In his essay ‘Critique of Violence’, Walter Benjamin subjects violence to a critique in order to establish the criterion for violence itself as a principle. His starting point is the distinction between law-positing and law-preserving violence. However, these are for him inseparable and subjected to the law of historical change: the history of the law is nothing but the dialectical rising and falling of legal orders. Benjamin’s analysis of legal violence and his criticism of parliamentary democracies, this article advances, should (...) be related to the critical analysis of the possibilities for alternative politics in contemporary democratic rule of law states, as those advanced by Bernard Noël, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Jean-Luc Nancy and Jacques Rancière. For Benjamin, it is only law-destroying divine violence, whose principle is justice, not power, that is able to break this circle and open up a new era. Divine violence is, however, not only a provocative but also an extremely problematic, even dangerous, concept, as Jacques Derrida, among others, has claimed. This article considers, therefore, whether the concept of divine violence has any real political relevance in the contemporary era. (shrink)

Crises have become a new normality. This normality is turned into grounds for the politics of fear. The hegemonic principle of the politics of fear is security. This politics, which invents objects of fear, is intimately linked to the nationalist identity politics shaped by a particular nationalist essence. Racism is an elemental part of the nationalist identity politics. In the text, racism is considered in relation to, on the one hand, fear and anxiety and, on the other hand, the imaginary (...) and symbolic orders and the structure of fantasy. This analysis shows how xenophobic images, nationalist signifiers and racist fantasies create the vicious circles of fear and hate that gives justification for the nationalist identity politics that raises security as the hegemonic organizing principle. To counter the nationalist identity politics, the nationalist and racist fantasy must be traversed. Therefore, an anti-racist politics cannot be based on any pre-given identity. It takes place only as emancipatory events that confront the racists and nationalist fantasy. (shrink)

“Deconstruction is justice”. How are we to understand this striking and extraordinary sentence Jacques Derrida has written? Whose justice? Which deconstruction? The article asks these questions by thinking the continuity and discontinuity between Jewish, especially rabbinic, thinking and Derrida's writing. The article approaches Derrida's ethico-legal thinking through the tradition of Judaismby putting the sentence ``deconstructionis justice'' on the stage of the Jewish jurisprudence, which may be revealed as utmost important in relation to deconstructibility of law and undeconstructibility of justice. The (...) main question is, how Derridashares the tradition of Judaism. If deconstructive legal studies promises to take justice seriously then it have to understand Derridean deconstruction of law being “based” on the double tradition of the philosophico-phenomenological and Abrahamic thinking. The article concentrates on the Abrahamic tradition in Derrida's thinking. The first part of the article asks after the mystical foundation of law and its relationship to the writing of law. The second one asks the principle of justice. The third part addresses the problem of the time of justice and its relationship to messianism. All in all, the article traces through the writing, principle, and time ofjustice possible chiasmas of Derrida and the Jewish jurisprudence. (shrink)

Bringing together philosophical, political, and psychoanalytical perspectives, in analysing both the concept and the phenomenon of evil, the contributors to..

_Law and Evil_ opens, expands and deepens our understanding of the phenomenon of evil by addressing the theoretical relationship between this phenomenon and law. Hannah Arendt said 'the problem of evil will be the fundamental question of post-war intellectual life in Europe'. This statement is, unfortunately, more than valid in the contemporary world: not only in the events of war, crimes against humanity, terror, repression, criminality, violence, torture, human trafficking, and so on; but also as evil is used rhetorically to (...) condemn these acts, to categorise their perpetrators, and to justify forcible measures, both in international and domestic politics and law. But what is evil? Evil as a concept is too often taken as something that is self-evident, something that is always already defined. Taking Kant’s concept of radical evil as a starting point, this volume counters such a tendency. Bringing together philosophical, political, and psychoanalytical perspectives, in analysing both the concept and the phenomenon of evil, the contributors to this volume offer a rich and thoroughgoing analysis of the multifaceted phenomenon of evil and its relationship to law. (shrink)

This work sets out to demonstrate the inadequacy of current legal paradigms in explaining the phenomena of fragmentation through conceptions of modern law. It also addresses the possibility of legal and ethical alternativesand political counterstrategies.

The article analyses relationships between profane and religious illumination, materialism and theology, politics and religion, Marxism and Messianism. For Walter Benjamin, every second is “the small gateway in time through which the Messiah might enter”. This is the starting point in the reading of Benjamin’s works, where we confront various liaisons and couplings of radical politics and messianic events. Through the reading of Benjamin and through the analysis of his conceptions of history and time, the article addresses the question what (...) is possible in the world. (shrink)