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Law and Domination

Christoph Menke

in Critical Theory in Critical Times: Transforming the Global Political and Economic Order

The program of Marx’s social critique of law is to reveal the social logic of law, the structural nexus between its normative content and the basic forms of social domination. In this chapter, Menke ... More

The program of Marx’s social critique of law is to reveal the social logic of law, the structural nexus between its normative content and the basic forms of social domination. In this chapter, Menke sketches a critique of the social critique of law. He argues that the fundamental premises of Marx’s legal theory lead him to reduce bourgeois law to private law, neglecting the separate and equiprimordial formation of social law. His alternative proposal is a conception according to which the tension between private and social law is constitutive of the bourgeois legal formation. This conception allows us to understand the law in bourgeois society as not only the “different form” of social domination but also the object, medium, and scene of a struggle of antagonistic relations of power.Less

After the Afterward

Laurent Dubreuil

David Fieni (ed.)

in Empire of Language: Toward a Critique of (Post) colonial Expression

This concluding chapter argues that, in order to get rid of a social and political prescription, one cannot claim to know nothing about it. Instead, it asserts that dominating parlance should become ... More

This concluding chapter argues that, in order to get rid of a social and political prescription, one cannot claim to know nothing about it. Instead, it asserts that dominating parlance should become the sole forge of language. Examining (post)colonial usage allows one to situate regions and zones of discursive thought where one does not want to remain. Hence it is up to each of us to find one or more voices that break the noxious harmony of social domination. The chapter asserts, in short, that knowledge of colonial activity—as with any other social and political prescription—takes on meaning only through the test of a discourse surpassing the unthought of its parlance.Less

How Do We Express and Share Knowledge?

Otto Maduro

Eduardo Mendieta (ed.)

in Maps for a Fiesta: A Latina/o Perspective on Knowledge and the Global Crisis

This chapter considers the role of language in shaping and informing our knowledge of reality as well as the influence of what we know on our way of speaking to ourselves and to others about the ... More

This chapter considers the role of language in shaping and informing our knowledge of reality as well as the influence of what we know on our way of speaking to ourselves and to others about the world. To highlight the connection between language and knowledge, it looks at several of the problems seriously affecting Latin America. It first discusses the relationship between the processes of social domination and a kind of “politics of language” aimed at controlling a community's capacity to grasp and change their own reality. It then reflects on the way silence, the apparent absence of language, can have completely different meanings in different circumstances. It also examines the efforts of oppressed groups to creatively reappropriate language and the ways in which liberation is expressed and developed. Finally, it examines elitism and populism and offers possible alternatives to this apparent polarization, along with the role of nonverbal languages, such as body language and religious symbolism, in relation to knowledge.Less

A Radical Revolution in Thought: Frederick Douglass on the Slave’s Perspective on Republican Freedom

Alan Coffee

in Radical Republicanism: Recovering the Tradition's Popular Heritage

While the image of the slave as the antithesis of the freeman is central to republican freedom, it is striking that slaves themselves have not contributed to how this condition is understood. I draw ... More

While the image of the slave as the antithesis of the freeman is central to republican freedom, it is striking that slaves themselves have not contributed to how this condition is understood. I draw on the long-overlooked work of Frederick Douglass to show how this results in a one-sided conception of both freedom and slavery, which leaves republicanism unable to provide equal and robust protection for historically outcast people. Douglass argued that republican freedom under law is always dependent on a more fundamental ‘radical revolution in thought’, in which the entire system of social norms and practices are reworked together by members of all constituent social groups—women and men, black and white, rich and poor—so that it reflects a genuinely collaborative achievement. Only then can we begin the republican project of establishing a contestatory freedom as non-domination that today’s republicans take for granted.Less