The destructive function that shadows the constructive promise of legal interpretation stands out as one of the key provocations in Cover\u2019s ‘Violence and the Word’ (1986). I wish to raise here a couple of questions relating to the limits of the \u2018world-destroying\u2019 violence with which the author tries to displace the \u2018world-making\u2019 fixation of the jurisprudence of Dworkin and White.<\/p>\n
The first concerns the intrinsic limits of \u2018common meaning\u2019 that Cover suggests to be implied in the unhealable rift that separates law and the criminal. For Cover, the prisoner\u2019s \u2018co-operation\u2019 with the legal system evidences not so much his\/her\u00a0repentance as the coercive domination of the machinery, which extinguishes the possibility of cohabitation in a normative universe. Already thinned by the institutional division of will and labour, the \u2018common meaning\u2019 of law is further delimited by the wound that law burns into the ‘body of the condemned’ (Foucault). My question: would this \u2018hole\u2019 mark the horizon of the nomos<\/em> (\u2018the one ends here; there lies the other\u2019), or might it further indicate an impossibility within the nomos<\/em> (\u2018there is no “one” to begin with\u2019)? Is a world being destroyed (\u2018I am if you are not\u2019), or might it already be destroyed (\u2018you are not and neither am I\u2019)?<\/p>\n The second concerns\u00a0the possibility of resistance, of which Cover cites three instances: martyrdom, rebellion, and revolution. These scenes evince a militant refusal to accept the substitution of one law with the other (\u2018I would rather die than be you\u2019) or even a\u00a0repetition of world-destroying violence (\u2018be me or die\u2019). They suppose the sacrifice of the outlaw or the coup sought\u00a0by a counter-community. They rehearse the destructive function of law. But not every prisoner is destroyed by law. Aung San Suu Kyi survived her 15-year house-arrest. Indeed, criminal recalcitrance suggests the very longevity of the condemned. Sade\u2019s libertinism resumed\u00a0between his incarceration, not to say it flourished then — in those 27 years behind bars he wrote the copious pornography that were destined to outlive him and the regimes which sanctioned\u00a0him. So if worlds survive law, is law\u2019s operation \u2018world-destroying\u2019? Or does this\u00a0characterisation, however well-intentioned, collude with law by concealing\u00a0its\u00a0limits? And, with Sade in mind, could life resist law without destroying it? Give in to law without giving in?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The destructive function that shadows the constructive promise of legal interpretation stands out as one of the key provocations in Cover\u2019s ‘Violence and the Word’ (1986). I wish to raise here a couple of questions relating to the limits of the \u2018world-destroying\u2019 violence with which the author tries to displace the \u2018world-making\u2019 fixation of the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":47616,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[136347],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/lawandthehumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/341"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/lawandthehumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/lawandthehumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/lawandthehumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/47616"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/lawandthehumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=341"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/lawandthehumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/341\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":356,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/lawandthehumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/341\/revisions\/356"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/lawandthehumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=341"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/lawandthehumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=341"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/lawandthehumanities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=341"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}