Before the Law

More on Simon Critchley

UPDATE:  The full version of the review is now downloadable from SSRN here.

Having finally finished reading Simon Critchley's Infinitely Demanding, I am in a somewhat better position to opine than in my previous post on this topic, and have put my two bits in the form of a short review (forthcoming in the journal Law, Culture & the Humanities).  Here are the first two paragraphs, which more or less contain my bottom line:

      For the past fifteen years, Simon Critchley has been one of the foremost explicators of contemporary Continental philosophy for the English-speaking audience.  During the same period, he has been developing his own philosophical positions on ethics, politics and art in a series of books and articles that both draw on and re-work these Continental sources.  In his new book, Infinitely Demanding, he condenses this body of work into a succinct programmatic summa of his own ethical-political philosophy, one whose practical-political aim is a defense of a revised concept of political anarchism.
    If, as I will suggest below, his analysis provokes some questions that leave the ultimate success of his project in doubt, that does not diminish the value of this ambitious book, which raises all of the right questions at our current philosophico-historical juncture, questions that Anglo-American moral and political philosophy has for the most part swept under the rug.  Above all, Critchley should be applauded for recognizing that the problem of political motivation – the impetus to act politically as opposed to other motives for and forms of action – is not simply an empirical question of individual or group interest, but also a philosophical problem, perhaps the most pressing political-philosophical problem of our time.  The disenchanting powers of modernity have provided fodder for philosophical reflection at least since the Romantic era.  If these powers have now undermined our most basic sense of ourselves as zoon politikon – and there is plenty of evidence that they have, from voter-turnout statistics to the denatured, scientistic “policy analysis” that today substitutes for political reflection and deliberation – then it is high time for political philosophy to address the possibility of a cure as well as diagnosing the disease.  Critchley recognizes this situation and calls it by name, and his book deserves attention and response for this reason alone.

In the meantime

I have had the blog-itch for months now with no time to scratch, and still don't, unfortunately.  Maybe next month, after I figure out where I live and what I'm going to do when I grow up.  Anyway, in lieu of something more interesting, some self-promotion:  I've posted a paper I just finished here, titled "On Continental Philosophy in American Jurisprudence."  It's a Hegelian reading of the Legal Realist Karl Llewellyn's short essay "On Philosophy in American Law," coming out in an anthology of contemporary responses to that essay.  I also recently posted a new and improved version of "Specters and Scholars: Derrida and the Tragedy of Political Thought" here.  Some other older papers are available here.   More, sooner rather than later, I hope . . . .

Law and Literature and the Right to Death

I just sent a paper, "Law and Literature and the Right to Death," off to the editor.   Since it's appearing in a bi-lingual German anthology, which I suspect will not get a lot of play in the Anglophone world where I live; and since I'm hoping to expand it in the near future and could really use some feedback from people who know more about Blanchot than I do (at least some of whom I have reason to believe occasionally look at this blog); and since I'm already advertising it on the Legal Research Network (a database for law professors' scholarly self-promotion where it is all but certain to sink without a trace into a sea of incomprehension and indifference), so that it's too late to pretend innocence of self-promotionary impulses anyway; and prompted, in part, by this post at Charlotte Street; and since I haven't had the time to post anything else recently, here's the first paragraph (the abstract is here):

     Whatever its intellectual frisson, I take it that most would agree that “Law & Literature” as a subdiscipline is at best secondary within the general study of law. The reasons for that marginal status are familiar and I will not belabor them here, although I will come back to what I take to be the most essential of these reasons shortly. My goal is rather to indicate a theoretical road less taken that suggests the possibility that the question of “literature” belongs instead at the heart of law and jurisprudence. That road will eventually take me through a reading of the French literary critic Maurice Blanchot’s 1948 essay “Literature and the Right to Death.” This is a “road less taken” not only in the sense that Blanchot has had almost no presence as a figure in the Anglo-American study of Law & Literature, but also because most attempts to de-marginalize the study of Law & Literature have begun with what is indisputably common to the law and to literature – their shared status as linguistic or cultural constructs, repositories of humanistic values, and so on. What I would like to try to do here, by contrast, is to begin at the very center of the concept of law itself (or at least its Western concept) – with law qua expression of political sovereignty. That is to say, I will begin with what is generally held to distinguish law most fundamentally from other linguistic, cultural or social norms or constructs, including particularly those of the institution of literature. My goal is thus to locate “the literary” – in a sense that remains to be determined – within the very essence of law itself, beyond the kind of general cultural resemblances that have previously been identified.

And this is the (absurdly ambitious) statement of the hoped-for pay-off :

In what follows, I hope to show that that point of contact with literature constitutes the simultaneous possibility and impossibility of law as sovereignty, its motivating essence and its most implacable and insurmountable obstacle, precisely insofar as law is understood as the sovereign power over death. And that because, as Blanchot argues, literature itself is nothing more than the simultaneous demand for death inscribed in every act of linguistic meaning and the exposure of its impossibility – the impossible condition of possibility at the limit of literature, of linguistic meaning, of death itself; and (I will argue) of law as well. But at the same time, and by the same token, the possibility of politics, also.