Christoph Menke is a third-generation Frankfurt School theorist, and widely acknowledged as one of the most interesting philosophers in Germany today. His lead essay focuses on the fundamental question for legal and political philosophy: the relationship between law and violence. The first part of the essay shows why and in what precise sense the law is irreducibly violent; the second part establishes the possibility of the law becoming self-reflectively aware of its own violence. The volume contains responses by María del Rosario Acosta López, Daniel Loick, Alessandro Ferrara, Ben Morgan, Andreas Fischer-Lescano and Alexander García Düttmann. It concludes with Menke's reply to his critics.
Portugal, Spain, United Kingdom, United States
Christoph Menke is Professor of Philosophy at the Institute of Philosophy at Goethe University Frankfurt am Main.
'Christoph Menke is the foremost critical theorist of the "self-repugnance" (as immanent self-critique) of judgment, aesthetics, and the law. In this volume, he turns to a literary archive for its more lucid awareness of the law's paradoxes. Rethinking Benjamin's Critique of Violence, Menke asks us to imagine the difference of a law executed in reflexive awareness (rather than disavowal) of its own violence. His leading critics explore the extension of his trenchant theses to contemporary forms of transitional justice, politics, literature, subjectivity, decision, and depotentiation.'
Penelope Deutscher, Joan and Sarepta Harrison Professor of Philosophy, Northwestern University
