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The Thinker of the Future – Introduction to The Violence of the Masquerade: Law Dressed Up as Justice

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 March 2019

Drucilla Cornell

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There has perhaps been no greater thinker of the future than Jacques Derrida. Throughout his entire body of work Derrida constantly returns to the thinking of the “perhaps,” of the arrizant. This thinking of the “perhaps” takes shape as what is “new” and other to our world, something that is therefore unknowable even as a horizon of ideality that both arises out of and points to what ought to be in any given world. I renamed deconstruction the philosophy of the limit so as to emphasize Derrida as the protector of what is still yet to come. My argument was fundamentally that Derrida radicalized the notion of the Kantian meaning of “laying the ground” as the boundaries for the constitution of a sphere of valid knowledge, or determinant judgment. In Kant, to criticize aims to delimit what is decisive to the proper essence of a sphere of knowledge, say for example science. The “laying of limits” is not primarily a demarcation against a sphere of knowledge, but a delimiting in the sense of an exhibition of the inner construction of pure reason. The lifting out of the elements of reason involves a critique in the sense that it both sketches out the faculty of pure reason and surveys the project as the whole of its larger architectonic or systematic structure.

Type
Articles: Special Issue: A Dedication to Jacques Derrida – Justice
Information
German Law Journal , Volume 6 , Issue 1: Articles: Special issue - A Dedication to Jacques Derrida , 01 January 2005 , pp. 125 - 149
Copyright
Copyright © 2005 by German Law Journal GbR 

References

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10 Benhabib, supra note 2. Seyla Benhabib misunderstands Benjamin here.Google Scholar

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12 Derrida, supra note 3 at 919. I want to note here that this is also a reference to the title of the conference, “Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice,” held at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in October 1989. “Force of Law” was the basis of Jacques Derrida's keynote address at the conference.Google Scholar

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Paradoxically, one can be faithful to legal history only by revising it, by redescribing it in such a way as to accommodate and render manageable the issues raised by the present. This is a function of the law's conservatism, which will not allow a case to remain unrelated to the past, and so assures that the past, in the form of the history of decisions, will be continually rewritten. In fact, it is the duty of a judge to rewrite it (which is to say no more than that it is the duty of a judge to decide), and therefore there can be no simply “found” history in relation to which some other history could be said to be “invented.Google Scholar

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It is illuminating and disquieting to see that we are nonrationally constructing the legal world over and over again… In fact, it is neither. It is not illuminating because it does not throw any light on any act of construction that is currently in force, for although your theory will tell you that there is always one (or more) under you feet, it cannot tell you which one it is or how to identify it. It is not disquieting because in the absence of any alternative to interpretive construction, the fact that we are always doing it is neither here nor there. It just tells us that our determinations of right and wrong will always occur within a set of assumptions that could not be subject to our scrutiny; but since everyone else is in the same boat, the point is without consequence and leaves us exactly where we always were, committed to whatever facts and certainties our interpretive constructions make available.Google Scholar

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The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.Google Scholar

U.S. Const. amend. IX.Google Scholar

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No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.Google Scholar

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32 Bowers v. Hardwick, 478 U.S. 186, 191 (1986).Google Scholar

33 Bowers v. Hardwick, 478 U.S. 186, 192-94 (1986) (footnotes and citation omitted).Google Scholar

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35 See Cornell, Drucilla, Institutionalization of Meaning, Recollective Imagination and the Potential for Transformative Legal Interpretation, 136 U. Pa. L. Rev. 1135 (1988); Drucilla Cornell., The Philosophy of the Limit Ch. 5 (1992) (Chapter five is entitled: The Relevance of Time to the Relationship between the Philosophy of the Limit and Systems Theory: The Call to Judicial Responsibility).Google Scholar

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52 For a more thorough exploration of the appeal to natural and unnatural conceptions of sexuality, see Drucilla Cornell, Gender, Sex and Equivalent Rights, in Feminists Theorize the Political (Judith Butler and Joan Scott eds., 1991).Google Scholar

53 Derrida, supra note 3 at 971.Google Scholar

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