CRYPTIC COMMENTS

This chapter meditates on the relationship of law and the concept of death through an image, a story, and a set of theoretical reflections essentially Derridean in origin. Law as the limit and horizon of experience, and the implications of this for our human relations, as mediated both personally and institutionally, form the core of the discussion. The secret of law is its weakness faced with these imponderable limits and barriers. But at the same time, by putting a stop to the cost-benefit analysis of our relations and arrangements once and for all, it is the absolute limit of death, not the promise of an afterlife, that makes possible responsibility, and therefore such sacrifice, ethics, and justice as there is. Death is both the figure and ground of law: the end of responsibility and its condition; the end of justice and its condition.