Nietzsche, critique and the promise of not being thus..

International Journal for the Semiotics of Law

Volumn 13, Issue 4, 2000, Pages 357-375

  Pavlich, George ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF ALBERTA   (Canada)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 22644446027     PISSN: 09528059     EISSN: 15728722     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1023/A:1011274629160     Document Type: Article

References (84)

1. See Richard W. Bauman, Critical Legal Studies: A Guide to the Literature (Boulder: Westview, 1996)
2. for an overview of the literature. More specifically, see Ian Ward, An Introduction to Critical Legal Theory (London: Cavendish, 1998);
3. Duncan Kennedy, A Critique of Adjudication: fin de side (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997);
4. Richard W. Janikowski and Dragan Milovanovic, Legality and Illegality: Semiotics, Postmodernism and the Law (New York: P.Lang, 1995);
5. James Boyle, Critical Legal Studies (Aldershot, Hants, England: Dartmouth, 1994);
6. David Kairys, The Politics of Law: A Progressive Critique (New York: Pantheon, 1990);
7. Mark Kelman, A Guide to Critical Legal Studies (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987);
8. Allan C. Hutchinson, Critical Legal Studies (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1987);
9. Roberta Mangabeira Unger, The Critical Legal Studies Movement (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986), etc.
10. Here I refer to Wittgenstein's important recognition that the, '. . .the meaning of a word is its use in the language'. See Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983), p. 20, fragment #43. In this view, a grammar of critique articulates rules for the 'use of signs', and so is inextricably involved in creating the meanings of a particular discourse, p. 138, fragment #496.
11. In the case of the odd exception, such as Alan Hunt, "The Critique of Law: What is Critical about Critical Legal Theory," in Peter Fitzpatrick and Alan Hunt (eds), Critical Legal Studies (London: Basil Blackwell, 1987),
12. one finds a focus not so much on exposing a grammar of critique, but on elevating one style of critique over another. See also some of the relevant passages in Dragan Milovanovic, Chaos, Criminology, and Social Justice: The New Orderly (Dis)Order (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1987).
13. There are by now many overviews of the movement, and some that open up to the sort of discussion entertained here. See n. 2 above, and also Albert P. Cardarelli and Stephen C. Hicks, "Radicalism in Law and Criminology: A Retrospective of Critical Legal Studies and Radical Criminology", The Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 84 (1993), 502-553;
14. Stanley Cohen, "Intellectual Skepticism and Political Commitment: The Case of Radical Criminology." Studies in Law, Politics, & Society 13 (1993), 187-209;
15. David Ingram, "Dworkin, Habermas, and the CLS Movement on Moral Criticism in Law." Philosophy and Social Criticism 16 (1990), 237-268;
16. and Fitzpatrick and Hunt supra n. 4.
17. See Reinhart Koselleck, Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society (Oxford: Berg, 1988)
18. and Paul Connerton, The Tragedy of Enlightenment: An Essay on the Frankfurt School (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980).
19. See Pierre Bayle, Selections from Bayle's Dictionary, ed. E.A. Beller and J.M. du P. Lee Jr. (New York: Greenwood Press, 1952).
20. I have discussed this in more detail in George Pavlich, Critique and Radical Discourses on Crime (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000).
21. See Robert Con Davis and Ronald Schleifer, Criticism and Culture (London: Longman, 1991) for a helpful overview of this genealogy.
22. Connerton, supra n. 6, at 18.
23. Immanuel Kant, Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, and What is Enlightenment? Translated with an Introduction by, Lewis White Beck (New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1958), 7.
24. For example, see Mitchell Dean, Critical and Effective Histories: Foucault's Methods and Historical Sociology (London, England: Routledge, 1994), 119.
25. See Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power. Translated by Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage, 1986), Book 2, #449.
26. See Pavlich, supra n. 8.
27. See Koselleck supra n. 6, at 103, and following n. 18;
28. and, John Ayoto, Dictionary of Word Origins (New York: Arcade Publications, 1990).
29. Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 86.
30. Williams, supra n. 16, at 85.
31. For example, see Seyla Benhabib, Critique, Norm, and Utopia: A Study of the Foundations of Critical Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986);
32. Richard J. Bernstein, "Metaphysics, Critique and Utopia", Review of Metaphysics 42 (1988), 255-273. Koselleck, supra n. 6.
33. My reading here has been markedly influenced by my reading of Deleuze's excellent interpretation of Nietzsche on the question of critique. See Chapter 3 of Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, Translated by Hugh Tomlinson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983).
34. See, for example, Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason (Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1952).
35. Of course, the towering figure of this critical style is Marx; a style that is particularly developed through his critiques of both bourgeois texts (Hegel, the political economists) and concrete structures of capital. See Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Program (Moscow: Foreign Language Publishers, 1959);
36. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy Vol. 1 Chicago: Charles H. Kerr and Company, 1906);
37. and, Karl Marx and Fredrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party (Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1956).
38. Benhabib, supra n. 18 provides an extensive and valuable analysis of this genre of critique.
39. Here one may summon the influential work of Herbert Marcuse, Negations: Essays in Critical Theory (London; Allen Lane, 1968),
40. and especially Habermas' ambitious attempts to outline the so-called universal rationality of 'domination-free' communicative processes; see Jurgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol 1: Reasons and the Rationalization of Society (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984);
41. and, Jurgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol. 2: Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason (Boston: Beacon Press, 1988).
42. 'Yes, a sacred Yes is needed, my brothers, for the sport of creation: the spirit now wills its own will, the spirit sundered from the world now wills its own world.' See Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Translated by Walter Kaufmann (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961), 55.
43. Of course, here I am expressly referring to On the Genealogy of Morals where ressentiment and bad conscience are considered, as is the related asceticism of slave moralities. I shall return again to the latter in due course.
44. Nietzsche, supra n. 13, at Book 3, #531.
45. See Friedrich Nietzsche, Book 2, #76 in The Gay Science, Translated by Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1974).
46. Nietzsche, supra n. 27, at Book 4, #335.
47. Nietzsche, supra n. 27, at Book 4, #335.
48. The theme pervades much of his work, but is especially clear from On the Genealogy of Morals, in On the Genealogy of Morals/Ecce Homo, edited by Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage 1969);
49. and, Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, Translated by Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1966).
50. The situation regarding such judgement could, perhaps, be related to Ecce Homo's 'Why I am Destiny' where existing images of good and its accompanying moralizing are deemed, '. . . irreconcilable with an ascending, Yes-saying life: negating and destroying are conditions of saying Yes' (The Gay Science: #4). Is Nietzsche's approach an example of destructive, as opposed to reactive, negation - mobilized in favour of affirming life beyond what is?
51. See Nietzsche, supra n. 30, at 'Why I am a Destiny: #1'.
52. Nietzsche, supra n. 13, at Book 3, #708.
53. Derrida, in his discussion of Nietzsche, usefully cautions that even if being's limits are singularly created in context, '. . . it would be precipitate to conclude that, either in general, or more specifically in a reading of Nietzsche, the critical resources of the ontological question have been dispensed with.' See Jacques Derrida, Spurs: Nietzsche's Styles (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 113. That is, the lingering importance of speaking through images of being has not yet passed, and its traces continue to haunt the present text (even as, or especially, when it seeks to focus critique as a weapon for creative becoming).
54. Ayoto notes how the term 'art' derives from an Indo-European root, ar- that meant "put things together, join"; supra n. 15, at 37.
55. See Michel Foucault, Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, edited by Paul Rabinow (New York: New Press, 1997), 323.
56. This concept has been the subject of endless debate, but I shall use it to designate relentlessly creative forces, such as might under-gird the call for an art of critique that seeks to create new life. I derive this reading from the following statement: 'The victorious concept 'force,' by means of which our physicists have created God and the world, still needs to be completed: an inner will must be ascribed to it, which I designate as 'will to power,' i.e., as an insatiable desire to manifest power; or as the employment and exercise of power, as a creative drive, etc.', Nietzsche, supra n. 13, at Book 3, #619.
57. Nietzsche, supra n. 24, at 137.
58. See Jean-Francois Lyotard The Postmodern Condition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984);
59. and, Zygmunt Bauman, Legislators and Interpreters: On Modernity, Post-Modernity and Intellectuals (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987);
60. Zygmunt Bauman, Intimations of Postmodernity (London: Routledge, 1992);
61. and Zygmunt Bauman, Postmodernity and Its Discontents (New York: New York University Press, 1997) for detailed accounts of the condition.
62. The theme is encountered repeatedly, in whole and fragments, throughout his texts; especially Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals and Beyond Good and Evil, supra n. 30;
63. but, see also, Nietzsche, supra n. 32;
64. and, Nietzsche, supra n. 13, at Book 2, and #69, n. 39.
65. This point echoes Nietzsche's aphorisms in The Will To Power under the heading 'Further Considerations for a Critique of Morality', supra n. 13, at Book 2, section 6, #399-4105.
66. Nietzsche, supra n. 27, at Book 4: #335.
67. Nietzsche, supra n. 27, at Book 4: #335.
68. Here one might valuably refer to Thomas Keenan's excellent discussion of responsibility, particularly in relation to deconstruction and justice. See Thomas Keenan, Fables of Responsibility: Aberrations and Predicaments in Ethics and Politics (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 28-412.
69. One thinks here of Jacques Derrida, Spectres of Marx: The State of Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International (London: Routledge, 1994);
70. and, Simon Critchley's synopses of Derrida and Levinas' contribution to this ethics in his The Ethics of Deconstruction: Derrida and Levinas (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992).
71. Nietzsche, supra n. 13 at Book 1: #80.
72. Nietzsche, supra n. 13 at Book 1: #113, 114.
73. George Pavlich, "Political Logic, Colonial Law and the Land of the Long White Cloud", Law and Critique 9 (1998), 175-206 provides a fuller discussion of the idea of progress in a colonial context such as Aotearoa/New Zealand.
74. The point recurs, but is clear from Ecce Homo, supra n. 32, even if one reads this text as written tongue in cheek.
75. See, for example, his On the Genealogy of Morals, supra n. 32.
76. Nietzsche, supra n. 13, at Book 3, #708.
77. Nietzsche, supra n. 27, at Book 1, #26.
78. Nietzsche, supra n. 13, at Book 3, #656, #692, #694.
79. Nietzsche, supra n. 13, at Book 3, #617.
80. Ayoto supra n. 15, at 414 depicts the etymology of 'promise' as deriving from the Latin Promittere, meaning 'send forth'; it combined the prefix pro (forwards) and mittere (send).
81. See, Jacques Derrida, "Force of Law: The 'Mystical Foundation of Authority'," in D. Cornell, M. Rosenfeld, and D.G. Carlson (eds), Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice (New York: Routledge 1992), 3-67.
82. Nietzsche, supra n. 27, at Book 4, #307.
83. Nietzsche, supra n. 24, at 136.
84. Perhaps one could recover a Dionysian 'etemal joy of existence' behind this art; see Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy (New York: Dover Publications, 1995), 17-18.