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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.
79 2 Between law and violence: towards a re-thinking of legal justice in transitional justice contexts María del Rosario Acosta López In the already extensive literature connecting philosophy and law, there is a long tradition of framing this encounter in terms of what I will provisionally call a “negative critique.” As it is clear in Walter Benjamin’s canonical essay, a philosophical critical perspective seems to be capable of bringing to light the main paradox at the core of the law, namely, that its foundation coincides with its violence. Violence exists
literature and philosophy, I seek to identify and explore a concept of law that might be able to conceptually integrate the above-mentioned two sides –the objection of law against violence on the one hand, and the exercise of violence by law on the other. The unity of the concept of law consists of its contradiction between the fight against and the exercise of violence. The contributions in this volume have raised a number of critical objections against this thesis and its explication, which I will address, at least in part, in this response. However, I would first like
his cue from literature, from a play in which an officer needs to make a decision about the behavior of a renegade soldier in a situation where the troops under the officer’s command need to defend the capital against the invasion of a powerful foreign army, Menke explores the utopian potential of an alternative, or of the fact that 201 Self-reflection 201 two equally persuasive but mutually exclusive possibilities indicate ways of dealing with a situation that are no longer indebted to a logic of sovereignty, which is a logic of violence and tautological
others, which include family relations, the medical profession, and literature, among others; and all of these are subservient to the wider project of formulating and honoring what “we,” pluralistically construed and in constant conversation with each other, take to be human flourishing. 3. Unlawful entry: Menke, Hart, and Derrida on problematic beginnings McEwan’s novel presents a model of the law that, first, has welfare, or a version of the Good Life, as its central concern; second, can fulfill this promise to the degree that the interconnections between legal
two processes, though related, are distinct. The second section formulates the theoretical arguments of this chapter, namely that regimes and societies are two important referent objects of security which, though neglected by traditional security studies literature, are consequential; and that the two are inextricably linked. This is followed by the chapter’s empirical case study, the Palestinians and
those concepts that have led to confusion in the water scarcity and environmental security literature. The second section offers arguments why water scarcity rarely causes war, and then considers how scarcity under certain circumstances can nevertheless lead to acute conflict. Examined here is a ‘most likely’ case, which is intended to validate the environmental security hypothesis that water scarcity
norm/normative and such related concepts as value/value judgement, morality/moral, ethics/ethical, are, to say the least, blurred in the literature. Definitional usage generally seems to lack a clear conceptualisation. This is perhaps the first difficulty which besets any exploration of the normative domain. The difficulty is compounded by the fact that ‘norm’ and ‘normative’ are also frequently used
the notion of ‘redefining security’. Even during the last decade, the literature on this subject has remained small. In comparison to Western regions and states where, it is argued, liberal capitalist democracies do not go to war, especially with each other ( Mueller, 1990 ; Doyle, 1986 ), the Middle East remains an area in which protracted militarized, armed conditions of conflict are staples of the
challenges of international society at any given time’. 8 Knight’s research is noteworthy in that it seeks to apply a highly sophisticated body of theoretical literature to the study of multilateral institutions through an examination of the UN. Especially important for us is his application of historical structural ‘insights’ to the study of institutional evolution, with a constant