Abstract
Jean-Luc Nancy has not written a single work dedicated entirely to the problem of justice or related themes, but nevertheless, topics such as right, justice, judgement or law appear in various places in Nancy’s work. Besides ‘Lapsus judicii’ and ‘Dies irae’, the theme of justice particularly comes up and in two small texts: ‘Cosmos Basileus’ and ‘Human Excess’. These texts are crucial to understand Nancy’s point of view in juridical matters but are largely left aside in secondary literature, probably because of their enigmatic character. In this article we explore the cluster of juridical questions in ‘Cosmos Basileus’ and ‘Human Excess’ and argue why today, for Nancy, an ontological perspective is needed to cope with juridical questions. For him, justice is in the first place bound up with the fact of our co-existence, with what is unique about every existence in its co-existence with other creations. He claims, first, that freedom is responsibility and the act of doing justice to existence and, second, that sharing the world is the law of the world. We will discuss these two claims and conclude with Nancy’s plead for ontological reflection within juridical topics.
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Notes
For an elaboration of this, see Ghetti (2005), Pryor (2004), Zartaloudis (2005). In ‘Lapsus judicii’, Nancy wants to make clear that the law feeds off proclaiming justice, off its juris-diction, and that the law thus always presupposes ‘the particular case’, a lapsus (fall, faulty). The law needs to ‘fictionalize’ (from the Latin fictio: forming, manufacturing, and from fictum: lie, fantasy) its fall in order to install its universality. In this way, jurisdiction is always and already juris-fiction. ‘Law and case come before right only if they are modeled, shaped, fashioned—fictioned—in and through one another. The implications of this necessity are quite radical, however: the installation or inauguration of right must of itself be fictioned’ (Nancy and Sparks 2003, p. 157). For an elaboration of this, see Zartaloudis (2005).
In the Aristotelean sense, dikè refers to the general term for law and justice. In the fifth book of the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle distinguishes between different forms of specific justice: distributive and reciprocal justice, civil and domestic justice, law and natural law, and fairness.
Nancy cites Emmanuel Levinas in his commentary upon the categorical imperative, interpreted as the law of the law and which focuses on the immeasurable duty accompanying it. More specifically, Nancy stresses the ethical resistance of the Face, which Levinas emphasizes in his oeuvre. In this respect, further research into, on the one hand, the similarities between the stress on the immeasurability of existence in Nancy and the excess, immeasurable as well, of the Infinite in Levinas, and on the other hand, into the differences of their conception of otherness, seems very much necessary. My research here, however, will have to limit itself to just pointing to the existence of such analogies between Levinas and Nancy.
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Devisch, I. Doing Justice to Existence: Jean-Luc Nancy and ‘The Size of Humanity’. Law Critique 22, 1–13 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10978-010-9078-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10978-010-9078-6