Legislation-Transgression: Strategies and Counter-Strategies in the Transcendental Justification of Norms

Abstract

With these rhetorical questions Jacques Derrida casts general suspicion on what is primarily constitutive of the transcendental tradition: the authority of the “I think” as the source of laws for both knowing and acting. In this paper I wish to show some presuppositions under which the legislative ego can appear as traversed by “the a priori of a counter-law,” by a condition of “impossibility”; how an element of transgression can be seen to “contaminate” transcendental legislation at its very heart. I will then point out some consequences of the formal identity between legislation and transgression for the status of the social and human sciences today.

What if there were, lodged within the heart of law itself, a law of impurity or a principle of contamination? What if the condition for the possibility of law were the a priori of a counter-law, an axiom of impossibility, maddening its sense, order and reason? Jacques Derrida¹