The Economy of Violence Derrida on Law and Justice德里达对法律与司法的暴力经济.pdfVIP

Ratio Juris. Vol. 11 No. 2 June 1998 (168–79) NOTES • DISCUSSION • BOOK REVIEWS The Economy of Violence: Derrida on Law and Justice ROBERTO BUONAMANO A. Law, the Complicity of Right and the Aporetic Experience of Justice Let me begin by gathering, in a sweeping and paradigmatic move, three “Derridean” propositions about the law: 1. The law always tends towards universality; 2. The law operates to maintain, and thus is inseparable from, rights; 3. The law is bound up with the silence of its own force, and is self- preserving. 1. This is a reference to the structural formulation of the law (not its ontology): The moving principle of “intentional content” of the law is gen- erality; “its meaning requires that in its immediacy it must extend beyond the historical, national, geographical, linguistic, and cultural limits of its phenomenal origin” (Derrida 1987, 22). This tendency towards universality might be understood in regard to its implications of disposition, movement and direction. Derrida seems to suggest that whereas the law always presents itself as singular and idiomatic,1 it disposes and inclines itself, by movement and a direction, to rules, norms and values which, a priori, have a general form. It may apply itself, permit on each occasion to be exercised singularly for each case, and this is in fact its appearance (representation) of accessibility, whereas, or rather precisely by reason that, it necessitates a gravitation to universality (the “right path,” the “good direction,” the “just decision”). It is because the law is universal that it is applicable to everyone and can apply 1 In the sense of Kafka’s representation of the law appearing to the countryman as the beyond of a door and its keeper, a door which has been made specifically for that countryman (Derrida 1992a, 183–84, 210). © Blackwell