Abstract

This article offers an historical commentary on Jacques Derrida’s influential essay ‘Force of Law’, seeking to situate Derrida’s deconstruction of law and jurisprudence within an intellectual history of 1960s humanities theory. It does so by approaching deconstruction as symptomatic of the periodic resurgence of European university metaphysics, mediated here by Derrida’s redeployment of Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology. Deconstruction is historicised by investigating its operation as a particular kind of ‘spiritual exercise’ or intellectual regimen. This is one designed to form a privileged intellectual persona — that of the supra-civil deconstructive theorist — cultivated through the hyperbolic problematisation of positive disciplines, in this case jurisprudence.