Christoph Menke

Law begins with the experience of violence. Law exists because there is violence, and because recognizing the existence of violence appears to be tantamount to saying that violence should not exist. Law translates the violence that one inflicts upon another into the violation of a law. Walter Benjamin calls the transformation of law in the face of the experience of its violence its Entsetzung. For taking the violence of law seriously, that is, taking the Nietzschean demand which all experience of violence raises seriously, namely the demand to go, "Away, you pain!", must mean to go beyond law. For the "impulse" or "force" at the ground of law is justice: the resistance to violence. "Law and Violence" tries to show this by reference to the experience of law in tragedy, especially the Oresteia, and its philosophical reflection in Benjamin's "Critique of Violence."

In the Critique of Judgment, Kant quotes the traditional view of the relation between the ethical and the aesthetical ('the beautiful is the symbol of the morally good'). However, he elaborates this view in a radically new way: as equivalence between two forms of reflection, between ethical and aesthetic reflection. The article distinguishes three different aspects of aesthetic reflection in Kant and discusses their respective ethical meaning. It shows the unresolved tension between Kant's program of an 'aesthetics of autonomy' on the one hand, and his reference to sensualistic and vitalist motifs of an aesthetic 'energetism' on the other.

“Life” has become an enigmatic keyword in diverse fields of contemporary philosophy in the past years – from political thought and its reflections on biopolitics to practical philosophy and its recourse to forms of life, to aesthetics and its reflections on the modes of life and liveliness in aesthetic representation. The contributions included in the following special section investigate the peculiar way this keyword functions in a diversity of fields, in order to bring to light the underlying conceptual and structural implications of this term in these different domains. As these contributions show, the use of the marker “life” is more than a fleeting fashion – it articulates a modern predicament with deep historical roots.

Christoph Menke links the dimension of publicness of the justice-of-the-law paradigm with an intrinsically political quality of the law, which is counterintuitive and requires a supplementary argumentation. In his famous essay "Critique of Violence," dated 1921, Walter Benjamin distinguishes two kinds of criticism that can be leveled against the persisting enmeshment of law with violence. It could be conceived of as a form of law that, drawing on the idea of "democratic dualism," pioneered by Ackerman and integrated within political liberalism by Rawls, renounces the demand for the direct consent of all the governed and settles for an indirect consent. The indirect consent hinges on the law's compatibility or is in accordance with the constitution. At each of three critical junctures on its way to overcoming the mythical relation of law to violence, Menke's argument, it seems to the author, intersects the path of contemporary "political liberalism".

Parallax, or the change in the position of an object viewed along two different lines of sight and more precisely, the assumption that this adjustment is not only due to a change of focus, but a change in that object's ontological status has been a key philosophical concept throughout history. Building upon Slavoj Žižek's The Parallax View, this volume shows how parallax is used as a figure of thought that proves how the incompatibility between the physical and the theoretical touches not only upon the ontological, but also politics and aesthetics. With articles written by internationally renowned philosophers such as Frank Ruda, Graham Harman, Paul Livingston and Zizek himself, this book shows how modes of parallax remain in numerous modern theoretical disciplines, such as the Marxian parallax in the critique of political economy and politics; and the Hegelian parallax in the concept of the work of art, while also being important to debates surrounding speculative realism and dialectical materialism. Spanning philosophy, parallax is then a rich and fruitful concept that can illuminate the studies of those working in epistemology, ontology, German Idealism, political philosophy and critical theory.

At a central point in his much-discussed book Real Presences, George Steiner writes of the “mountebank’s virtuosity... of a Hitler,” that realises “a counter-logos which conceptualizes and then enacts the deconstruction of the human.” It was clear to Steiner’s American readers what was meant by this transposition of the term ‘deconstruction’ from the field of aesthetics and philosophy, of literary and cultural criticism, to the context of political and ideological struggle against fascism and totalitarianism in general. Steiner discusses this in another context, but again with all the pathos of confession at his disposal: “I believe that the eclipse of the humanities, in their primary sense and presentness, in today’s culture and society, implicates that of the human.” This creed closes Steiner’s discussion of the “liberals” who are treated with contempt because they preach tolerance in the face of the triumphal procession of deconstruction in the humanities. According to Steiner, such a policy of appeasement once again misjudges the degree of threat to which our social order is exposed: what starts in the humanities ends in society as the nihilistic corruption of binding human values. With the establishment of deconstruction in literary studies at elite American universities, the Occident succumbs to the powers of disintegration and ‘brutalization’ for the second time in the twentieth century—Yale of the seventies and eighties repeats Munich of 1938.

Der Gedanke, der sich in der modernen Idee der Autonomie verdichtet, ist ein doppelter: Die Figur der Autonomie enthält zugleich eine neue Auffassung von Normativität und eine eigene Konzeption von Freiheit. Dem Gedanken der Autonomie zufolge ist ein Gesetz, das wahrhaft normativ ist, eines, als dessen Urheber wir uns selbst betrachten können; und eine Freiheit, die im vollen Sinne wirklich ist, drückt sich in Gestalt eben solcher selbstgegebener Gesetze aus. Die Idee der Autonomie artikuliert so die Einsicht, dass man Freiheit und Gesetz nicht durch ihre Entgegensetzung bestimmen kann, sondern durcheinander erläutern muss. Wirkliche Freiheit ist nicht Freiheit von Gesetzen, sondern Freiheit in Gesetzen; verbindliche Normen sind nicht das, was Freiheit äußerlich beschränkt, sondern das, was Freiheit innerlich verwirklicht. Die Idee der Autonomie, die für die moderne praktische Philosophie seit Rousseau und Kant grundlegend ist, zielt so darauf, Freiheit und Verbindlichkeit in einem Zuge zu artikulieren: durch die Form selbstgegebener Gesetze. Mit Beiträgen von Robert Brandom, Judith Butler, Thomas Khurana, Christoph Menke, Terry Pinkard und Sebastian Rödl.

The question on the actuality of the tragedy has been an important subject of the philosophy since the times of Romanticism. The most defended idea denies such actuality on different reasons. This paper questions such negation to maintain that, on the contrary, tragedy is present in our culture, although in a peculiar mode: as tragedy of the reflection in which ethical and aesthetical perspectives substitute endless one another as can we see in Beckett’s Endgame, the modern tragedy par excellence. This point of view has some consequences for the theory of modernity and for the notion of modern reflexivity that here are discussed starting from some thesis of Hegel, Nietzsche, Derrida and Barthes.