Abstract
In this article I reflect on some aspects of Baxi’s essay “Law and State-Regulated Capitalism in India” (1991). I wish to evoke, firstly, how Baxi’s critique of Indian law allows students to experience ‘negative thinking’ through its undermining of basic assumptions about law and the State. Secondly, I attempt to make sense of Baxi’s reference to ‘law’s illegalities’ by using Derrida’s conception of the impossibility of fixing the limit between the legal and the illegal, which is associated with the impossibility of justice itself. Finally, I offer a brief analysis of some technical aspects of Baxi’s writing style to show how the text’s powerful literary properties shape our experience of its argument.
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Notes
Upendra Baxi, Law and State Regulated Capitalism in India: Some Preliminary Reflections, in Capitalist Development: Critical Essays, 185-209 (Ghanshyam Shah ed., 1990).
Id., at 189.
H. Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 131 (Routledge, 2nd edn. 1991).
Id. at 144.
Simon Critchey, The Ethics Of Deconstruction: Derrida And Levinas(3rd ed., 2014)).
In his study of Derridean ethics, Critchley uses the phrase in the context of the issue of ‘closure’ in Derrida. It is linked in a later passage to the problem of ‘logocentric totality’; there is, perhaps, some distant resonance of this in my comment below on the limits of legality in both Derrida and Baxi.
Baxi, supra note 1, at 185.
Margaret Davies, Asking the Law Question 378 (3rd edn. 2008).
Baxi, supra note 1, 200. The connection between this and state-regulated capitalism is not immediately obvious. Baxi might be suggesting that the reign of terror allows the state to maintain the working-class population (they are the ones who face the brunt of the “illegal” violence) in a perpetually disciplined state. However, this suggestion is not spelled out; Baxi says instead that the State’s violent oppression fuels popular insurrection which in turn justifies more excessive use of force. That this represents and contributes to both discipline and hegemony is a radical idea that one wishes he had explored further.
Jacques Derrida, Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundation of Authority’ in Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, 3-67 (Drucilla Cornell et. al., eds., 1992).
Id., 15: ‘[D]econstruction takes place in the interval that separates the undeconstructibility of justice from the deconstructibility of droit (authority, legitimacy, and so on). It is possible as an experience of the impossible, there where, even if it does not exist (or does not yet exist, or never does exist), there is justice.’
See douglas e. litowitz, Postmodern Philosophy & Law, 98-108 (1997). This is why I think it is missing the point to accuse Derrida of relying on hidden Platonic or natural law concepts of justice; Litowitz is an example of such an accusation.
See generally Carolyn D’Cruz, Responding to a Heritage: Justice, Deconstruction and Injunctions of Marx, 6(2) Social Semiotics 159-178 (1996). In later work, Derrida himself engages with Marxist approaches that speak of justice as an emancipatory ideal.
For a glossary that defines some the technical terms I use in this section see The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms (Chris Baldick ed., 1990)
Although I have seen some hints of it elsewhere in Baxi’s own writing.
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Arun Sagar—Associate Professor.
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Sagar, A. Fragments on reading and teaching Baxi: pedagogy, deconstruction, style. Jindal Global Law Review 9, 267–277 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s41020-018-0068-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s41020-018-0068-0