Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-7cvxr Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-26T19:34:41.580Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Violence, Justice, Deconstruction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 March 2019

Costas Douzinas

Extract

Core share and HTML view are not available for this content. However, as you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the ‘Save PDF’ action button.

In his famous talk “The Force of Law,” given at Cardozo Law School in 1989, Derrida linked his work with the Critical Legal Studies movement. This lecture signposted a change of direction in deconstruction. Early deconstruction had been criticized for formalism, aestheticism and scant recognition of political realities. Derrida's (in)famous statement that “there is nothing outside of the text,” was a rare philosophical sound-bite meaning that language, communication and social interaction cannot avoid, as commonly assumed, the uncertainties and ambiguities of the written text. But the aphorism was often misinterpreted to signify extreme idealism, disregard for the real world and literary and philosophical reductionism. But the “Force of Law” signified a clear turn towards political and ethical engagement, symbolized by the discussion of law and justice. After that talk, deconstruction became obsessed with questions of ethical responsibility, the meaning of friendship and the complex relationship with the other. Before his death, Derrida wrote a number of essays on contemporary political events. He denounced the Kosovo and Iraq wars and devoted a book to ‘rogue’ elements and states, in which he attacked the United States as the greatest rogue. Just before his untimely death in 2004, Derrida had become preoccupied with the concept of sovereignty at the basis of the tragedies and abuses of modernity. It is this political and ethical turn of deconstruction that I would like to address in the context of critical legal theory.

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. 171 - 178
Copyright
Copyright © 2005 by German Law Journal GbR 

References

1 Derrida, Jacques, Voyous (2003).Google Scholar

2 Derrida, Jacques, The Force of Law. ‘The Mystical Foundation of Authority', 11 Cardozo Law Review 919 (1990).Google Scholar

3 Cover, Robert, Violence and the Word, 95 Yale Law Journal 1601 (1986).Google Scholar

4 The linguistic and interpretative aspects of the law were always a part of legal theory. They were somewhat neglected during the heyday of legal positivism, but they have been reinstated within jurisprudence. Law is often now seen as an exclusively linguistic and meaningful construct and various types of hermeneutics and literary theory have been adopted to explain and justify the operations of the “prison house of language.” For a critique of these theories see Douzinas & Gearey, Critical Philosophy of Law Chapter 13 (2005).Google Scholar

5 Cover, supra note 3 at 1607.Google Scholar

6 Derrida, Jacques, Declarations of Independence, 15 New Political Science 15 (1986).Google Scholar

7 Lyotard, Jean-Francois, The Differend 5 (1988).Google Scholar

8 Leonard, Tom, Situations Theoretical and Contemporary, quoted in Willy Maley, Beyond the Law: the Justice of deconstruction, 10 Law and Critique 49, 59-60 (1999).Google Scholar

9 Douzinas, Costas, The End of Human Rights Chapters 5 and 6 (2000).Google Scholar

10 Derrida, supra note 2, at 993.Google Scholar

11 Id. at 990.Google Scholar

12 Id. at 991.Google Scholar

13 Douzinas, & Warrington, , Justice Miscarried Chapter 4 (1995).Google Scholar