Towards an Aesthetics of Law

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Notes

¹ Plato, Republic, 607a. References in this essay to Plato, Kant, and Wittgenstein are by paragraph number, not by page number.

² More of this later.

³ Plato, Republic, 600e.

⁴ Ibid., 602b.

⁵ Sanders, Ambiguities of Witnessing, 4. Subsequent page references to this text are included in parentheses in the body of the article.

⁶ Cornell, Moral Images of Freedom, 6. Subsequent page references to this text are included in parentheses in the body of the article.

⁷ Kant, “Answer to the Question,” 135.

⁸ Plato, Republic, 601a–b. I have written about this in relation to Wittgenstein in another essay: Clarkson, “Ancient Antagonisms.”

⁹ Cited in Sanders, Ambiguities, 3.

¹⁰ Ibid., 3. See also 150–7.

¹¹ Sanders's proficiency in isiXhosa, isiZulu, and Afrikaans means that his discussions of translation are conducted with a sense of authority.

¹² See the recent collection of essays, Law and the Politics of Reconciliation, edited by Scott Veitch, and also the essays in a special issue of Ariel, “Law, Literature and Postcoloniality,” edited by Suzack and Boire (particularly Peter Fitzpatrick's “Juris-fiction: Literature and the Law of the Law”).

¹³ For detailed discussions of “politics” and “the political” in relation to the law, see Christodoulidis's “Against Substitution” and Schaap's “The Time of Reconciliation and the Space of Politics.” For Sanders, these distinctions do not matter in the same way that they do in legal theory.

¹⁴ “The literary” in Ambiguities is wide-ranging: Sanders speaks of “the ambiguity in all language that…designates the literary” (4) and “the self-othering that can be termed ‘literary’”(23). The discussion on pp. 166–7 includes (in one paragraph) all these related, but not clearly distinguished terms: “literature,” “fiction,” “stories,” “the realm of the counterfactual,” “the realm of fable and fictionality,” “invention,” “invention of the other,” and “‘ironic’ counter-questions.” Other concepts associated with the literary include “irony” and “allegory” (23).

¹⁵ Wittgenstein, Tractatus, 5.6; Wittgenstein's emphasis.

¹⁶ Williamson, The Philosophy of Philosophy, 41.

¹⁷ Coetzee, Giving Offense, 56.

¹⁸ Again, the cues are Derridean. In my essay, “Drawing the Line,” I have argued that the titular prominence given to “force” in two of Derrida's essays, “Force and Signification” (which Sanders does not mention) and “Force of Law,” invites us to bring about a convergence of questions of law and of literary signification. The operative space of reconciliation, I argue, is at this point of convergence. In reconfiguring the lines that trace out patterns of meaning and paths of communication, the arts play a transformative role in calibrating the socio-political space of reconciliation.

¹⁹ Plato, Republic, 600e.

²⁰ Ibid., 602b.

²¹ Kant, Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals, 4:459.

²² Plato, Laws, 817.

²³ It is worth mentioning here that the first part of Derrida's “Force of Law” was read at a colloquium (“Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice”) organized by Drucilla Cornell at the Cardozo Law School, in October 1989.

²⁴ Celan, “The Meridian,” 44. I have written more extensively about Celan and Derrida in my essay, “Drawing the Line.”

²⁵ Celan, “The Meridian,” 44–5.

²⁶ Celan, “The Meridian,” 49; my emphasis.

²⁷ Foot, Natural Goodness, 74.

²⁸ Derrida, “Force and Signification,” 11.

²⁹ Derrida, “Force of Law,” 232.

³⁰ This is a major point of discussion in the second part of “Force of Law,” where Derrida engages with Benjamin's Zur Kritik der Gewalt.

³¹ Derrida, “Force of Law,” 269–70; emphasis in the original.