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On Justice

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Abstract

This paper returns to the question of how to think of justice through Teubner’s recent definition of what he calls juridical justice. Juridical justice is defined as distinct from political, moral, social and theological conceptions of justice. Teubner attempts to think of an imaginary space for a juridical justice ‘beyond the sites of natural and positive law’ and searches for a conception of justice as the ‘law’s self-subversive principle’. This article reviews Teubner’s conception of juridical justice and further proposes a distinction between juridical and non-juridical understandings of justice.

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Notes

  1. See also for Teubner’s comments on Rabbi Eliezer’s halachic discussion.

  2. Teubner calls this juridification: ‘justicialization of the world’ at pp. 21–22.

  3. See, for example, Teubner’s discussion of Rudolf Wiethölter’s attempt, in Teubner (2006, pp. 41–64).

  4. See Nancy (2003, pp. 152–171). A manner of thinking thought as judgment that is fundamental to both legal and philosophical reason.

  5. Gewalt is difficult to translate since it represents both the role of authority and the application of violence.

  6. See for the correction of the translation of the term Auslösung that which triggers rather than as Auflösung (that which dissolves), Agamben (2007, p. 125).

  7. As suggested earlier, juridical conceptions of justice are not exclusively confined to those of a legal system but include all conceptions of justice that operate under the paradigm of the juridical, of judgment.

  8. Ethics is understood here in the sense of ethos meaning a way of being.

  9. Benjamin (1995, p. 401). In these extracts I have also consulted Eric Jacobson’s translation (2003, pp. 166–167). Jacobson’s reading of these extracts is very helpful, if also different to the one provided here. Benjamin’s notes call for a far more detailed analysis that cannot be provided here.

  10. See Heidegger (1957). In English see ‘The Anaximander Fragment’, in Heidegger (1975). See also Derrida (1982, pp. 3–27).

  11. Agamben (1995, p. 48). See also on the experience of language, Agamben (1999b).

  12. Paraphrasing Agamben (1995, p. 84).

  13. Scholem quoted in Jacobson (2003, n. 52, p. 177).

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Correspondence to Thanos Zartaloudis.

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Article dedicated for Cornelia Vismann.

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Zartaloudis, T. On Justice. Law Critique 22, 135–153 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10978-011-9086-1

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