Renewing Philosophy General Editor: Gary Banham Titles include: Kyriaki Goudeli CHALLENGES TO GERMAN IDEALISM Schelling, Fichte and Kant Keekok Lee PHILOSOPHY AND REVOLUTIONS IN GENETICS Deep Science and Deep Technology Vincent W. Lloyd LAW AND TRANSCENDENCE On the Unfinished Project of Gillian Rose Jill Marsden AFTER NIETZSCHE Jean-Paul Martinon ON FUTURITY Malabou, Nancy & Derrida Simon O Sullivan ART ENCOUNTERS DELEUZE AND GUATTARI Thought Beyond Representation Peg Rawes SPACE, GEOMETRY AND AESTHETICS Through Kant and Towards Deleuze Celine Surprenant FREUD S MASS PSYCHOLOGY Alberto Toscano PHILOSOPHY AND INDIVIDUATION BETWEEN KANT AND DELEUZE The Theatre of Production Vasiliki Tsakiri KIERKEGAARD Anxiety, Repetition and Contemporaneity
Philip Walsh SKEPTICISM, MODERNITY AND CRITICAL THEORY Martin Weatherston HEIDEGGER S INTERPRETATION OF KANT Categories, Imagination and Temporality Renewing Philosophy Series Standing Order ISBN 978 0 333 91928 6 (hardback) 978 0 230 20086 9 (paperback) (outside North America only) You can receive future titles in this series as they are published by placing a standing order. Please contact your bookseller or, in case of difficulty, write to us at the address below with your name and address, the title of the series and the ISBN quoted above. Customer Services Department, Macmillan Distribution Ltd, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS, England
Law and Transcendence On the Unfinished Project of Gillian Rose Vincent W. Lloyd Georgia State University, USA
Vincent W. Lloyd 2009 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2009 978-0-230-21047-9 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6-10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2009 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave and Macmillan are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-30310-6 ISBN 978-0-230-29419-6 (ebook) DOI 10.1057/9780230294196 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Lloyd, Vincent W., 1982 Law and transcendence : on the unfinished project of Gillian Rose / Vincent W. Lloyd. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN-13: 978-1-349-30310-6 (alk. paper) 1. Rose, Gillian. 2. Law Philosophy. 3. Transcendence (Philosophy) I. Title. B1649.R74L56 2009 192 dc22 2008030090 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09
Contents Series Editor s Preface vi Introduction 1 1 Gillian Rose, Philosopher of Law 12 2 On Dualism 33 3 On Traditionalism 64 4 On Quietism 92 5 Metaphysics of Law 121 6 Phenomenology of Law 145 7 After Transcendence 173 Notes 198 Bibliography 203 Index 209 v
Series Editor s Preface The project of Renewing Philosophy is to present works that either engage anew with the legacy of modernity or allow in some sense a connection between philosophy and something that touches on an understanding of the contemporary in a way that is unique to philosophy. This work engages in a response to a thinker of the late twentieth century who has yet to receive her due: Gillian Rose. Rose herself was certainly engaged in a critical reflection on modernity, a reflection intended to address the trends most significant in contemporary thought. In setting out this project Rose self-consciously aimed at recovering for social thought a sense of what was most significant in the Hegelian heritage. Whilst Hegel s shade was often invoked in the twentieth century it remains questionable whether his heritage has been one that the contemporary world has comprehended. Hegel himself, in another preface, famously claimed that when philosophy paints its grey in grey, then has a form of life grown old. This statement has been consistently read as a conservative one with the result that it has seemed better to focus on the manner of making the world better or, as Marx famously put it in his riposte, to cease interpreting and start changing things. Since the twentieth century was, however, one in which the change called for by Marx produced renewed distortions and diremptions, cleavages in the social whole that produced further strife and not the harmony that was alleged to be their aim, it is perhaps time to reassess the question of whether his statement concerning philosophy was part of a conservative vision. Certainly not only those of a Marxist persuasion have thought this but it is also not only those of a Marxist persuasion who have reproduced violence through insistence on the change wrought by means of abstractions. It is in fact a problem about the nature of abstraction that is at the heart of Hegel s famous declaration concerning philosophy. Just prior to making the claim that when philosophy paints its grey in grey then has a form of life grown old, Hegel cautions against the view that philosophy should give instructions on how the world ought to be. It is because the business of philosophy is with the concept that what it tends to produce is an intellectual world that is set out against the sensuous one and which in being so set against it produces not an alternative to it but rather a mirror of it that will in its turn reflect back on that vi
Series Editor s Preface vii time in ways that will reproduce further tensions. The assessment of philosophy as a moral discipline that can externally relate to the world is what is problematic for Hegel. It is the Philosophy of Right that he is prefacing when he makes these comments and perhaps most important is the following: What lies between reason as self-conscious spirit and reason as present actuality, what separates the former from the latter and prevents it from finding satisfaction in it, is the fetter of some abstraction or other which has not been liberated into [the form of] the concept. 1 We see here a vivid statement of the diremption of reason: it is presented both as a self-conscious spirit and a present actuality with the former failing to find satisfaction in the latter. The lack of such satisfaction is essential to the movement we term history. The basis of it is the abstraction from the present in the spirit of the reflection on that present. Within this spirit comes the need and drive to incarnate something that is abstracted and set against. Hegel s movement of thought underscores both the necessity of the abstraction and its violence. Without violence no history but without violence no diremption and suffering: this is what Gillian Rose re-presented for us under the figure of the broken middle. The middle is broken in the sense that the attempt at synthetic unification of the social whole in a move that would harmonize and dissolve tensions is a recurrent motif that ensures other divisions and diremptions arise in their turn. The attempt to close history, to declare it at an end is precisely the movement of resistance to Hegel s thought. 2 Hegel is not the one to declare history over or rather in his speculative thinking each movement of closure ensures the thinking of a new opening. We remain caught in the middle in the contest between beginning and end, a contest that is unwinnable and which becomes poisonous in the circumstances where a complete and total finality is claimed. The game of thought with itself that we term philosophy is thus on an Hegelian reading no mere intellectual situation: it is formative of the nature of political life itself. Hegel is rare in being so bold as to completely identify philosophy with the given that we call our life. It is precisely this identity which is not one that is the secret of Hegel s thought, a secret re-told by Rose in the contemporary world as one in which the reinvention of neo-kantianism prevents the emergence of a relation to the world that would permit a recognition of spirit with its own actuality. The tracking of the fetter of abstraction within the middle in which we are broken is the main work of Rose, a work which she, late in her very short life, identified in Kierkegaardian fashion, as a work of love. One of Hegel s first and philosophically finest efforts is entitled The Spirit
viii Series Editor s Preface of Christianity and Its Fate and in it Hegel tracks the relationship between love and law. If love is something other than the personal relation of one to another, if it is capable of being a figure for something central to social and moral life, then it must be in terms of a structure that would express a connection of the members of a social bond with each other by means of a projection that is both of them and beyond them. This movement within and beyond the community is however also at work in law. Law is not merely a set of regulations, a group of statements concerning what should and should not be done but a tense bond that enables the narration of a set of actions into a meaningful whole. The connection between the meaningful whole and the movement of the community beyond itself is one that Hegel traces in this early piece through the patterns of religion. However the general message here is broader than can be told by means of religion alone. The connection of religion to the political is one whereby the former s request for transcendence has to come to be grounded in a pact that regulates life in rituals and movements that command something that will allow the movement of the group beyond any given particular settlement. These general reflections are meant to express something of a context for what is attempted here by Vincent Lloyd. Rose s work had two central moments, the first was given in her early work Hegel Contra Sociology and the second in the work on which I have been drawing thus far, The Broken Middle. Whilst the first demonstrated the need for thinking law in a way which ceased to view it as external to society, the second by contrast focused on love as a relation in which we are caught prior to being able to control it. The relation between the early thought of law and the later thought of love is one that remained to be set out further in her work and which Lloyd here takes on. Beginning from an engagement with jurisprudence Lloyd concludes with an investigation of eros. The movement from one to the other is part of a work that requires a sense of spirit coming to engage with its own fetters in a thought that will allow movement as well as enable a sense of the actual as rational. For Lloyd s thought to be one that we can become open to is for philosophy to again be something we see as requiring not merely work but a love that will not settle only on something personal but will free us from that which is only singular in order for the universality of Spirit to once more gather strength. Such a reawakening of the universal in the relation to the social bond would truly mark a renewal of philosophy. GARY BANHAM