----- Original Message ----- From: "Chuck Grimes" <cgrimes at tsoft.com> To: <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com> Sent: Thursday, May 17, 2001 12:25 AM Subject: Re: judicial tyranny
>
> Just a footnote the previous post. The concept of law as a rational
> system, self-consistent and free from internal contradiction, is
> precisely what Horkheimer and Adorno eschew in Dialectic of
> Enlightenment as the basis for a totalitarian system.
>
> Chuck Grimes
==================
Well then we have to look at the meanings of contradiction[s] from the
Leibnizian-Hegelian-Whiskerite genealogy; the non-compossibility of
conflicting projects, goals, values, norms etc. that exist in any
complex society. The law as practice cannot aspire to the kind of
non-contradiction we find, in, say, mathematics or mathematical
physics. In those disciplines non-contradiction is aspired to/achieved
only with the humbling recognition of incompleteness; we live in a
spacetime that is Goedelian at the very least. The "law" is always
incomplete and exhibits only local consistencies;
historico-contextually situated resolutions that never "finally"
achieve permanence, nor the sort metahistorical "there is nothing
further to dispute" "equilibrium". Tragedy/Irony in an open ended
play/dance/battle of signifiers.
Ian