Thinking Palestine by Ronit Lentin

Thinking Palestine by Ronit Lentin

Author:Ronit Lentin [Lentin, Ronit]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Zed Books
Published: 2013-07-17T18:30:00+00:00


Now the Law of Nature is so unalterable, that it cannot be changed even by God himself … Thus two and two must make four, nor is it possible to be otherwise; therefore God himself suffers his actions to be judged by his rule (Grotius 1901: 22).

When this argument is secularized one receives the elementary idea of the rule of law: he who makes the laws is also subject to them. If God himself is subject to his own laws, then the sovereign, too, might be subject to his own rules. Grotius introduced the idea of self-limitation that lies at the heart of modern constitutionalism. The image in Ockham is one in which the rule always runs out or is suspended, and there is a will to decide when it does so. The essence of law does not lie in these regular cases of rule-following, but rather in deciding those cases that lie outside the rule.

This dualism has always been with us. At times, law appears as the voice of reason that manifests itself in rules, not in arbitrary power, and is synonymous with right. At other times law is an expression of might or power. When it is an expression of power it is arbitrary, and, as such, impossible to subsume under any rule. When law is the voice of reason it expresses itself as rules that aim to curb and restrain the arbitrariness of power; thus on the one hand it is rule and on the other the moment of exception is dominant.

In many ways liberal legal theory tries to marginalize the exceptional, hiding power, judgement and violence as exceptions. Modern democracy – so its proponents claim – exists wherever the rule of law and not the rule of men applies, where the sovereign himself is subject to the law, where there is no arbitrary power, and where the law is the voice of reason and not simply the whim of the powerful over the powerless, the rich over the poor, or the colonialist over the native.

However, a whole tradition, from Hobbes to Schmitt, draws our attention to the hidden exception. First came revolution, violence, lawlessness and formlessness, and thereafter came the norm, the constitution.

The norm, the rule, the normal, tries to blot out the exception, the violence, both historically and geographically. In terms of time it excludes the moment of its inception – the revolution and its violence. In terms of space it wants us to forget those who are geographically excluded from the system, those who are not citizens and therefore do not enjoy the rights enjoyed by the insiders. While the constitutional state is surrounded in time and space by violence, the modern state is based on the possibility of amnesia, of forgetting both what existed before there were laws and norms, and non-citizens, who are beyond the protection of law and norms.

Kierkegaard does not write as a political philosopher and does not address the question of the sovereign, and yet in his theological writings



Download



Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.