On the Deconstruction of Jurisprudence: Fin(n)is Philosophiae

Abstract

Deconstruction' proposes a reading of texts, especially philosophical texts, drawing on literary criticism. It claims that the old distinction between philosophy and literature, that the former gives a scientific insight into truth which the latter obscures in the play of language, is simply untenable. Philosophical texts are linguistic constructs, inevitably subject to the figurality of language. The fully transparent logical language that philosophers, such as Locke or the early Wittgenstein, have tried to create in order to free their discourse from the dangerous 'irrationality' of the always present rhetoric of language,2 is simply a rhetorical game. Thus, deconstruction brings to the surface in its analysis of texts, the revenge of language (of literature with its rhetoric) on philosophical claims (of science with its systematicity). As the buried figures of the most austere logical languages are brought into the open, philosophy turns out to be an "endless reflection on its own destruction at the hands of literature".3 The argument then is that all philosophical texts involve linguistic play. Further, the rhetorical analysis shows the 'unconscious' text undermining the 'conscious' pretensions. Even those texts that appear stubbornly to resist deconstruction are exposed by fastening on their figures "to the point where their effects are all the more striking for having taken hold of their text".4 Texts which actively deny deconstruction are those which claim to be a privileged site of merger between truth, authentic meaning and language. Deconstruction shows how figurality never permits such an assured correspondence, how indeed it dissolves any prioritisation between 'proper' and 'figurative' senses. In particular, the metaphors of texts are scrutinised to reveal the impossibility of closing down meaning, and to show how the means claimed to contain meaning are, at the same time, those that ground the opposites of the apparent claims. In this paper we propose a rhetorical and deconstructive reading of a text of modern jurisprudence. In doing so we use the very figural language that we