For today the police are no longer content to enforce the law, and thus to conserve it; they invent it, they publish ordinances, they intervene whenever the legal situation isnt clear to guarantee security. Which these days is to say nearly all the time. The police are ignoble because in their authority the separation of the violence that founds and the violence that conserves is suspended [...] the police invent law, they make themselves rechtsetzend, lawmaking, legislative, each time law is indeterminate enough to give them the chance. The police behave like lawmakers in modern times, not to say lawmakers of modern times.[...] Right away there are police and the police legislate, not content to enforce a law that would have had no force before the police. [...] [The police] are present, sometimes invisible but always effective, wherever there is preservation of the social order. [...] [Benjamin] admits that the problem with the police is that they are a faceless figure, a violence without a form. As such, they are ungraspable in every way. In so-called civilized states the specter of its ghostly apparition is all-pervasive. -- Derrida, Force of Law: The Mystical Foundation of Authority, 1990.
Posted on: Thu, 16 Oct 2014 08:49:38 +0000
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