Paper's abstract

Paul W. Kahn, Criminals, Enemies and the Imagination of Violence
Lawyers tend to focus on doctrine, philosophers on abstractions. In truth, we live our lives within interpretive complexity. We live and we die by the imagination, which works through the particular and sees through it an entire world of meaning. Using the aesthetic to interpret the political, this essay argues that we find ourselves in an anxious age in which the imagination can no longer mediate between law -- a system of repre-sentation -- and sovereignity -- an expression of identity. This destabilization of the modern relationship of identity to representation shows itself, in particular, in a confusion of the categories of criminal and enemy. Popular films offer an important point of access to the troubled status of this modern political settlement. We find a threefold expression of anxiety over the relationship of criminals and enemies: a longing for a recovery of the unity of love expressed in an original act of violence, a fear that political violence cannot be stabilized in law, and a fear that an all too stable code will preclude a free politics of identity.

Key Words : Criminal – ennemy – sovereignty – representation – imagination - violence
t. 53, 2010 : p. 58-85

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