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With the Iraqi Interim Authority concept abandoned, Bush and Rumsfeld allowed the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) to become an instrument of occupation. The CPA was characterized by confusion over objectives and organization of a kind that Rumsfeld usually found intolerable. It had an ambiguous mandate, an odd relationship with the military, and multiple lines of reporting back
96 3 Law without violence Daniel Loick “Law is itself violence” (p. 3) –this claim is not only an “observation” about forms of law existing hitherto, but a thesis about the very concept of law as such. According to Christoph Menke, there never was and never can be any law without violence. The reason for this dependency of law on violence lies in its need to be enforced; Menke follows Kant’s definition according to which law consists in a reciprocal authority to use coercion. The aim of my essay is to question this basic assumption. While it is certainly true
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.
classmates were moved to other premises ten kilometres away and alternated mornings and afternoons with local children there, halving Christian’s schooling. In Brest, most schools did not reopen in autumn 1941.2 At this point, the German authorities there refused to authorise the civilian evacuation of the town, so the mayor used school closure to encourage parents to send their children to safer locations. But such was parents’ reluctance to part with their children that schools were forced to reopen. However, they were closed for good from February 1943, this time on
. Allied bombing policy, too, evolved as the war progressed, bringing changes to targets, technology and tactics. As policy developed, so did the way in which the French State and local authorities met the challenge. Further down the scale, families and individuals also adapted their behaviour under the bombs. Evolution of the threat To understand the evolution of the response, we must understand the evolution of the threat. The Allies bombed France during different campaigns that targeted objectives in different regions; as new campaigns began, new towns came into
population was informed that blacking out windows and shatterproofing them would protect their communities and their homes. If civilians could ‘prevent the planes from spotting their target’, the bombers might not bomb; ‘lights attract bombs’, they were told, ‘just as trees attract lightening’.15 Windows linked safe domestic interiors to the dangerous world of public war, and needed attention during the pre-war period and then after war had broken out. Following a blackout exercise in 1935, the population of Brest came under criticism from the naval authorities for its
, argues Menke in the first section of his essay, is inextricably bound up with a paradoxical relation to violence: aimed at curbing violent action taking place in the legal area that it regulates, law performs its function through directives backed up by a violence which is always lurking in the background and is sometimes manifestly applied. Within this classical topos –already found in Benjamin’s essay “Critique of Violence” and in Derrida’s revisitation of it in his Cardozo Law School lecture “Force of Law: ‘The Mystical Foundation of Authority’ ”1 – Menke
dead in the streets; similarly, after the 4 April raid, the police wrote of human remains ‘collected in the streets’.13 Official reports commented on the ‘dreadfully mutilated’ bodies of the dead. Unidentified body parts were v 125 v Experiencing bombing meticulously recorded: ‘Woman’s head about 40 years old grey hair black eyebrows blue eyes 110, rue de Silly in Boulogne.’14 Death was violent, public and on such a scale that local authorities struggled to house the bodies. Makeshift morgues were set up across Lomme in April 1944 at the fire station, a brewery, two
new form of justice that is associated with the authority of a judge passing impartial judgment. The suit of the individual, the antagonism and the dialogue between the parties, the responsibility that comes with action, the significance and consequences of the decision, the questions and mysteries of interpretation – these are structural elements of both tragedy and law. The basic elements of tragedy correspond to the basic elements of the new theory and praxis of justice that emerge concurrently: justice as law. But the connection between tragedy and law applies
. Instead of conceptualising trauma as ‘unrepresentable’, it seems more fruitful to understand the ways humans can share experience. Finally, the moral dimension of trauma’s social presence can also make it less desirable to ‘own’. Traumatised people are equated with ‘victims’ who are awarded high moral authority.49 This idea has arisen, perhaps, because of the concentration of trauma research by scholars into Holocaust and abuse narratives, and extends beyond the academy.50 Sometimes the two overlap, but, for example, perpetrators may also be traumatised by their own