Individual violence and the law

• Date: 26 September 2006
• Pages: 3-14
• Published date: 26 September 2006
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/S1059-4337(06)39001-1
• Author: Patricia Tuitt

INDIVIDUAL VIOLENCE AND THE

LAW

Patricia Tuitt

ABSTRACT

The political landscape that has been unfolding since the attacks on the

World Trade Centre in September 2001 has created an urgent imperative

for a reappraisal of the place of individual force within philosophies of

violence, particularly those that are directed to law. An extensive critique

of the relation between law and violence has emerged around the works of

philosophers, such as Walter Benjamin, Franz Fanon, Jacques Derrida

and Giorgio Agamben (1998, In: D.H. Roazen (Trans.), Homo sacer:

Sovereign power and bare life. California: Stanford University Press),

but it is questionable whether any of these provide us with the conceptual

tools with which to address what is being presented (correctly or other-

wise) as a particular problematic of the 21st century. Indeed, I would

argue that a certain intellectual malaise surrounds discussion around in-

dividual force and that this state of affairs is in large measure due to the

way in which critical theory and philosophy has addressed questions con-

cerning the relation between individual violence and the juridical order.

Without exception such accounts declare that individual violence under-

mines the authority of law itself. The following seeks to interrogate this

contention and in doing so to begin to construct a more nuanced way of

conceiving how the law preserves its authority.

Studies in Law, Politics, and Society, Volume 39, 3–14

Copyright r2006 by Elsevier Ltd.

All rights of reproduction in any form reserved

ISSN: 1059-4337/doi:10.1016/S1059-4337(06)39001-1

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