Christoph Menke

In his critical review of Recht und Gewalt Andreas Fischer-Lescano has suggested that the critical insight into the paradoxical entwinement of law and violence should lead towards the utopian idea of a “transcendence” of law. The response to Fischer-Lescano rejects this idea as a false leveling of the - decisive normative - difference between law and society. This difference is the condition of possibility of law’s critical and hence transformative relation to society. The response thus defends the idea, brought forward in Recht und Gewalt by way of an interpretation of Benjamin’s formula of the Entsetzung of law, that the break with law’s fateful violence cannot consist in the “transcendence” but rather the “depotenciation” of law