Position of the Sublime in the Derridean Deconstruction of Law

Abstract

Jacques Derrida’s reading of the topic of sublime is disseminated throughout his different texts such as Glas (1974) and Truth in Painting (1987) to a vast area of convergence between topoi such as its being colossal and monstrous or between examples from the Greek sculptures to monotheistic religions. Yet one topos, namely the law, is the utmost example of the sublime, where the opposite is also at stake: the position of the law exemplifies itself as the sublimity of the law. Here, by condensing on Derrida’s reading of Kant’s conception of sublime, and by locating its position in the deconstruction of law via the text of Kafka (Before the Law) that also Derrida gives access to, it is illustrated how the law itself presents itself as much as it is only re-presented before the law. When the law appears only in the frames of its representation, it is attested that that representation is tantamount to the representation of that which cannot be presented. The instance of this representation of law is its position without existence. In this position where the example precedes the law, the example of law becomes itself (for itself) the access as the accessory frame. It is then with the aid of Derrida’s reading of Kantian parergon as frame that the sublime enters into the frames of the exemplarity. While sublime becomes example for the parergon, the parergon, it seems, does not yield itself as an example of the sublime. By the incision that Derrida operates in the Kantian texture of the sublime, it is remarked that nevertheless the sublime itself is posited (just as a parergon is posited too). That is, according to Derrida, where the position of the sublime offers itself both as the law of the sublime and the sublimity of the law. And that is, it will be proposed, how the position of the sublime becomes the example of the deconstruction of the law insofar as the deconstruction of the law becomes itself the example of a position of the possibility of justice.