[...]... question, then it would simply and fully ‘be’, and there would be no ‘call’ for law We could take standard notions of the rule of law to illustrate a bringing together of the extremities of law in the face of death – a bringing together of the certainty and uncertainty, the determinate and what is beyond determination The predominant view of the rule of law would drape it in a secure solidity Countless... indefinitely Law even presents itself as embodying a community and a tradition, and claims to carry forward that spirit beyond the death of each of us There is a self-deluding eternity to these manoeuvres We must be critical of the myth of law as transcendent and immemorial and certain Law often provides for human beings the comfort of continuity and therefore allows us to evade the logic of the gift Law often... punishment.2 But there must be more to it For Blanchot, law is ‘less the command that has death as its sanction, than death itself wearing the face of law ; this death is always the horizon of the law. ’3 And this law is the angel of discord, murder, and the end’, antithetical to ‘life itself’.4 Hence, law s deathly claim to fix, determine and hold life, to deny its protean possibility Death in this... we ought to respond to the call of the other, this other, any other It must be a gift The existence of God, for all the good it may do, seems on the contrary to undermine the logic of the gift Instead, it very often entails two related concepts The first is that it ushers in the epoch of the Book’, codifying rules on the basis of some justification external to human experience The Book converts doing... This is part of the value to be found in the way our society understands death It shows us both the necessity and the possibility of responsible action It is the figure and ground of law *** Law needs death because it needs us to be responsible independent of its own constitutive power In Part One of this volume, ‘In Extremis’, the focus is therefore on the moment of death as an occasion of heightened... nature of that outcome corresponds to a comprehensive death. 7 There would be nothing living left for law to rule We can, then, say that death is the horizon of the law in that death is an horizon belonging to law Law has an affinity with death or some similarity to it But the horizon is also a relation between law and death as different and separate Should, or could, law relate purely to death, in the. .. responsibility law requires, and the control it craves Through examining the secret of death we hope to unlock the secret weakness and fleshy body of the law Law’s competence and potential is its surface; its impotence and its impos- Introduction 5 sibility its secret meat This is the argument of this introduction It is a meaning every bit as hard as the meaninglessness of death In the dead of the night, when the. .. psyche.11 The psychic frontier makes the modern experience of death vertiginous to us, the more awful because what is lost in death is unique But on the other hand it also makes a sense of responsibility or sacrifice possible at all Our sense of death and of responsibility are alike artefacts of modernity With the experience of death, as we so fearfully navigate it, comes a sense of self and therefore the. .. within the human community – in the form of a tree, a fountain, a bullock, a flower.’9 The skeleton of the law is in fact a memorial to the fleshy matter concealed thereunder It points, by this bluster and assertion of absolute power, to its own encrypted body The secret of law against which it armours itself, like a cockroach, is its weakness in the face of death: the impossibility of instilling the. .. take? I cannot respond to the call, the request, the obligation, or even the love of another without sacrificing the other other, the other others … I am responsible to any one (that is to say to any other) only by failing in my responsibility to all the others, to the ethical or political generality And I can never justify this sacrifice.17 I think here of another situation of demand and dependence . cannot respond to the call, the request, the obligation, or even the love of another without sacrificing the other other, the other others … I am responsible. weakness in the face of death: the impossibility of instilling the responsibility law requires, and the control it craves. Through examining the secret of death