Derrida’s Legal Times:

Abstract

To the extent that European critical theory influenced the American legal academy, it has tended to be Michel Foucault and, more recently, Giorgio Agamben, who have affected discussions of the connection between law and politics and the power dynamics at the heart of the juridical. Jacques Derrida’s essay “The Force of Law” spawned some commentary, but Derrida’s work largely entered legal circles due to its emphasis on the indeterminacy of language and its inversion of binaries, which legal scholars took as a source for ideology critique. The aim of this essay is to suggest what Derrida’s later forays into law and politics might contribute to thinking in American legal theory beyond what can be derived from Foucault and his inheritors. The key differences, I contend, pertain to time. In particular, Derrida’s writings lead us to reconsider the timing of the relation between the subject and the law, whether that subject is declaring independence or awaiting death. Four temporally inflected terms — decision, declaration, deferral, and event—bear a particular weight in Derrida’s discussions of the juridico-political and furnish the focal points for this essay.