Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 October 2020
Many of us say with a smug surprise: “the Law is founded on its own transgressions.” This may be a convenient aphorism that carries within it the memory—in most cases a textual memory not necessarily elaborated by the user—of Lacan's explanations of the Law of the Father, or of Derrida's meditations on perjury, or, rather, par-jure because ultimately Derrida carefully stopped short at the irreducibility of idioms, the limits of the translatability of philosophies.