Law's Trace

Law's Trace argues for the political importance of deconstruction by taking Derridaâs 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 Derridaâs most potent arguments was that the exclusions at work in every representation are not accidental but constitutive. 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 â representation democracy justice and so on â 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. Hegelâs thought is central to the argument of this book for this reason: the logic of this fabulous retroactivity was articulated most decisively for the modern era by the powerful idea of the Aufhebung â the temporal structure of the always-already. Deconstruction reveals the exclusions at work in the foundational political concepts of modernity by âre-tracingâ the path of their creation revealing the âalways-alreadyâ at work in that path. Every representation knowledge or law is more uncertain than it seems and the central argument of Law's Trace is that they are therefore always potential sites for political struggle. . Language: English