Derrida, Sovereignty and Violence (original) (raw)
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"Law, Violence and Justice in Derrida’s ‘Force of Law’" (author's original version)
Published in "Derrida Today" 17.1, pp. 97-112, 2024
In ‘Force of Law’, Derrida’s discussion of the ‘unstable’ distinction between law and justice exemplifies the deconstructive double bind and makes this a very significant text in virtue of its juridical, political and ethical import. The first section focuses on Derrida’s deployment of the polysemous term ‘force’. ‘Force’ refers to the enforceability of the law but also to the performative and interpretative foundational violence at the moment when a new order of legality is instituted. In the second section, I argue that Derrida’s insistence on the differential relation between law and justice and on the corollary deconstructibility of the law leads to a critique of the current legal system and its axiomatics. I show that deconstruction appeals to unconditional justice in order to call for an excessive responsibility on the part of the legal system, to broaden the category of subject of law, and to have an impact on the lives of others in the margins of the established political order.
What is Justice? Following Derrida's Concept of Law and Justice
I’m trying to think of some unconditionality that would not be sovereign,… . That means that some unconditionality might be associated not with power but with weakness, with powerlessness. J. Derrida What can be understood from Derrida's looking for powerless unconditionality? What can be leart from Derrida's writings about the connection between justice, law, power and democracy? In Derrida's writings democracy can be understood as established through freedom; the right and power of each person to make his own laws, which Derrida calls an ipseity. The endeavour of ipseities to realize their freedom and establishes their own laws can lead to a competitive society in which consciousness is essentially power-oriented. This power-oriented consciousness can become a rogue consciousness whenever the law is enforced by power without justice. Derrida calls the circumstances in which the laws of the strongest are forced upon others an autoimmune situation, because this is a situation in which the implementation of democracy can lead to the ruin of freedom, and thus ruin democracy itself. Since Derrida thinks that justice can maintain freedom, he confronts law with justice. Derrida says that law is deterministic and powerful, while justice is the indeterminate and powerless component that makes democracy possible. In this paper, I analyse what can be the meaning of justice as a basic powerless component for democracy establishment.
Jacques Derrida: Deconstructing Sovereignty
The concept of sovereignty has long preoccupied philosophers and political theorists as far as the formation of state authority and the structures by which it operates are concerned. I will attempt to follow the narrative backbone of Jaques Derrida in the Seminar The Beast and the Sovereign and create the portrait of the sovereign subject, drawing upon the thought of Aristotle, Thomas Hobbes and Carl Schmitt.
Law, institutions, and interpretation in Jacques Derrida
Revista Direito GV, 2017
In this paper, we would like to advocate for a certain reading of Jacques Derrida’s thinking about law, against the grain of most of his reception in legal studies. In this process, we aim to develop a better theoretical understanding of the dynamics of how law institutes itself, and continues to function as an institution, through interpretive practices that must, on one side, respect the rules of the institution and, at the same time, re-institute it on new grounds, as Jacques Derrida points out in his lecture “Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundation of Authority.’” The problem under investigation is how law manages to differentiate itself symbolically from violence and what are the consequences of this concerning legal interpretation. This paper’s partial conclusion is that ultimately we are better off viewing interpretation as neither fully determined by nor fully free from text and/or context.
A Law unto Himself Derrida and the Force of Justice
This chapter examines Derrida's distinction between law and justice, looking at the heritage of Pascal and Montaigne and examining issues of ethical and political responsibility in the process, taking some examples from contemporary American political discourse ________________________________________________________________________________ One of the strongest criticisms aimed at the project of Jacques Derrida in particular, and indeed at literary and cultural theory in general, is the relativistic and apolitical nature of its epistemological position. Derrida has been seen as a nihilist and a relativist and as someone for whom anything goes in terms of ethics and politics. One of the most celebrated examples of this was the Cambridge affair where Derrida's putative award of an honorary doctorate from Cambridge University became a point of contestation among the fellows of that college, and later among the wider academic community.
Sovereignty as its Own Question: Derrida's Rogues
Contemporary Political Theory, 2008
This paper attempts to provide, through a reading of Derrida's Rogues, an account of the political phenomenon where regimes of sovereignty are resisted in the name of the very values-freedom, democracy and human rights, for example-they purport to stand for. To Derrida, sovereignty must simultaneously conform to a logic of both self-identity and of unconditionality. However, the unconditionality that makes sovereignty possible will always threaten and exceed it, something that other accounts like Agamben's try implicitly to deny. In the end, for Derrida, our present political challenge is to recognize, and even affirm, the way the unconditionality of sovereignty is turned against itself. Sovereignty, then, is most effectively dealt with not by imagining a world in which it will no longer occur, nor by simple opposition, but by committing to the very logic of sovereignty itself.
Introductory Editorial - Jacques Derrida: Before, Through, Beyond (the) Law
German Law Journal
On the 8 th of October 2004, Jacques Derrida died. By all accounts, whether sympathetic or unsympathetic to the philosopher, and understanding or not of his work, Derrida had, by the time of his death, gained the status of one of the most influential thinkers of the second half of the 20th century. He combined an essentially philosophical endeavour with an affinity for literary criticism, and a commitment to the venerable French tradition of the public, and, thus, political, intellectual. Unlike Habermasian and post-Habermasian critical theorists, he was not a self-conscious bridge-builder, though his thought nevertheless came to occupy sizeable and highly articulate niches across the world's academies, and most notably in North America, thereby "disseminating" his always quintessentially francophone word far beyond the French and European scene.
Book review of Jacques Derrida: Law as Absolute Hospitality By Jacques de Ville. Routledge (Nomikoi: Critical Legal Thinkers), 2011, 220 pp. £75.00/$125.00 (Cloth). ISBN: 978-0-415-61279-1 Published - doi: 10.1177/1743872112440393d Law, Culture and the Humanities, June (2012) vol. 8 no. 2 382-384 http://lch.sagepub.com/content/8/2/382.full.pdf+html
The deconstruction of sovereignty: unconditionality, freedom and agency
Because the classical concept of sovereignty implies an unconditioned agency, Derrida’s deconstruction of political sovereignty cannot proceed on the model of his deconstructive analyses of concepts such as justice, hospitality, forgiveness and democracy. In this paper, I focus on his reluctance to completely abandon the idea of sovereignty because it is bound up with the ‘classical principles of freedom and self-determination.’ I argue that there are good reasons to pursue the critique of the classical conception of personal agency, freedom and self-determination, and that rejection of those ideals need not imply rejection of the normative priority of individuals.