Before the Law: The Complete Text of Préjugés

90 Pages·2018·0.363 MB·English

by  Jacques Derrida, Sandra Van Reenen, Jacques De Ville

Before the Law
A Univocal Book
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Before the Law
The Complete Text of Préjugés
Jacques Derrida
Translated by Sandra van Reenen
and Jacques de Ville
A Univocal Book
University of Minnesota Press
Minneapolis
London
Originally published in French as Préjugés: devant la loi in
La faculté de juger. Copyright 1985 by Les Éditions de Minuit, 7,
rue Bernard- Palissy, 75006 Paris
Copyright 2018 by Sandra van Reenen and Jacques de Ville
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
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otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
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23 22 21 20 19 18 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Derrida, Jacques, author. | Van Reenen, Sandra, translator. | De Ville,
Jacques, translator.
Title: Before the law : the complete text of Préjugés / Jacques Derrida;
translated by Sandra van Reenen and Jacques de Ville.
Other titles: Prejuges, devant la loi. English
Description: Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, [2018] | Series:
A Univocal book | Proceedings of the 1982 Colloquium in Cerisy-la-
Salle, France. | Includes bibliographical references and index. |
Identifiers: LCCN 2018024546 (print) | ISBN 978-1-5179-0551-4 (pb)
Subjects: LCSH: Judicial process—Congresses. | Judgment—Congresses.
| Law—Methodology—Congresses. | Law—Philosophy—Congresses.
| Law—Interpretation and construction—Congresses. | Procedure (Law)—
Congresses. | Lyotard, Jean-Francois, 1924–1998.
Classification: LCC K213 .D4713 2018 (print) | DDC 340/.1—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018024546
Contents
Translators’ Preface vii
Préjugés: Before the Law 1

Translators’ Preface
Derrida’s text “Préjugés: Before the Law,” presented at the
1982 Colloquium at Cerisy, is appearing here for the first
time in full in English translation. The colloquium was or-
ganized by Michel Enaudeau and Jean-L oup Thébaud, and
took place from July 24 to August 3, with the theme Com-
ment juger? (à partir du travail de Jean-F rançois Lyotard).
The conference proceedings were published under the
title La Faculté de Juger.1 Translations of this text have thus
far appeared in German under the title Préjugés— Vor dem
Gesetz and in Japanese, under the title Kafukaron.2 Only
an earlier, shorter presentation by Derrida at the Royal
Philosophical Society in London, with the focus on Kafka’s
“Before the Law,” has up to now appeared in English trans-
lation.3 Because of the lack of an English translation, the
1. Jacques Derrida et al, La Faculté de Juger (Paris: Les Éditions
de Minuit, 1985), 87–1 39.
2. See Jacques Derrida, Préjugés: Vor dem Gesetz, ed. Peter Engel-
mann (Vienna: Passagen Verlag, 1992) and Kafukaron, trans. Nobu-
taka Miura (Tokyo: Asahi syuppansya, 1986).
3. See “Before the Law,” trans. Avital Ronell and Christine Roul-
ston, in Jacques Derrida, Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge (New
York: Routledge, 1992), 181– 220; and “Devant la Loi,” trans. Avital
Ronell, in Kafka and the Contemporary Critical Performance, ed.
Alan Udoff (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 128– 49.
We benefited greatly from these English translations as well as the
German translation.
vii
untranslated part of this text has, since the publication of
the French original in 1985, seldom been referred to in ac-
ademic publications in English.
The importance of “Préjugés: Before the Law” for Der-
rida’s oeuvre, and for the question of judgment in general,
was recently highlighted by Gasché’s analysis of this text
in “Have We Done with the Empire of Judgment?”4 “Pré-
jugés: Before the Law” should, as Gasché also contends, be
read with other texts of Derrida that touch on the issue of
judgment, such as The Truth in Painting, “Economimesis,”
Glas, and “Force of Law: The Mystical Foundation of Au-
thority.”5 The present translation of “Préjugés: Before the
Law,” with judgment as its point of departure, now also
calls for a rereading of the previously translated part, with
its focus on Kafka’s “Before the Law,” and which deals spe-
cifically with the question of the essence of literature, the
role of the title, singularity, the law of law, and Freud’s re-
flections on the origin of law in Totem and Taboo.6 This
translation furthermore casts light on the relation in Derri-
da’s thinking between judgment and decision, as for exam-
ple explored in Politics of Friendship.7
4. See Rodolphe Gasché, Deconstruction, Its Force, Its Violence:
together with “Have We Done with the Empire of Judgment?” (Al-
bany: State University of New York Press, 2016).
5. See Jacques Derrida, The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoff Ben-
nington and Ian McLeod (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1987); “Economimesis,” in The Derrida Reader: Writing Perfor-
mances, ed. Julian Wolfreys (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,
1998), 263– 93; Glas, trans. John P. Leavey Jr. and Richard Rand (Lin-
coln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986); and “Force of Law: The
Mystical Foundation of Authority,” in Acts of Religion, ed. Gil Anidjar
(New York: Routledge, 2002), 228– 98.
6. Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo, in The Standard Edition of
the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans.
James Strachey (London: Vintage, 2001) 13:1– 161.
7. Jacques Derrida, Politics of Friendship, trans. George Collins
(London: Verso, 1997).
viii
The translators would like to thank David Culpin for act-
ing as first reader of the translation.
Jacques de Ville would like to acknowledge the finan-
cial support provided by the South African National Re-
search Foundation.

ix