LAW AND VIOLENCE: CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES

Law is often considered to be the opposite of violence: Promising to deliver us from the cycles of violence preceding its arrival, it sets its task as the establishment of a normative order that sanctions arbitrary and illegitimate uses of violence, derives its legitimacy from our consent, and guarantees formal equality to everyone under its rule. Various critics have challenged this conventional understanding of law, however, and examined the numerous ways in which law finds itself entangled with the very violence that it aims to combat. They have pointed out how the enforcement of law often entails the use of coercion and force, that legal decisions involve legitimations of state violence, and that the provision of rights often goes hand in hand with the entrenchment of social inequality and domination.

Taking Walter Benjamin’s “Critique of Violence” as a focal point, this course examines a wide range of critical perspectives on the relationship between law and violence. Following our study of Benjamin, we turn to the deconstructionist perspectives represented by Jacques Derrida and Judith Butler. Then we move to the biopolitical critique developed by Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, and Roberto Esposito. Following these continental perspectives, we turn to the American scene and read the criticisms developed by Robert Cover as well as Critical Legal Studies (e.g., Duncan Kennedy, Roberto Unger) and Critical Race Theory (e.g., Derrick Bell, Patricia Williams). In the final section, we examine three thinkers who strive to chart a path beyond the impasses we studied and navigate the aporias arising from law’s entanglement with violence (albeit in very different ways): Hannah Arendt, Jürgen Habermas, and Christoph Menke.