The Thinker of the Future – Introduction to The Violence of the Masquerade: Law Dressed Up as Justice

Abstract

There has perhaps been no greater thinker of the future than Jacques Derrida. Throughout his entire body of work Derrida constantly returns to the thinking of the “perhaps,” of the arrizant. This thinking of the “perhaps” takes shape as what is “new” and other to our world, something that is therefore unknowable even as a horizon of ideality that both arises out of and points to what ought to be in any given world. I renamed deconstruction the philosophy of the limit so as to emphasize Derrida as the protector of what is still yet to come. My argument was fundamentally that Derrida radicalized the notion of the Kantian meaning of “laying the ground” as the boundaries for the constitution of a sphere of valid knowledge, or determinant judgment. In Kant, to criticize aims to delimit what is decisive to the proper essence of a sphere of knowledge, say for example science. The “laying of limits” is not primarily a demarcation against a sphere of knowledge, but a delimiting in the sense of an exhibition of the inner construction of pure reason. The lifting out of the elements of reason involves a critique in the sense that it both sketches out the faculty of pure reason and surveys the project as the whole of its larger architectonic or systematic structure.