Law's trace : from Hegel to Derrida / Catherine Kellogg.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Kellogg, Catherine M.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Political science--Philosophy.

Political science.

Deconstruction.

Physical Description:

vi, 171 pages ; 25 cm

Place of Publication:

Abingdon [England] ; New York : Routledge, 2010.

Summary:

Law's Trace for the political importance of deconstruction by taking Derrida's reading of Hegel as its point of departure. While it is well established that seemingly neutral and inclusive legal and political categories and representations are always, in fact, partial and exclusive, among Derrida's most potent arguments was that the exclusions at work in every representation are not accidental but constitute. Indeed, one of the most significant ways that modern philosophy appears to having completed its task of accounting for everything is by claiming that its foundational concepts representation democracy, justice, and so no are what will have always been. They display what Derrida has called a "fabulous retroactivity". This means that such forms of political life as liberal constitutional democracy, capitalism, the rule of law, or even the private nuclear family, appear to be the inevitable consequence of human development. Hegel's thought is central to the arguments of this book for the following reason the logic of this fabulous retroactivity was articulated most decisively for the modern era by the powerful idea of the Aufhebung - the temporal structure of the always-already. Deconstruction reveals the exclusions at work in the foundational political concepts of modernity by "re-tracing" the path of their creation, revealing the "always already" at work in that path. Every representation, knowledge or law is more uncertain than it seems, and the central argument of Law's Trace: from Hegel to Derrida is that they are, therefore, always potential sites for political struggle. Book jacket.

Contents:

Deconstruction and representation : tracing the sign

Translating deconstruction : signing the trace

The messianic without messianism

Mourning terminable and interminable : law and (commmodity) fetishism

Justice and the impossibility of mourning : Antigone's singular act

Generalizing the economy of fetishism.

Notes:

"A GlassHouse book."

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780415561617

0415561612

9780203853146

0203853148

OCLC:

377834698