law aspires, but justice will always remain in excess of law. Justice both makes law possible by providing it with its meaning, but it also makes law impossible by setting up an aspiration that the law can never meet. On the one hand, the law comes into being only in response to justice, but the only existence justice has is by way of law. Normally, justice is seen as the larger, unconditional phenomenon that the law constricts violently by narrowing and reducing it. This paper argues that violence does not only reside on the side of constriction in Derrida, but that unconditionality is itself always a principle of violence. Indeed constriction and unconditionality work togther insperably even as they challenge and defy one another. By connecting these themes with Bataille's theory of sovereignty, this paper explores the horizons of violence in Derrida's political thinking.