Keywords
Legal scholarship, critical legal theory, routine, narrative, poststructuralism
Abstract
I have come to think that, most of the time, radical critics of a given discursive practice were once believers in that practice’s necessities and realities. In particular, I am of the opinion that one comes to appreciate the power of a discourse only when one has genuinely and personally experienced the necessitarian pull as well as the realities such discourse creates. To put it in phenomenological terms, I think that radical scepticism is often the expression of some self-revulsion at one’s earlier beliefs. The phenomenological causality described here is thus not simply about the devastating rage that one can possibly vent after feeling tricked into believing in the necessities and realities of the hard-learnt sophisticated paradigms of a system of thought. What is at stake here is a much greater phenomenological claim. It pertains to the greater potential of those who have experienced the full potency of the necessities of realities created by discourses to develop a very acute sensibility for discourses’ hidden works and thought-governing structures.
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Recommended Citation
Jean d'Aspremont, "Law, Critique and the Believer's Experience" (2024) 47:1 Dal LJ 43.
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