Philosophy of Law According to Derrida: A Deconstructivist Approach to Legal Concepts.

Résumé

In this paper we try to examine, first of all, the general perception about Jacques Derrida and his strategy in Deconstruction. This perception presents him as a Nietzschean nihilist philosopher who has never contributed to the study of practical philosophy in any the following three areas: policy, ethics, and law. Going against this received idea, we will carefully read the works of Derrida from the 1990s until his death in 2004. We try to prove how his philosophy resembled a revolutionary transformation during this time period, for he spent more than a decade of his life writing about practical issues including law and justice. We call this practical period “Derrida’s ethico- juridical-political- turn”. To justify this idea of a transformation, we will provide supportive evidence to our argument, starting by exploring the historical and geographical contexts within which the deconstruction was born and produced. 

Reading his few texts about law especially his book, Force of Law, we shed light on the complex distinction that he made between justice and law, possible law and justice in-itself. We also attempt to highlight a number of important, but difficult issues, (that appear in his book as well as in other of his works like his article entitled, “Before the Law” (1982)), such as the notion of “undecidability”, “justice to come”, the singularity of each judgment, and the “mystical foundation of law.”

We try to show how in Force of Law, Derrida clearly relied on Walter Benjamin’s text, Critique of Violence, to develop his own ideas about the intern relationships between violence and law and to describe how violence founds and conserves law, and how law returns the favor, justifying the violence that it was founded on. After examining this problematic, we display how Derrida unmasks the aporias of justice.

Finally, we show the ultimate efforts and contributions of the late Derrida to reform and reinvent international law, global citizenship, and human rights as well as his great influence on Legal Studies especially in USA. In conclusion, we find that Derrida’s practical works in law, policy, and ethics, belongs to the traditions of the Enlightenment.