Introduction: Un Cygne Noir

International Journal for the Semiotics of Law - Revue internationale de Sémiotique juridique, 2009

*Political Theory* 29:3 (June 2001) 395-423.

IN THE WAKE of the Paul de Man controversy nearly a decade ago, Jacques Derrida delivered a lecture on the "Force of Law." 1 It had only recently come to light that de Man, an intimate of Derrida and high-profile practitioner of deconstruction, had collaborated with fascism in wartime Belgium. 2 Derrida's work and the poststructuralist movement with which it was associated had long been suspected of-perhaps unwittingly and unintentionallypromoting nihilism and authoritarianism. L'affaire de Man rendered these charges more plausible than ever before. I suggest that the "Force of Law" lecture and subsequently published essay is an apologia, a response to critics, a manifesto on deconstruction and poststructuralism, in the midst of this crisis. 3 To be sure, it is hardly a straightforward declarative statement of purpose or principles. Rather, it demonstrates by example, by action-through "performance," one might saypoststructuralism's understanding of enlightenment, learning, law, and justice. In fact, I argue that Derrida's essay pursues an expositional strategy centered around three less than obvious performances, overlooked or misrecognized by both friendly and critical interpreters: (1) Derrida's restaging of the trial of Socrates, with himself cast in the starring role; (2) his reposing, in the two "testaments" of the essay, the Greek versus Hebraic tension at the core of the so-called Western tradition; and (3) Derrida's deliberate

2009

This book is one in a series of publications by a working research group at the University of Barcelona, Mimesi (http://stel.ub.edu/mimesi/), which has as its primary goal the study of literature and literary theory in the Renaissance and Baroque periods connected with the literary culture of Catalonia, focusing also on how Catalonian culture interacted with other European literary cultures and traditions during the early modern period. The working group organizes conferences, workshops, and other scholarly meetings, which have generated numerous publications, including

Nevada Law Journal, 2010

There is nothing more refreshing than a successful failure. A momentary flaring of flamboyance. A near miss. Fifteen weeks as media monarchs; a good part-a small part-of a decade as a political threat to the order of the academy, if not the stability of the system. The affective bonds and the institutional disruption of youthful and latterly not-so-young dissidents and socialist sympathizers within the law schools definitely had their excitements, their impetus and novelties, and then they grew old, got rejected, disappeared into the shadows, backrooms, and faculty lounges. The various histories assign different figures to the failure of critical legal studies (CLS) in the U.S. of A.: it was killed by the lack of a positive program; it went underground and still subsists as interstitial trench warfare; it slept with the enemy, got distracted by the status incentives and glittering prizes of the law professoriat; it was undermined by its own poor scholarship, by the pretention of philosophy; it fragmented into forty different movements; it was undone by a predilection for abstraction and consequent waning of its visceral commitments. I could think of plenty of other post-mortem descriptive vivisections, but that list will do. Add to it as you wish. This Article will focus on the last interpretation, the decline of critique in law due to its tendency to academicism, a propensity to adiaphorism or indifference to doctrine, which is an essentially hermeneutic diagnosis of an affective inability. 1 One of the founding brothers of the U.S. critical legal movement, Peter Gabel, left conventional law teaching early on to become an activist and administrator. On reflection, a quarter of a century later, youth in the rear view mirror, Gabel sees the decline of radical politics in law, and specifically the all too sudden stasis of the critical legal movement, as a consequence of psychological and spiritual weaknesses. It is true that the movement ran into a wall-the tenure wars, the threat of institutional exile, in a word law professors-but that was only the symptom, the obvious reason for deceleration. Walls, after all, can and have come down. The root cause was an interior weakness to the collectivity, an affective incapacity, and so, in the end, a failure of desire

Liverpool Law Review, 2013

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.

Law and Critique, 2008

This is the first issue of the twentieth volume of Law and Critique, the prime international critical legal theory journal. When we started in the dark late Eighties, law meant exclusively positive law, legal scholarship was committed to the writing of footnotes to judicial decisions and jurisprudence veered between sterile positivism and the celebratory moralism of rights. Legal theory generated a feeling of terminal boredom for student and academic alike. In the intervening period, Law and Critique helped change the landscape of legal scholarship and pedagogy. Articles on semiotics, rhetoric, literature, aesthetics and psychoanalysis have introduced a much wider conception of legality of which state law is only one part. A variety of critical schools, such as postmodernism, phenomenology, postcolonialism, critical race, queer theory, the ethics of otherness, the ontology of plural singularity, the critique of biopolitics and post-politics have been pioneered in these pages and created a new and stronger link between theory and practice. Nowadays even established learned journals carry articles on the 'deconstruction' of doctrine or the 'legal aesthetics' of drama, poetry or the Constitution. It was Law and Critique, as well as a few other radical and theoretical journals, which brought legal scholarship back to the centre of intellectual debate from the outer periphery to which it had been consigned by apologetic jurisprudence. Throughout the last 20 years, Law and Critique retained a strong connection with the Critical Legal Conference. Since 1984, every first weekend in September, the CLC brings together critical and radical legal scholars from all over the world. It has been a phenomenal success despite its modesty. The Critical Legal Conference is exactly that: a conference without organisation, presidents and secretaries, members and subscriptions. The Critical Legal Conference is a transient community; a 'coming' or 'inoperative' community that just lasts for 3 days every year, without orthodoxies, exclusions or stars, which gets down to the business of thinking and