Does Derrida's death justify a special issue of this Journal, preceded immediately by a special edition on human rights? Can death justify anything at all? And what does this mean for the authors of this volume; are their texts doomed to remain unjustified, if no authority steps in to legitimate our endeavour to gather texts by friends in the name of Derrida?

Jacques Derrida. J.D. for short. And J.D. of course is titular. It is the acronym for Juris Doctor. It signifies a lawyer or one wise in the law. If we are to recollect and celebrate his life in its juridical context and significance then Jacques Derrida, J.D., is not a bad place to start. Technically, of course, and despite the legal sounding acronym, J.D. was not a lawyer. He did, however, hold a visiting appointment at a Law School in New York. My law school in fact. Let me add, at the risk of getting personal for a moment – and if not now, when? – that in many ways I am here because he was. And then also some of his most influential articles were on the subject of law or were delivered and published first in a legal forum. His essay on Kafka, on the law of genre, for example, and then again his lengthy and widely circulated exposition of “The Force of Law.” He kept coming back to law: he inhabited its margins, searched for its supplements, dwelt on its traces.

A vital measure of the influence of a thinker on a discipline is the extent to which they transform its customs, protocols and practices in a way that makes it difficult to conceive how things were done before they appeared on the scene. Such transformations are usually simply incorporated into the discipline and presupposed by those who come after. This is why we often have a thankless relation to the most influential thinkers – because their innovations are now the way in which we are accustomed to see and do things. Definitionally then, great thinkers are often those who change the way we do things in a peculiarly thankless way. Jacques Derrida was a great thinker. He exerted a massive influence over a whole generation of people working in philosophy. His death is an unfathomable loss. In what follows I would like to thank him for what he enabled people like me to presuppose thanklessly in our practice.

Since receiving the invitation to participate in this special issue, I have been wondering about whether I can do justice in this brief space to what I have learnt from reading Derrida. And as someone who long ago began to distrust those versions of the history of ideas organized around the names of important individuals, I've also wondered about how and why I would want to link lessons to the proper name “Jacques Derrida.” Indeed the pleasure, and even the reward, I have received from reading Derrida is hard for me to separate out from the experience of living as part of a community that exists within and across the institutions I inhabit, with colleagues, students and friends. I associate Derrida with a way of life, a way of reading, writing, speaking and listening to each other, that is part of the “simple day-to-dayness” and “the intense moments of work, teaching and thinking” that constitutes this community, that allies us. I hope I can communicate a little of what reading Derrida has meant, and still does mean, to me then within this particular institutional life.

Derrida's death caused a surprising reaction in the media, being responsible for a great number of articles, commentaries and announcements. It seems that now, with his death, one of his inventions – the most famous and misinterpreted one which is widely used to define his philosophical style and which is known as “deconstruction” – has finally been understood. Fortunately, in the most respected newspapers in Brasil, articles with a good survey of Derrida's work were published not only by journalists but also by literary critics, economists, lawyers and psychoanalists. But, unfortunately, the philosophers, or the ones that call themselves philosophers, seem to have insisted on ignoring the fertility of his thoughts.

One has never experienced the initial words of “The Ends of Man” spoken so seriously as at the recent colloquium held in Rio de Janeiro, between August 16-18, 2004. The international colloquium “Towards a Reflection on Deconstruction: Issues of Politics, Ethics and Aesthetics” opened with a lecture by Jacques Derrida entitled “Forgiveness, Truth, Reconciliation: What Gender?” It seems to echo incessantly the sentence of the philosopher who claimed in his own Margins of Philosophy: “every and any philosophical colloquium necessarily has a political sense.”

In a candid interview in 1991, when he was 60, Jacques Derrida let the cat out of the bag. For all his academic achievements and popular acclaim, his abiding dream for himself remained that of his youth “becoming a professional footballer.” In this mere aside, Derrida revealed as much about himself as both philosopher and person (if they can be separated) as in almost all his voluminous writings, speeches, reviews, and interviews. How fitting, therefore, that this passing remark should take us from the expressive margin into the subversive heart of this man of thought and reveal him as a frustrated man of action; the philosophical life was only a consolation for a more fulfilled life as sporting hero. Yet, in so many ways, so much can be learned and understood about the Derridean oeuvre by treating its author as a footballer, as someone who plied his trade on the fields of sporting endeavour than in the classrooms and libraries of the world. Indeed, if Derrida had played football, both philosophy and life might have been the better for it. Not because he would have spared the world his philosophical interrogations, but because he might have made even more of an impression on the sensibilities and senses of his times. It is as a footballer of attacking flair, not as an intellectual of defensive legend, that I will remember Derrida best. While it is hard to imagine the suave Derrida in the garishly-coloured synthetic shirt of his favourite team with a number “7” and “Derrida” emblazoned on the back, there is a genuine excitement at the prospect of him tantalising and tormenting the opposition in his own version of “the beautiful game.” He knew that those who knew nothing of football knew nothing of life.

With respect to space at least, philosophy is almost unanimous. A space comes into being as soon as a border is established and an observer looks at both sides of the border including at the border separating the sides. Without the border, no space, and the space has none. Without the observer, the same applies, even if there are only observers where distinctions are being drawn. Jacques Derrida was conscious of this. One of his questions is the perennial question of philosophy: what is space if, for a space to reveal itself, there is a boundary to be drawn, such that an observer may emerge looking at the space the boundary is brought forward in.

In his final publication Derrida argues for a rather wide notion of the concept of sovereignty. Sovereigns are not only public officers and dignitaries, or those who invest them with sovereign power – we all are sovereigns, without exception, insofar the sovereign function is nothing but the rationale of all metaphysics, anchored in a certain capability, in the ability to do something, in a power or potency that transfers and realizes itself, that shows itself in possession, property, the power or authority of the master, be it the master of the house or in the city or state, despot, be it the master over himself, and thus master over his passions which have to be mastered just like the many-headed mass in the political arena. Derrida thinks the sovereign with Aristotle: the prima causa, the unmoved mover. It has been often remarked that philosophy here openly reveals itself as political theology. Derrida thus refers to the famous lines of the Iliad, where Ulysses warns of the sovereignty of the many: “it is not well that there should be many masters; one man must be supreme – one king to whom the son of scheming Saturn has given the scepter of sovereignty over you all.”

“To be or not to be?” – in a sense that has always been the question of ethics, of the life worth living, and philosophy would be the search for the answer to that question. In this essay I would like to propose an alternative formulation and interpret it, rather grotesquely (Shakespeare I'm not), as the following: “To ontologize the ethical or not to ontologize the ethical: that is the question of politics.” Ultimately, I would like to suggest that this is a question that must but cannot be answered, or at least answered by philosophy, by a philosophy that retains the ideal of an “answer” that conforms to the form of knowledge. The vehicle for this exposition will be several texts by Jacques Derrida (primarily “Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundation of Authority'” and Specters of Marx). My hope is that this discussion will ultimately justify (or at least excuse) my grotesque paraphrase of Hamlet as well as my rather pretentious subtitle.

[Editorial Comment: This engaging dialogue between the two authors is a selection from a much larger piece including a wider exploration of Derrida's intellectual context and his current interlocutors in law and the social sciences in general. The editors of this Special Section hope to publish further parts of this conversation in a subequent issue of German Law Journal.]

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.

In the 1970s and 80s, the philosophical works of Jacques Derrida became known well beyond the borders of France and beyond the limits of the French language. It was a radical and disturbing new form of materialism which made Derrida's thought so notorious: a philosophy of writing, of différance, of the movements of negation which always escape our grasp – with the effect that all theoretical trust in the idea of “presence” is undermined. Derrida develops his thought relentlessly on the border between form and content. It could be said that he balances on this border. And he conceives these diverse, experimental balancing acts, which are portrayed as readings of other texts, as a procedure in its own right – a procedure, called “deconstruction”, which has a distinctly irritating effect on the reader.

In his famous talk “The Force of Law,” given at Cardozo Law School in 1989, Derrida linked his work with the Critical Legal Studies movement. This lecture signposted a change of direction in deconstruction. Early deconstruction had been criticized for formalism, aestheticism and scant recognition of political realities. Derrida's (in)famous statement that “there is nothing outside of the text,” was a rare philosophical sound-bite meaning that language, communication and social interaction cannot avoid, as commonly assumed, the uncertainties and ambiguities of the written text. But the aphorism was often misinterpreted to signify extreme idealism, disregard for the real world and literary and philosophical reductionism. But the “Force of Law” signified a clear turn towards political and ethical engagement, symbolized by the discussion of law and justice. After that talk, deconstruction became obsessed with questions of ethical responsibility, the meaning of friendship and the complex relationship with the other. Before his death, Derrida wrote a number of essays on contemporary political events. He denounced the Kosovo and Iraq wars and devoted a book to ‘rogue’ elements and states, in which he attacked the United States as the greatest rogue. Just before his untimely death in 2004, Derrida had become preoccupied with the concept of sovereignty at the basis of the tragedies and abuses of modernity. It is this political and ethical turn of deconstruction that I would like to address in the context of critical legal theory.

This provocative assertion, sharply contrasting with the decades-old criticism of deconstruction as an aesthetisizing apolitical and ahistorical exercise, recapitulated in 1989 the stakes of an infinite task and responsibility that, in spite of and because of its infinity, cannot be relegated to tomorrow: “[…] justice, however unpresentable it may be, doesn't wait. It is that which must not wait.” It is in the spirit of such urgency, of a responsibility that cannot be postponed, that Jacques Derrida was an active and outspoken critic and commentator on issues such as South Africa's Apartheid, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the bloody civil war in his native Algeria, human rights abuses, French immigration laws, the death penalty, and on what Richard Falk has termed “the great terror war”.

Given the remarkable consistency in Jacques Derrida's work over several decades, it is not hard to draw a line from “Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundation of Authority’” to his last seminars, on pardon and forgiveness. The aporias of forgiveness are analogous to those of the gift and of justice he had analyzed in detail in previous decades, as Derrida states in “To Forgive: The Unforgivable and the Imprescriptible” — to that extent his last seminars and lectures were part of the same deconstructive project on the possibility of justice. At the same time, Derrida postulates that forgiveness is an experience outside or heterogeneous to the rule of law. In considering this juncture in Derrida's work, this paper will juxtapose the logic and history of amnesty with Derrida's analysis of pardon: the latter pivots on a monotheistic heritage, a Biblical-Koranic sense that is demarcated from the former concept, that of amnesty between an ethics of forgiveness and the politics of forgetting.

How could one conclude the preceding collection of texts and create the closure necessary for the recognizability, citability, and, indeed, untouchability of this “Special Section on Derrida” within the German Law Journal? And how could one determine the multiple significations of each and all these texts, and connect them through a single thread? And, finally, how is one to respond to the preceding questions? Do they call for an analytical reflection on the structural indeterminacy of conclusion, or for an ethical reflection on its justice?

July 8, 2004, marked a cornerstone for the German law against unfair competition. The amending Statute Against Unfair Competition (UWG 2004) came into force on that day. That day also ended a long discussion among researchers who had called for a thorough modernization of the UWG. In particular, researchers criticized the prohibitions on sales promotion; these prohibitions are now abolished. Furthermore, the new UWG addresses European Union demands for greater liberalization and consumer protection, especially with respect to the electronic communications sector. The new law is a complete reorganization of the old act of 1909. The revised UWG is much more liberal, but still guarantees a high standard of protection for consumers and competitors.

After last year's successful Academia Juris Internationalis workshop on local products, Prof. Dr. Thilo Marauhn and Dr. Sebastian Heselhaus (Academia Juris Internationalis Franz von Liszt, Faculty of Law, Justus-Liebig-University, Giessen) organized the second Jean Monnet – Workshop in the Senate Hall of the Main Building of Justus-Liebig-University in Giessen, Germany, on 2 July 2004.