Jacques Derrida and Deconstruction of Law Jacques Derrida et Deconstruction de Droit En Fr

Résumé En

Deconstruction, which brings to mind the name of Jacques Derrida, has a controversial nexus with the law and legal studies. The story of world's prestigious law schools dealing with this notion is a testament to this claim. Nevertheless, the belief in the obvious clarity of the legal text, and the concealment of the law-making violence, necessitates the deconstruction of the law, and requires consideration of this thought in legal theory. Discussions that have so far focused on the relation between deconstruction and legal studies can be divided into two general categories. The first category seeks to make deconstruction into a technique of legal reasoning, and the other is aimed at addressing its moral side. However, merely establishing a relation between Derrida and law-even at the cost of eradicating the radical side of deconstruction and reducing it into a method or moral advice-does not exert much difference in the status quo. Therefore, it is of the essence to impede the transformation of deconstruction in the mainstream legal theory, and to emphasize its intervening aspect. In so doing, one can aim to highlight the third and radical type of legal thinking's link to deconstruction. Accordingly, the present paper, after scrutinizing the relationship between deconstruction and legal studies, seeks to critically analyze the types of legal theories influenced by Derrida's weltanschauung, with an analytical-critical eye. It also stresses the deconstruction of law as a movement which exposes and summons the hidden myths and silenced voices of law, and in this way, breaks the one and only logos of law and opens a way beyond it.