SELF-SUBVERSIVE JUSTICE: CONTINGENCY OR TRANSCENDENCE FORMULA OF LAW?

Abstract

In this article the author wonders  whether  the social theory of law can make a specific contribution  to a concept of justice viable today, different from what moral, political and  legal  philosophy  can  say  about  it.  In  his  opinion,  the  concepts  of  autopoiesis  and deconstruction  (Luhmann  and Derrida) have suff icient power to activate such a contribution in two different  directions:  reconstruction  of a genealogy  of justice and observation of  paradoxes  of decisions  in modern law. The genealogical  approach  tries to discover the hidden connections  between the semantics  of justice and the social structures  (which, on the other hand, may result in the reformulation  of a plausible concept of justice in present day conditions).  A deconstructive  process,  in turn,  enables  us to see the hiatus  between legal structures and decisions, a hiatus that provokes important paradoxes in the processes of  legal  decision-making.  Through  such  observation  a  deeper  understanding  of  justice can be reached,  which the author interprets,  in the final instance,  as a process  of a self- description  of law that undermines  the recursivity  of legal operations,  and that forces law to self-transcendence,  but which sabotages itself because in its realization it always creates a  new injustice,  an experience  that Henry von Kleist anticipated  in a literary form in his novel Michael Kolhaas.