Dans Le Capital, le phénomène du fétichisme apparaît bien plus lié aux conditions générales de l’échange qu’à celles de l’exploitation capitaliste. Il n’est dès lors pas certain qu’il disparaisse dans la société post-capitaliste que décrit Marx dans ce même ouvrage, parce que cette société maintient le principe de l’échange équivalent. C’est seulement dans la Critique du programme de Gotha que Marx semble prendre conscience de cette difficulté, à laquelle il répond en opposant au principe bourgeois du droit l’idée d’un « (...) droit inégal ». Cette idée, dans sa radicalité, serait à rapprocher de ce que Derrida pense sous le nom de justice.In Das Kapital, fetishism appears to be more closely linked to generic exchange conditions than to capitalist exploitation. Consequently, fetishism may endure in the post-capitalist society envisioned by Marx in this same work, because this society will maintain the principle of equivalent exchange. Marx seems to realize this difficulty only in the Critique of the Gotha Programme, where he tries to solve it by opposing to the bourgeois law system the idea of « inegal law ». This idea, and its radical content, can be discussed in relation to the concept of justice as it is developed by Derrida. (shrink)

Marx's thought about justice is essentialist and dialectical. It has been interpreted in terms of immoralism. It is rather a synthesis of the traditional natural law, based on the Aristotelian concept of nature as the potential for perfection or ideal fulfilment, radically different from the Hobbesian reductionist concept of nature as atomistic and mechanical; of the tradition of dialectics in its German idealist form; and of Feuerbach's humanism. Marx's explicitly realist idea of science reveals 'veiled wage-slavery'. Concentration on the market (...) exchange, to the exclusion of the subsequent exploitative use of labour power, deceives exclusively analytic observers into the belief that there is some justice in capitalism. Marx characterized the proletariat as the 'universal class', capable of bringing about the fulfilment of the human essence in a family-style mode of production , because it is the victim of total injustice . However, he criticized workers for not rising above such bourgeois selfishness as demanding 'a fair wage', which is not even a coherent concept. Capitalism is not only a moral injustice, but an ontological injustice, a violation of the worker's humanity. It is coercion into alienation, fetishism and idolatry. (shrink)

Marx and Rawls seems to have a very different concept of justice. Marx argued that the concept of justice functions in the performance of the dominant ideological mode of production required for the conduct, as universally binding legal code. Rawls is argued that justice is the first virtue of social institutions, its law may be recognized by all such people: they are fair and reasonable to discuss the issue is how to equitably divide among themselves the burden of social cooperation (...) and interests. Although embodied in Marx and Rawls an important difference between the various positions still exist, but I believe that the concept of justice is obviously two different positions, is able to reconcile. Despite the different effects of Hegel and Kant, Marx and Rawls's view can still show the same place. In a clear political concept of justice, Rawls believes that acceptable principles of justice, must be in the social system can be implemented. This led to his "Kantian constructivism", close to Hegel's view, at this point, Marx laid him on the universal, social rejection of a priori principles of justice. I believe that both Marx and Rawls are asked, and what can be seen as a social system to achieve the principles of justice as fairness. However, during which there are two important differences. First, Marx's vision, seems to be a Hume and Rawls beyond the so-called "environmental justice" society, while Rawls , the social environment beyond the justice is utopian. Secondly, Marx believed that, as the social basis of market relations should be exceeded, because the relationship between these markets to include the producers of natural and social process of production of the products of labor and social alienation. Although environmental justice in the society beyond the market's demise may be, Rawls was declared to be a just solution in the competitive demands of any society, the demise of the market are not. I believe that, if Marx's rejection of the market, as a fundamental denial "commodity fetishism", then the position of Marx and Rawls will be able to reconcile. The author concludes that, in addition to Marx's concept of the future classless society with the ideal ingredients, capitalism and the market in the concept of justice, Marx and Rawls's position is very close. Man and Raids appear to have quite different views at justice. Marx claims that the concept of justice functions ideologically to represent conduct required by the prevailing mode of production as universally binding imperatives. Rawls claims that justice is the first virtue of society, whose principles may be agreed to by all persons who impartially and rationally deliberate on the issue of fairly dividing the burdens and benefits of social cooperation. I argue that these apparently different positions on justice can be reconciled, although important differences between the standpoints of Marx and Rawls remain. Despite the differing influences on them of Hegel and Kant, the views of Marx and Rawls can be shown to converge. In proposing an explicitly political conception of justice, Rawls argues that acceptable principles of justice must be realisable in social institutions. This brings his' Kantian constructivism 'closer to the Hegelian view, on which Marx bases his rejection of universal, socially transcendent principles of justice. I argue that both Marx and Rawls can be seen as asking what social institutions can realise principles of justice as fairness. Nevertheless, two important differences remain. Marx seems to envisage a society which transcends the 'circumstances of justice', as specified by Hume and Rawls, whereas Rawls a society beyond the circumstances of justice as utopian. Secondly, Marx claims that market relations should be transcended as the basis of society, since they inherently involve alienation of producers from the social process of production and from the product of their social labour. However, while elimination of markets might be possible in a society that transcends the circumstances of justice, Rawls claims that it is not possible in any society where a fair resolution of competing claims is necessary. I argue that the positions of Marx and Rawls can be reconciled if we take Marx's objection to markets as fundamentally an objection to the 'fetishism of commodities'. I conclude that, apart from the utopian element in Marx's conception of a future classless society, the positions of Marx and Rawls on the justice of capitalism and the market are quite close. (shrink)

Jacques Derrida: Law as Absolute Hospitalityãeepresents a comprehensive account and understanding of Derridaâe(tm)s approach to law and justice. Through a detailed reading of Derridaâe(tm)s texts, Jacques de Ville contends that it is only by way of Derrida's deconstruction of the metaphysics of presence, and specifically in relation to the texts of Husserl, Levinas, Freud and Heidegger - that the reasoning behind his elusive works on law and justice can be grasped. Through detailed readings of texts such as To (...) speculate âe" on Freud, Adieu, Declarations of Independence, Before the Law, Cogito and the history of madness, Given Time, Force of Law and Specters of Marx, De Ville contends that there is a continuity in Derridaâe(tm)s thinking, and rejects the idea of an âe~ethical turnâe(tm). Derrida is shown to be neither a postmodernist nor a political liberal, but a radical revolutionary. De Ville also controversially contends that justice in Derridaâe(tm)s thinking must be radically distinguished from Levinasâe(tm)s reflections on âe~the otherâe(tm). It is the notion of absolute hospitality - which Derrida derives from Levinas, but radically transforms - that provides the basis of this argument. Justice must on De Villeâe(tm)s reading be understood in terms of a demand of absolute hospitality which is imposed on both the individual and the collective subject. A much needed account of Derrida's influential approach to law,ãeeJacques Derrida: Law as Absolute Hospitalityãeewill be an invaluable resource for those with an interest in legal theory, and for those with an interest in the ethics and politics of deconstruction. (shrink)

Tracing the sign -- Signing the trace -- The messianic without messianism -- Mourning terminable and interminable : law and (commmodity) fetishism -- Justice, law, and Antigone's singular act -- Generalizing the economy of fetishism.

This paper gives an account of the most significant elements of Derrida’s ethical thought, drawing on the desert of the Hebrew Bible, which Derrida associates with a moral law that is ethically troubling. Partly with reference to Kierkegaard’s account of the story of Abraham and Isaac, Derrida examines how ethical law can become subordinate to the sovereignty of the power apparently at the source of ethics which may then destroy moral law. The political equivalent of this (...) is the decision proposed by Carl Schmitt, drawing on Kierkegaard. Derrida’s famous statement that “deconstruction is justice” is the recognition that justice, and ethics in general, is caught between the formality of law and the violence of the sovereign power. One outcome of this is sacrifice as substitution, where ethics becomes recompense for violation through sacrifice. Sacrifice is the offering of a substitute. The substitution becomes repeated and itself is then the source of violence contravening some sense of ethics. Derrida’s attempts to escape from these deserts include a poetics which recognises the subjective and the aesthetic in the interpretation of law. It also includes the development of a form of sacrifice which is the individual responding to violation in an individualised way which cannot be substituted. (shrink)

The circumstance that on the one hand the daily sustenance of labour power costs only half a day's labor, while on the other hand the very same labor power can work during a whole day, that consequently the value which its use during one day creates is double what he [the capitalist] pays for that use, this circumstance is without a doubt a piece of good luck for the buyer but by no means an injustice [Unrecht] to the seller [the (...) worker].[T]he surplus product [is] the tribute annually exacted from the working class by the capitalist class. Though the latter with a portion of that tribute purchases the additional labor power even at its full price, so that equivalent is exchanged for equivalent, yet the transaction is for all that only the old dodge of every conqueror who buys commodities from the conquered with the money he has robbed them of. (shrink)

The rule of law is a necessary condition for any substantive theory of justice. If a theory sacrifices the rule of law, justice, too, is sacrificed. The connection between the necessary condition and justice is explored in the work of John Rawls, H. L. A. Hart, Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim, Albert Camus and William Shakespeare. The conceptions of justice elaborated in each of these political thinker's works share very little more than the rule of law. Since the conceptions examined are (...) so different and the necessary condition is contained in each, I conclude that there is substantial support for the thesis. ;In order to do justice to the texts examined in this dissertation the plain language, the words on the page, must be given priority but cannot be fully determinative of the text's meaning. The immanent structure of the text, the rules of the text which give it shape and form, must also be discerned. There are no particular rules for interpretation in general, yet each text contains within it its own individual rules. The rules of the text are what allow the meanings of the text to play themselves out for different readers. Understanding the history of the text is also important for interpretation. ;Some interpretations of the theories of justice examined here have sought to change the substance of that theory through interpretation. For example, Marx's theory depends upon the law of equal commodity exchange. As shown in chapter three, if an alien supposition of distributive justice is interpreted into Marx's theory so that the surplus value which Marx claims belongs to the capitalist is redistributed, then the proposed transition to communism, which Marx analyzed and supported, will not occur. Doing justice to Marx's texts allows Marx's theory of justice to come through and be judged on its own terms. Only after that has been accomplished can it be evaluated and compared with other theories. The same association between interpretative method and substantive meaning is demonstrated for each theory. The conclusion compares interpretation in law and drama and connects doing justice to texts with justice. (shrink)

The essay is a critical revision of various of Marx’s approaches in his analysis of capitalism in “Das Kapital”. One can distinguish immanent, normative critiques from transcendental and objectivistic ones. The review of the normative standards used in each case leads to the questions of how Marx determined and used the relationships of justice and law and the capitalist mode of production. Orthodox Marxist views (most recently C. Menke) claim that Marx did not criticise capital as unjust and understood the (...) law of capital only as private law that stabilised domination. Against this, it is shown that he certainly bases his “critical presentation” on an (almost Kantian) constitutional (“rechtsstaatliches”) concept of private law and public law. Thus the “popular prejudice” of “human equality”, defined by Marx as an epochal and systematic condition of the capitalist exchange of goods, becomes apparent as a covert reference to the historical (America, French Revolution),public-lawdeclarations of human rights. And in the chapter “Struggle for the length of the working day” Marx presents the decisions of this dispute between “equal rights” first and foremost in the systematic historical actions of the constitutional powers (legislature, executive and judiciary). At the same time, however, he attempts to ironise and defame this public-law and deliberative, democratic dispute and then to misinterpret it as a violent “civil war”. Because Marx in his further presentation ignores this legal-democratic dispute, including a potential human-rights critique and (possible!) future regulation of capitalism, focussing instead on objectivist concepts of history and development, he can only insufficiently grasp the still challenging relationship between democracy and capitalism. (shrink)

This paper is a reply to Zhongqiao Duan, who challenges my reading of Karl Marx on the question whether capitalism can be criticized on grounds of justice. Marx is naturally read as claiming that capitalism is unjust to wage labourers, but perhaps surprisingly, Marx never makes such claims, but on the contrary denies that capitalism is unjust, and even scolds working class advocates for making the charge of injustice against capitalism. Although Marx charges capitalism with exploiting workers, he does not (...) consider this unjust because capitalist exploitation only corresponds to the prevailing mode of production, and Marx regards standards of justice as consisting in correspondence to the prevailing productive mode. Duan raises several objections to the account just summarised and I reply to them. (shrink)

“Deconstruction is justice”. How are we to understand this striking and extraordinary sentence Jacques Derrida has written? Whose justice? Which deconstruction? The article asks these questions by thinking the continuity and discontinuity between Jewish, especially rabbinic, thinking and Derrida's writing. The article approaches Derrida's ethico-legal thinking through the tradition of Judaismby putting the sentence ``deconstructionis justice'' on the stage of the Jewish jurisprudence, which may be revealed as utmost important in relation to deconstructibility of law and undeconstructibility (...) of justice. The main question is, how Derridashares the tradition of Judaism. If deconstructive legal studies promises to take justice seriously then it have to understand Derridean deconstruction of law being “based” on the double tradition of the philosophico-phenomenological and Abrahamic thinking. The article concentrates on the Abrahamic tradition in Derrida's thinking. The first part of the article asks after the mystical foundation of law and its relationship to the writing of law. The second one asks the principle of justice. The third part addresses the problem of the time of justice and its relationship to messianism. All in all, the article traces through the writing, principle, and time ofjustice possible chiasmas of Derrida and the Jewish jurisprudence. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Tracing a Traumatic Temporality: Levinas and Derrida on Trauma and ResponsibilityCathrine Bjørnholt Michaelsen (bio)For more than three decades, Jacques Derrida and Emmanuel Levinas develop their conceptions of trauma and responsibility in close, critical, and engaged readings of each other’s works.1 In a text first published in 1973, Levinas explicitly considers different aspects and implications of Derrida’s “new style of thought,” as well as his own relation (...) to Derrida, describing their recurring crossing of paths as “a contact at the heart of a chiasmus,” which is further said to constitute “the very modality of the philosophical encounter” (PN 56, 62).Since the publication of “Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundation of Authority’” in 1990, in which Derrida makes the somewhat surprising announcement that justice can be considered the undeconstructible condition of deconstruction (AR 243), as well as the subsequent publication of Specters of Marx in 1993, which is often designated as the work in which Derrida begins to consider ethico-political concerns more explicitly than hitherto, there has been much scholarly discussion about a so-called “ethical turn” of deconstruction.2 Throughout [End Page 43] the 1990s and up until this day a tendency prevails among certain scholars to strive for the establishment and legitimization of a more or less harmonic accordance between Levinas and Derrida with reference to concepts that preoccupy them both (e.g., “justice,” “hospitality,” “the other,” or “responsibility”). However, as Martin Hägglund has convincingly argued, a certain disjoining of Derrida and Levinas is required in order not to conflate what ultimately amount to two very different styles of writing and thinking. Such disjoining is particularly important when it comes to an issue such as responsibility, which is too often and too quickly categorized as an “ethical issue,” as if such a categorization were self-explanatory.3The aim of this article is not to carry out a comparative study focusing on the similarities and dissimilarities of the writings of Derrida and Levinas. Instead, the article is an attempt to let a “third” voice arise from the ongoing philosophical conversation between Derrida and Levinas, which is neither entirely accordant nor discordant, in order to emphasize a certain traumatic temporality of responsibility that finds a space in both their works while indicating the subtle nuances of disjuncture separating these spaces. In what follows, I therefore wish to explore some of the most significant displacements to which the notions of trauma and responsibility are subjected throughout the writings of Derrida and Levinas, as a result, to some extent at least, of their repeated chiasmic encounters.By way of introduction, it should be noted that both Derrida and Levinas transport the notion of trauma away from its most frequent psychopathological, psychoanalytic, or neurological areas of interpretation, just as they transport the notion of responsibility away from its usual autonomist or decisionist connotations toward a more extensive space of signification.4 Bearing this introductory note in mind, the question concerning what precisely enables this transport of trauma will direct the approach of the article. In other words, the article will question what it is about the structure of “trauma” or “traumatism” that allows the somewhat “fearsome” generalizations—to employ [End Page 44] Derrida’s own formulation from “Typewriter Ribbon”5 —to take place in the writings of both Derrida and Levinas.The suggestion in what follows will be that it is the peculiar temporality of trauma that allows for the generalizations, openings, and disseminations of trauma in Derrida and Levinas. More specifically, this traumatic temporality inscribes itself through an interruption of what might, with a reference to Heidegger, be called the vulgar understanding of time.6 Drawing attention to the temporality of trauma as a vehicle of transportation, the article advances in six main sections, each exploring different aspects of the relationship between temporality, trauma, and responsibility displayed in Derrida and Levinas.Traumatic TemporalityAs is well known, at least since Freud, trauma only becomes a trauma belatedly, or after its own fact, since a trauma only manifests itself by withdrawing itself in the traces it leaves behind, that is, by its aftermath and its effects of repetition and deferral. Trauma is somehow... (shrink)

This article presents a critical examination of Igor Soikhedbrod’s Revisiting Marx’s Critique of Liberalism: Rethinking Justice, Legality, and Rights. We argue that the book presents an important criticism of antinomian forms of critical theory, which underplay the extent to which Marx engaged in an imminent critique of liberal societies, including the rule of law, and upheld that progressive advances enshrined in this rule should be carried over or sublated in a communist dispensation.

This essay is a study on national self-determination and justice from the differing perspectives of John Rawls and Rabindranath Tagore. Both thinkers have addressed the problem of conflict caused by national loyalties. Influenced by Immanuel Kant’s philosophy of cosmopolitanism, John Rawls articulates the “Law of People” that suggests that mutual consent consists in economic interdependence among nations and tolerance for cultural diversity under monitored conditions of the international relations. Such an arrangement is not inclusive as it excludes the subaltern perspectives (...) and reinforces the hierarchies between East and West. Tagore offers post-colonial versions of nationalism and cosmopolitanism that call for a creative and spiritual unity of nations through cultural exchange where each is equal in dialogue. The essay makes a case for Tagore’s cosmopolitanism being more inclusive than Rawls, yet, limited in its accommodation of the “other” as Tagore’s creative unity domesticates this “other” on the basis of spiritual familiarity. The essay also critiques Martha Nussbaum’s cosmopolitanism that suggests reconciliation of both. It makes a case for a paradoxical understanding of hospitality, friendship and otherness theorized by Jacques Derrida as the basis of self-determination and global justice. (shrink)

"When he died in 2004, Jacques Derrida left behind a vast legacy of unpublished material, much of it in the form of written lectures. With The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume I, the University of Chicago Press launches an ambitious series of English translations of these important works based upon the meticulously established original French editions." "In this seminar from 2001 and 2002, Derrida explores the persistent association of bestiality or animality with sovereignty and continues his deconstruction of (...) the traditional determinations of the human. The beast and the sovereign are connected, he contends, because neither animals nor kings are subject to the law - the sovereign stands above it, while the beast falls outside the law from below. He then traces this association through an astonishing array of texts, including La Fontaine's fable "The Wolf and the Lamb," Hobbes's biblical sea monster in Leviathan, D. H. Lawrence's poem "Snake," Machiavelli's Prince with its elaborate comparison of princes and foxes, a historical account of Louis XIV attending an elephant autopsy, and Rousseau's evocation of werewolves in The Social Contract." "Deleuze, Lacan, and Agamben also come into critical play as Derrida focuses in on questions of force, right, justice, and philosophical interpretations of the limits between man and animal." --Book Jacket. (shrink)

Considerations of Jacques Derrida’s oeuvre, and of deconstruction as theory and practice, are bound to revolve around Derrida’s key notion of différance, developed at the outset of his career. However, Derrida’s conception of justice, which started to make its presence felt in his work in the late 1980s, should also be considered to play a major role, not least when bearing in mind his declaration, made in 1989, that “deconstruction is justice.” In this paper, the relation between (...) différance and justice is explored against the background of Martin Heidegger’s essay “Anaximander’s Saying” which, it is argued, played a formative role in the development of Derrida’s thinking. Derrida’s analysis of justice as being comprised of three aspects—justice as idea, as law or right and as deconstruction—is shown to bear a strong resemblance with the conceptual scheme drawn from Anaximander in Heidegger’s essay. The parallels between Derrida’s différance and the notion of usage, described by Heidegger as “the early word for Being,” are also brought out. (shrink)

While it is often taken for granted that the concepts of property and of distributive justice are capable of working together to generate norms which can enhance positive social and political relations, in particular the value of community, this Article argues otherwise. Relying on critical tools deriving from Hegel’s Philosophy of Right and Marx’s notion of fetishism, the author claims that the Rawlsian conception of distributive justice fetishizes the institution of property, and claims to "distribute" participation in society amongst its (...) members as if this amounted to a distribution of so many objects. Taken in this way, the concept of distributive justice has no respectable content. What social justice requires is a means to ensure that people are not "socially excluded," which requires each individual’s participation in the social and cultural enterprise. This sort of participation can no more be "distributed" than can life itself, and the realization of this point undermines the cogency of most discussions of distributive justice. (shrink)

This paper considers the traditional debate about Marx and justice in light of Jacques Derrida's recent text, Spectres of Marx Specifically, I treat Derrida's consideration of the Marxist notion of justice in terms of the problematic of time. Following Derrida, I suggest that while much of the history of Marxism relies on a teleological and Hegelian understanding of time‐becoming‐history, the Marxist critique of justice is actually made possible by what Derrida calls a ‘messianic’ notion of time; (...) one wherein history does not come to an inevitable and predictable end, but rather breaks away to begin a whole new history. I conclude that the outcome of Derrida's analysis is that our responsibility as Marx's heirs is to resist the dogmatism inherent in the former logic, and to heed the normative call of the latter. (shrink)

“For what tomorrow will be, no one knows,” writes Victor Hugo. This dialogue, proposed to Jacques Derrida by the historian Elisabeth Roudinesco, brings together two longtime friends who share a common history and an intellectual heritage. While their perspectives are often different, they have many common reference points: psychoanalysis, above all, but also the authors and works that have come to be known outside France as “post-structuralist.” Beginning with a revealing glance back at the French intellectual scene over the (...) past forty years, Derrida and Roudinesco go on to address a number of major social and political issues. Their extraordinarily wide-ranging discussion covers topics such as immigration, hospitality, gender equality, and “political correctness”; the disordering of the traditional family, same-sex unions, and reproductive technologies; the freedom of the “subject” over and against “scientism”; violence against animals; the haunting specter of communism and revolution; the present and future of anti-Semitism (as well as that which marked Derrida’s own history) and the hazardous politics of criticizing the state of Israel; the principled abolition of the death penalty; and, to conclude, a chapter “in praise of psychoanalysis.” These exchanges not only help to situate Derrida's thought within the milieu out of which it grew, they also show more clearly than ever how this thought, impelled by a deep concern for justice, can be brought to bear on the social and political issues of our day. What emerges here above all, far from an abstract, apolitical discourse, is a call to take responsibility—for the inheritance of a past, for the singularities of the present, and for the unforeseeable tasks of the future. (shrink)

This interview with Michal Ben-Naftali from March 2004 is one of Derrida's last. It begins with the question of the relationship between love, law, and justice and then moves on to discuss everything from the secret, hospitality, friendship, sacrifice, pardon and psychoanalysis to the relationship between deconstruction and melancholy.

When he died in 2004, Jacques Derrida left behind a vast legacy of unpublished material, much of it in the form of written lectures. With The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume 1, the University of Chicago Press inaugurates an ambitious series, edited by Geoffrey Bennington and Peggy Kamuf, translating these important works into English. The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume 1 launches the series with Derrida’s exploration of the persistent association of bestiality or animality with sovereignty. In this (...) seminar from 2001–2002, Derrida continues his deconstruction of the traditional determinations of the human. The beast and the sovereign are connected, he contends, because neither animals nor kings are subject to the law—the sovereign stands above it, while the beast falls outside the law from below. He then traces this association through an astonishing array of texts, including La Fontaine’s fable “The Wolf and the Lamb,” Hobbes’s biblical sea monster in Leviathan, D. H. Lawrence’s poem “Snake,” Machiavelli’s Prince with its elaborate comparison of princes and foxes, a historical account of Louis XIV attending an elephant autopsy, and Rousseau’s evocation of werewolves in The Social Contract. Deleuze, Lacan, and Agamben also come into critical play as Derrida focuses in on questions of force, right, justice, and philosophical interpretations of the limits between man and animal. (shrink)

Tyrannie, ce vieux mot qui nous vient de Grèce, comment l'entendre encore, et d'une autre oreille? Que serait aujourd'hui la tyrannie? Cet essai traite des rapports entre le droit et la justice mais aussi entre le pouvoir, l'autorité et la violence. La justice n'est jamais épuisée par les représentations et par les institutions juridiques qu'on tente d'y ajuster. Le juste transcende à jamais le juridique, certes, mais il n'est pas de justice qui ne doive s'inscrire dans un droit, dans un (...) système et dans une histoire de la légalité, dans la politique et dans l'Etat. Même si à son tour le droit prime la force, si c'est là son devoir, il n'est pas de droit qui n'implique en lui-même le pouvoir de sa mise en œuvre, une technique, donc, et la possibilité de la guerre. Point de devoir sans contrainte, rappelle Kant. Ce qui prétend avoir force de loi inscrit alors l'appel à la force dans le concept même de son autorité. Le risque de tyrannie n'attend plus, il guette à l'origine de la loi. Il veille sur sa conséquence, sur ce que Pascal nomme, dans sa pensée si connue mais si énigmatique, la " suite " : " Justice, force. - Il est juste que ce qui est juste soit suivi, il est nécessaire que ce qui est le plus fort soit suivi. La justice sans la force est impuissante ; la force sans la justice est tyrannique [...] Il faut donc mettre ensemble la justice et la force... " Reprenant un mot de Montaigne, Pascal parle aussi, " d'un fondement mystique " de " l'autorité " : " Qui la ramène à son principe, l'anéantit. " Un tel anéantissement peut s'engager selon des voies multiples. Il s'agirait ici d'analyser en somme cette multiplicité même. En revenant sur la tradition de Montaigne et de Pascal, puis en s'expliquant avec un texte troublant de Walter Benjamin, Pour une critique de la violence (1921), cet essai situe la déconstruction devant la loi, plus précisément au regard de la justice à laquelle elle se doit. Car la justice n'est pas devant la déconstruction, elle l'engage et lui donne d'abord son mouvement. A quelles conditions peut-on alors penser les axiomes suivants : " La justice est un des noms de l'indéconstructible " ou encore " la déconstruction est justice "? (shrink)

This article considers Derrida's reading of Walter Benjamin's ‘Critique of Violence’ in ‘Force of Law’ with particular reference to the claims Derrida makes in his controversial ‘Post-Scriptum’. The article focuses in particular on Derrida's claim – a claim situated within the context of a discourse on the ‘final solution’ – that the ‘Critique of Violence’ is too Heideggerian. This claim is explored in the article mainly through reading Heidegger's ‘Anaximander's Saying’ with the purpose of showing some affinities (...) between his and Benjamin's notions of justice and also with respect to the importance both thinkers bestow on the purity of the name. Particular attention is paid to the notion of ‘divine violence’ and its ‘complicity’ with the ‘worst’ also in relation to the questions of the witness and the animal in Benjamin and Heidegger. The article insists on the importance of the theme of the singular witness in the thinking of justice and divine violence and opens up possible avenues for exploring Derrida's relation to Benjamin. (shrink)

. Under‐the‐covers undercover investigations: Some reflections on the state's use of sex and deception in law enforcement. Criminal Justice Ethics: Vol. 11, No. 1, pp. 13-24.

Philosophy, political philosophy and legal philosophy are all concerned with issues of justice and the validity of law (also known as the force of law ). These two problem areas are discussed against the background of the intersection of traditional theories of natural law and legal positivism, mediated by the contribution of the historical school. In addition the influence of the two neo-Kantian schools of thought (Baden and Marburg) required attention, particularly because certain elements in the thought of Derrida, (...) Dooyeweerd and Habermas are (implicitly) influenced by these schools. Derrida positions the problem of justice within the context of distinguishing universality and singularity (what is unique) and he alludes to the difficulty of bridging the gap between the two. It turned out that modern nominalism had an important effect on all three of the mentioned thinkers, in spite of their willingness to recognize “extra-mental” forms of universality. The problem of legal validity (the “force of law”) appears to be an instance of the interconnectedness between different aspects of reality, namely the jural and the physical . In order to account for this coherence Dooyeweerd developed a theory in which both the uniqueness and coherence between different aspects are explained in terms of inter-modal analogies. On this basis the difference between law and justice is specified by distinguishing between constitutive legal principles and the regulatively deepened (disclosed) principles of legal morality (such as f ault, equity, bona fides and so on). It will be shown that the idea of positivization , shared by thinkers coming from different backgrounds, is an important ingredient of an understanding of the nature of legal validity . Explaining it will require a focus on the nature of state law, of the power of the state, and of the legal competence entailed in the office of government. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:diacritics 34.1 (2004) 3-17 [Access article in PDF] Universal Shylockery Money and Morality in The Merchant of Venice Simon Critchley Tom McCarthy What if Nietzsche were a Jew, and a mean-minded Venetian Jew at that? We'd like to begin with the thought experiment of imagining The Merchant of Venice as a genealogy of morality and imagining Shylock as Nietzsche. What is The Merchant of Venice about? What is at (...) stake in this oddly inside-out drama, where a piece of good old Elizabethan comic Jew-baiting rotates 180 degrees into a devastating study of Christian anti-Semitism only to flip back into what it seemed to deny? Our initial hypothesis is that it is nothing less than an inquiry into the origin of our moral concepts of justice, good and bad, and more particularly guilt, law, mercy, and love. It is here that a link with Nietzsche suggests itself, particularly with the Second Essay of On the Genealogy of Morals.* * *How do we breed an animal with the right to make promises? For Nietzsche, the human being is an originally forgetful creature, like a young child. To make this originally forgetful creature remember requires physical discipline; it behooves punishment. The teaching of morality is never gentle; it never droppeth from heaven like gentle rain. On the contrary, if something is to be retained in memory, it must be burned in. The origin of memory lies in pain and cruelty: "Man could never do without blood, torture and sacrifices when he felt the need to create a memory for himself" [GM 61]. Nietzsche's first, astonishing hypothesis in the Second Essay is that the origin of concepts like responsibility and conscience lies in cruelty—cruelty administered and maintained through a corporal and corporeal regime. Further, as religions are systems of cruelty, all forms of asceticism originate in the same painful place. "Consider the German punishments," Nietzsche proposes—and we all know that there's nothing quite like the German punishments: stoning, breaking on the wheel, piercing with stakes, tearing apart or trampling with horses, boiling in oil, flaying alive, cutting straps from the flesh, smearing the wrongdoer with honey and leaving him to the flies in the blazing sun. As Nietzsche quips, with magnificent understatement, "With the aid of such images and procedures one finally remembers five or six 'I will not's'" [GM 62]. It is on the basis of this burned-in memory of cruelty that good, decent, upright burghers such as ourselves acquired the habit of moral reasoning:Ah, reason, seriousness, mastery over affects, the whole sombre thing called reflection, all these prerogatives and showpieces of man: how dearly they have been bought! How much blood and cruelty lie at the bottom of all "good things." [GM 62] [End Page 3]"Dearly bought": let's hold onto that trope of purchasing. In another extraordinary passage of the Second Essay, Nietzsche explains the origin of thinking itself in terms of economic activity:Setting prices, determining values, contriving equivalences, exchanging—these preoccupied the earliest thinking of man to so great an extent that in a sense they are thinking [das Denken ist]. [GM 70] In the beginning was trade. Human activity begins with exchange, with the to and fro of buying and selling, which are forms of life older than all other social alliances and organization. It is from here, Nietzsche insists, that human beings arrive at the first moral canon of justice:"Everything has its price; all things can be paid for"—the oldest and most naïve moral canon of justice, the beginning of all "good-naturedness," all "fairness," all "good will," all "objectivity" on earth. [GM 70] Which brings us to the origin of das Bewusstsein der Schuld and schlechte Gewissen, the consciousness of guilt and bad conscience. Nietzsche's hypothesis here, and our theme is beginning to come into focus, is that the origin of guilty conscience lies in the relation between a creditor and debtor, Glaubiger und Schuldner. The spiritual concept of guilt, Schuld, originates in the very material concept of Schulden... (shrink)

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. (shrink)

Readings of Derrida’s work on law and justice have tended to stress the distinction between them. This stress is complicated by Derrida’s own claim that it is not ‘a true distinction’. In this essay I argue that ordinary experiences of the inadequacy of existing laws do indeed imply a claim about what would be more just, but that this claim only makes sense insofar as one can appeal to another more adequate law. Exploring how Derrida negotiates a (...) subtle path between classical Platonism and classical conventionalism about justice, the attempt is made to take seriously Derrida’s aim to affirm the idea of a ‘mystical’ foundation of the authority of laws by taking ‘the use of the word “mystical” in what I venture to call a rather Wittgensteinian direction’. (shrink)

To apply oneself to Derrida's comprehension of “law,” to probe the connections between Derrida and law, raises a seemingly insurmountable challenge for anyone wishing to elucidate what the conjunction masks as it brings not‐together the inscription of a proper noun in the French language and that of a noun in the English language. To be sure, one cannot speak of a history, but only of histories. Derrida acknowledged that the word “law” can point to significance as it (...) issues “from morality, from legality or from politics, even from nature”. Derrida's lesson in the dismantling of positivism's hegemonic distortions is powerful. The first manifestation of Derrida's positivism pertains to his distinction between law and justice. (shrink)

Ross, Alf. On Law and Justice. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1959. xi, 383 pp. Reprint available December 2004 by the Lawbook Exchange, Ltd.

Carver's interpretation of Marx's value theory (Terrell Carver, ?Marx's Commodity Fetishism?, Inquiry, Vol. 18 [1975]) is accepted, but his rejection of it criticized by explicating the reasons Marx gives for his theory after his faulty analysis of exchange-value at the very beginning of Capital. The central concept of abstract labour is shown to relate commodity exchange to other forms of distribution; by being compared to these the function of commodity exchange is recognized as the attachment of an amount of abstract (...) labour to a commodity, and exchange-value as that which determines that amount What it means to say value is thought to inhere in commodities is explicated. (shrink)

Jacques Derrida’s and Gilles Deleuze’s philosophies of justice share many similar features. For both, justice involves an overturning of law by extralegal means, made possible by an “undecidability” in the judgment-making process. To distinguish their conceptions of justice, we examine their implicit modes of non-classical reasoning with regard to “otherness,” building from Routley and Routley and Daniel Smith, to conclude that Derrida’s thinking on justice is at least paracomplete (or analetheic) while Deleuze’s is just paraconsistent (or dialetheic).

Early on in Specters of Marx, the first sentence in Exordium reads: ‘Someone, you or me, comes forward and says: I would like to learn to live finally’. In the last paragraph of the last chapter, Derrida gives the injunction: ‘If he loves justice at least, the “scholar” of the future, the “intellectual” of tomorrow should learn it and from the ghost’. The ghost is the gift Derrida leaves us, yet, what can ghosts teach us about justice and (...) how may we (dare we) learn from them? Derrida invokes Levinas's name for the only time in Specters of Marx, with the line ‘The relation to others – that is to say, justice, writes Levinas’. From ‘Violence and Metaphysics’ to ‘At This Very Moment in This Work Here I Am’, the spectral relation between Derrida and Levinas already performs spectral justice. How do we say ‘J'accepte’ to spectral justice – justice that we cannot rightly possess? The figure and logic of the ghost serve not merely rhetorical purposes but, in its non-presence and presence, the ghost becomes the trace of the justice that we can neither own nor disown, but need to learn to live with, even if, in politics and in life, the fear of ghosts remains. (shrink)

Language & Logic -- Glossary -- Aristotle's syllogisms -- Russell's paradox & Frege's logicism -- profile: Aristotle -- Russell's theory of description -- Frege's puzzle -- Gödel's theorem -- Epimenides' liar paradox -- Eubulides' heap -- Science & Epistemology -- Glossary -- I think therefore I am -- Gettier's counter example -- profile: Karl Popper -- The brain in a vat -- Hume's problem of induction -- Goodman's gruesome riddle -- Popper's conjectures & refutations -- Kuhn's scientific revolutions -- Mind (...) & Metaphysics -- Glossary -- Descartes mind-body problem -- Brentano's intentionality -- Fodor's language of thought -- Parfit's persons -- profile: René Descartes -- Chalmer's zombies -- Zeno's paradoxes -- Kant's left hand -- Theseus' ship -- Laplace's demon, determinism, & free will -- Ryle's ghost in the machine -- Ethics & Political Philosophy -- Glossary -- Aristotle's ethics -- States of nature and the social contract -- Kant's categorical imperative -- profile: Immanuel Kant -- Mill's utilitarianism -- Marx's historical materialism -- The trolley problem -- Religion -- Glossary -- Aquinas' five ways -- Anselm's ontological argument -- profile: Thomas Aquinas -- Epicurus' riddle -- Paley's watchmaker -- Pascal's wager -- Hume against miracles -- Grand Moments -- Glossary -- Socrates' method -- Plato's cave -- Aristotle's four causes -- Lucretius' atomism -- profile: Ludwig Wittgenstein -- Berkeley's idealism -- Kant's synthetic a priori -- Hegel's dialectic -- James' pragmatism -- Moore's common sense -- Wittgenstein's picture theory of language -- Continental Philosophy -- Glossary -- Nietzsche's Superman -- profile: Friedrich Nietzsche -- Derrida's deconstruction -- Heidegger's nothing -- Sartre's bad faith. (shrink)

Peter Fitzpatrick’s writings prove once and for all that it is possible for a law professor to write in beautiful English. His work also proves once and for all that the dominating tradition of Anglo-American legal philosophy and of law teaching has been barking up the wrong tree: namely, that the philosopher and professional law teachers can understand justice as nested in empty forms, better known as rules, doctrines, principles, policies, and other standards. The more rigorous our analysis or decomposition (...) of the forms, we have believed, the more closely do we access the identity of laws. Justice has been assumed to be a matter of intellectually accessing such analysed forms. Fitzpatrick’s articles and books embody an implicit critique of the analytic view of law and of justice. My entry point into this critique is his preoccupation with Jacques Derrida’s theory of laws as universals and with Derrida’s theory of justice as an inaccessible immediacy or presence in context-specific or concrete experienced events. Each event is experienced in an official’s decision. Such a decision represents what Derrida, Fitzpatrick, and Hegel call ‘individuality’. -/- Derrida’s theory of law presents a conundrum. Derrida misses the possibility that law may exist by virtue of its content rather than its form. Derrida misses this possibility because, heavily influenced by Kant (in Derrida’s theory of law), Derrida associates law with universals. This is so because Kant (and Derrida) are preoccupied with the identity of what counts as a law (lois) rather than with a law’s legitimacy. A universal cannot exist unless it is legitimate, and it is legitimate, I claim, by virtue of its content. In his association of law with universals, Derrida presupposes that legal knowledge exists with reference to a territorial-like boundary. The forms are represented or signified by signs (signifiers) within a boundary of the ultimate form (the state, the nation, or humanity). This ultimate form as a universal, like the discrete rules or forms, lacks socially contingent content. A boundary separates knowable universals from the unknowable world on the exteriority of the boundary. The unknowable world is constituted by concrete events experienced in context-specific circumstances. In his legal theory Derrida hones in upon the decision as the experienced event. In a decision, one is present or immediate with the event. Derrida considers such immediacy as justice. The immediacy, however, can only be represented as a sign (sometimes called a signifier). The sign, in turn, represents an empty signified or form, according to Derrida. Because the immediacy remains a representation rather than a presentation of the experienced event, laws as universals cannot be just. The rupture between the inaccessible immediacy of a decision on the one hand and the represented empty forms on the other is critical to Derrida’s theory of law. -/- I claim that this rupture permeates Derrida’s writings about law because Derrida possesses a territorial-like sense of legal knowledge. I shall argue to this effect as follows. In the first section I shall explain the importance of Fitzpatrick’s exposure of the vacuity of the foundation of the system or structure of universals. In the second section I shall flesh out two elements of Derrida’s legal theory: law as form and the ipseity or concrete event that the form excludes from law. This takes me to the third section, where I shall elaborate how Derrida’s legal theory presupposes knowledge as territorial. I shall argue in the final section that this very sense of territorial knowledge prevents justice from accessing law and law from accessing justice. I conclude with the hint of a very different sense of law, one that draws from experiential knowledge in contradistinction to territorial knowledge. (shrink)

본 논문의 목적은 데리다의 법철학을 헌법이론의 관점에서 재독해하여, 근대 법/정치 이론이 봉착한 딜레마와 해체론에 제기되는 비판을 데리다의 법 이론이 어떻게 극복하는지를 살피고, 동시에 그러한 시도가 입헌민주주의에 새로운 대안을 제시해 줄 수 있는지를 모색하는 데 있다. 데리다는 해체론을 통해 지금까지 정당하다고 여겨져 온 법과 정치질서의 정당성에 물음을 던지고 근대적 법/정치 이론에 내재된 논리적 모순과 은폐된 폭력성을 폭로한다. 법과 정의를 구분하는 데리다에게 헌법의 정당성이란 하나의 해석적 모델이며, 입헌권력의 성립 이후에야 이뤄지는 사후 정당화에 불과한 것이다. 데리다는 해체적 작업이 근대적 법/정치 이론과 입헌주의적 기획의 (...) 맹점과 모순을 노정하는 기능뿐만 아니라 법과 정치 질서를 새롭게 재구축하는 구체적이고 실천적인 대안임을 주장하며, “해체가 곧 정의”임을 선언한다. 이러한 해체론의 관점에서 바라볼 때 헌법의 정당성은 정의를 통해, 그리고 정의를 실현시키고자 하는 끊임없는 해체와 재구축의 과정들의 반복을 통해 도출될 수 있다. 따라서 데리다에게 헌법의 정당성은 제헌의 순간이라는 과거의 가상적인 사건과 정치신학적 개념이 아닌 미래의 시점에 도래할 대상으로, 약속으로 남아 있게 된다. 이에 기반하여 본 논문은 데리다의 해체론이 기존의 법과 정치질서를 성찰하도록 강박하며, 이를 토대로 새로운 계몽과 시민교육의 효과를 의도하고 있음을 주장한다. 결국 데리다의 해체론이 가진 진정한 의미와 가치는 헌법의 정당성과 헌법적 정의의 한계를 노정하고 교조화된 법과 정치질서를 넘어설 수 있는 실천의 동기를 제공해 준다는 데 있다. (shrink)

Cosmopolitans argue that the account of human rights and distributive justice in John Rawls's The Law of Peoples is incompatible with his argument for liberal justice. Rawls should extend his account of liberal basic liberties and the guarantees of distributive justice to apply to the world at large. This essay defends Rawls's grounding of political justice in social cooperation. The Law of Peoples is drawn up to provide principles of foreign policy for liberal peoples. Human rights are among the necessary (...) conditions for social cooperation, and so long as a decent people respect human rights, a common good, and the Law of Peoples, it is not the role of liberal peoples to impose upon well-ordered decent peoples liberal liberties they cannot endorse. Moreover, the difference principle is not an allocative or alleviatory principle, but applies to design property and other basic social institutions necessary to economic production, exchange and consumption. It presupposes political cooperation—a legislative body to actively apply it, and a legal system to apply it to. There is no feasible global state or global legal system that could serve these roles. Finally, the difference principle embodies a conception of democratic reciprocity that is only appropriate to cooperation among free and equal citizens who are socially productive and politically autonomous. a Footnotesa I am grateful to K. C. Tan for many helpful discussions and criticisms of this essay. I am also grateful to the other contributors to this volume for their comments, and to Ellen Paul for her many helpful suggestions in preparing the final version of this essay. (shrink)

Cet ouvrage donne une place importante à l'idée de la justice selon deux philosophes : selon la théorie de Thomas Hobbes elle est prise dans un cercle entre la loi, le souverain et la violence, tandis que pour Jacques Derrida, elle ne doit pas être limitée à la loi. L'intention de l'auteure, n'est pas d'apporter une nouvelle théorie, mais de montrer qu'une idée philosophique peut avoir une influence en politique ou en droit selon les propositions des Critical Legal Studies.

This paper examines Jacques Derrida's analysis of Walter Benjamin's ‘Critique of Violence’ in the context of their respective theories of the university. Whereas Derrida foregrounds the complex ways that the university and law are intertwined, Benjamin claims that the ‘educative power’ stands removed from the law by identifying the university with ‘divine violence’. ‘Force of Law’ not only questions the possibility of a neutral, pre-legal space that Benjamin's theory warrants, ‘Force of Law’ also draws attention to the laws (...) structuring the colloquia that gave rise to Derrida's text. This paper claims that Derrida's analysis of justice, law, violence, and justesse is thus informed by a theory of the university, and that the ways in which Derrida's theory of law stands opposed to Benjamin's parallels the ways in which Derrida's theory of the university questions Benjamin's understanding of the ‘educative power’. This paper concludes by drawing attention to the demand posed by the absence of justice in the academy. Although the laws of the academy produce justesse in the present, this negatively affirms justice in the future, which cannot wait. (shrink)

Justice in the bible -- Plato's The Republic -- Aristotle's Nicomachean ethics -- Justice in Islamic law -- Saint Thomas Aquinas' summa theologica -- Confucius in china -- The conquest of America -- Machiavelli: "the end justifies the means" -- Jiirgen Habermas' theory of diskursethik -- John Rawls' Justice as fairness -- Ronald Dworkin's Taking rights seriously -- Robert N Ozick's Anarchy, state, and utopia -- Justice as "efficiency" -- Justice and "desert" -- Precedents -- Wojciech sadurski -- Marx's justice (...) as a "critique" -- Alasdair macintyre -- "Feminist" justice. (shrink)

How to introduce 'politics' as a specific concept within a deconstructive style of thinking? In order to answer this question, this contribution compares Derrida with Laclau. According to the former the starting-point of a deconstructive style of thinking is différance. It links together the economic detour of homecoming and the relation to otherness. Laclau's analysis of politics as hegemonization within a situation of undecidability presupposes this notion of différance and can therefore be useful in introducing politics within a deconstructive (...) style of thinking. But there still is a major difference between Derrida and Laclau's decisionism: if différance as the relation without relation of economy and otherness cannot avoid decisions based on power in order to stabilize the social, these decisions are always marked by passivity and therefore deconstructible in the name of 'justice' that exceeds politics even if it takes place nowhere but within politics. Key Words: decisionism • . Derrida • . hegemony • . Laclau • . law. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to respond to Jacques Derrida’s reading of Immanuel Kant’s laws of hospitality and to offer a deeper exploration into Kant’s separation of a cosmopolitan right to visit ( Besuchsrecht) and the idea of a universal right to reside ( Gastrecht). Through this discussion, the various laws of hospitality will be examined, extrapolated and outlined, particularly in response to the tensions articulated by Derrida. By doing so, this article will offer a reinterpretation of (...) the laws of hospitality, arguing that hospitality is not meant to capture all the conditions necessary for cosmopolitan citizenship or for a thoroughgoing condition of cosmopolitan justice as Derrida assumes. This is because hospitality could be understood as the basic normative requirement necessary to establish an ethical condition for intersubjective communication at the global level, where discursive communication regarding the substance of a future condition of cosmopolitan justice is to be subjected to global public reason. (shrink)