Jurisprudence

In his dis­tinct­ive con­cern for ety­mo­logy, Nancy notes that aban­don­ment con­tains the semantic unit ban­don, which is ‘an order, a pre­scrip­tion, a decree, a per­mis­sion, and the power that holds these freely at its dis­posal.’ (Nancy 1993, 44) A ban in this con­text should be under­stood as a gen­eral pro­clam­a­tion of the sov­er­eign rather than spe­cific pro­hib­i­tion. To aban­don, there­fore, is to be delivered over to the sov­er­eign ban and, as such, one always aban­dons to a law. What does such a law pre­scribe? Noth­ing but abandonment. Both law and aban­don­ment are con­ceived onto­lo­gic­ally, where ‘aban­don­ment remains the sole pre­dic­a­ment of being.’ (Ibid 36) Given the mul­tiple ways of think­ing and speak­ing being, aban­doned being is aban­don­ment to the very pos­sib­il­ity of such mul­ti­pli­city, to the law of exist­ence ...
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Jean-​Luc Nancy notes three ways that fic­tions have been asso­ci­ated with law: 1) jur­is­pru­den­tial exer­cises that require ima­gin­ing the extent of the applic­ab­il­ity of the law, 2) the mys­ter­i­ous ground of the con­sti­tu­tion, and 3) in Roman law, the exten­sion of the law to cases it did not cover. (Nancy 156) Bey­ond this, Nancy demon­strates that jur­is­dic­tion itself — the extent of the power to make a legal decision or judg­ment — is ulti­mately a fic­tional con­struct. This he calls ‘jurisfiction’. What are the steps involved in the move­ment from jur­is­dic­tion to jur­is­fic­tion? Jur­is­dic­tion is lit­er­ally jus dicere, the declar­a­tion of right as law. Nancy notes that dicere (related to the Greek root deik-​, show) is con­stitutively jur­idical since it con­tains within it the ideas ...
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