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This book focuses on the paradoxical character of law and specifically concerns the structural violence of law as the political imposition of normative order onto a "lawless" condition. The paradox of law which grounds and motivates Christoph Menke's intervention is that law is both the opposite of violence and, at the same time, a form of violence. The book develops its engagement with the paradox of law in two stages. The first shows why, and in what precise sense, the law is irreducibly characterized by structural violence. The second explores the possibility of law becoming self-reflectively aware of its own violence and, hence, of the form of a self-critique of law in view of its own violence. The Book's philosophical claims are developed through analyses of works of drama: two classical tragedies in the first part and two modern dramas in the second part. It attempts to illuminate the paradoxical nature of law by way of a philosophical interpretation of literature. There are at least two normative orders within the European ethical horizon that should be called "legal orders" even though they forego the use of coercion and are thus potentially nonviolent. These are international law and Jewish law. Understanding the relationship between law and violence is one of the most urgent challenges a postmodern critical legal theory faces today. Self-reflection, the philosophical concept that plays a key role in the essay, stands opposed to all forms of spontaneity.
constitutively tied to “the” political community: “There is no law outside the polity”; “the justice of law can exist only in a community of equal citizens” (p. 14). Both conjunctions –the unitary conception of the community and the concession of monopoly power over the law to the polity –are problematic. They tend to obscure patterns of inequality, sources of resistance within configurations of power,14 intersectional structures of discrimination and polycentric lines of exclusion, and unequal distributions of resources.15 Claude Lefort has accordingly substituted the
scene: in the guise and on the scene of the subject).45 The experience of tragedy thus accentuates the problem of how there can be a critique of the violence of law at all. “Critique,” Benjamin writes, is the title for the “discriminating and decisive approach” (“Critique”, 251). The critical “discrimination” being sought is one between the fateful 35 Law and violence 35 violence that continues and repeats itself ad infinitum and an agency (or “violence”) that breaks with fate by sublating itself in its purpose. But as tragedy demonstrates, in law, the two –the
official discrimination in the provision of social services, the promotion of economic development, and from other laws that favour the Jews in the officially Jewish State ( Rouhana, 1998 : 277–96). During the active years of the peace process, the Barak government had been willing to restore greater equality of rights for the Palestinian population by returning some expropriated land, allowing legal
becoming inextricable. And in fact, many of the characters were already dealing with structures that diminished their life chances before 9/11; the ‘war on terror’ only exacerbated discrimination, oppression, and violence they had already been experiencing. Ruby elaborates: [Vickie] didn’t have to tell me that we got to fight the war
. Foucault, M., 2008. The Birth of Biopolitics. Lectures at the Collège de France 1978–79 , New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Fuller, G., 2008. ‘Welcome to Windows 2.1: Motion Aesthetics at the Airport’, in M. B. Salter, ed., Politics at the Airport , Minneapolis, MN/London: University of Minnesota Press. Gandy, O. H., 2010. ‘Engaging Rational Discrimination: Exploring Reasons for Placing Regulatory Constraints on Decision Support
contention that one is faced with a complex legal problem 39 which may or may not be resolved on an ad hoc basis. A second question is where to place the threshold for intervening with or without UN authorization: on systematic human rights violations (such as systematic discrimination akin to apartheid or ‘internal colonialism’), on something more grave, such as so-called egregious crimes (i.e. ethnic cleansing, war crimes, crimes against humanity), or only at the level of mass
. Loader, I., 1999. ‘Consumer Culture and the Commodification of Policing and Security’, Sociology 33(2): 373–92. Lyon, D., 1994. Electronic Eye: The Rise of Surveillance Society , Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Lyon, D., ed., 2003. Surveillance as Social Sorting: Privacy, Risk, and Digital Discrimination , London/New York: Routledge
part, been collected together in state organizations with little regard for their differences and historical enmities. These reciprocal misgivings and traditional contrarieties have problematized attempts at co-operation in the name of higher interests affecting all sectors and have resulted in discrimination against minorities and political persecutions. The social dimension of security must include
allow for such a move. The discrimination and singling out of Milosevic’s Serbia therefore had to be based on its moral inferiority. This categorisation, one no longer premissed on a mediation between sovereign actors, was already present during the Rambouillet talks (of February–March 1999). The end result of the Rambouillet ‘negotiations’ could therefore only be a Western dictate