Law’s Trace: From Hegel to Derrida (review)

How do you take the concepts of justice, deconstruction, law, nationalism, feminism, and Freudian fetishism, filter them through a tight weave of Jacques Derrida and Georg W.F. Hegel, and come up with a book of tremendous significance for legal practitioners, theorists, and scholars of law, gender studies, philosophy, political science, queer theory, and cultural studies alike? One places them into the very capable hands of University of Alberta political science theorist and professor Catherine Kellogg. The resulting book is a stunningly rigorous deconstruction of the often complex thinkers and thought structures that have produced both modernity and its seemingly self-evident foundations: law, legal jurisprudence, sex difference, desire, linear narratives of progress as time, the family, and it goes without saying, compulsory heterosexuality.

How does Law’s Trace accomplish such a formidable deconstructive effect? It begins with one of the most commonplace affective and intolerable iterations of the modern period—that with the arrival of deconstruction in North America came great anxiety—and moves from anxiety’s need to stabilize an all-encompassing, absolutist, and binarized here and now and so always (the infamous “always already”) to a remedy of permanent becoming, that is, différance and deconstruction’s this and that as a project of radical and critical unknowability. Kellogg uses psychoanalysis to excavate the anxieties that shape epistemological, critical, and philosophical projects through the end of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. These anxieties index the demise of Truth, Law, Justice, History; the abandonment of the “real” after postmodernism and deconstruction; the failure of certainty within cultures of despair; and the incoherence of any belief in transcendent justice both begetting and producing wars of terror, to mention only a few. She suggests that these anxieties have spurred resistances that themselves function not as evidence of the failures of deconstruction, but instead as traces of the very foundationalist and referential thinking structures those deconstructive strategies set out to trouble. They mark, in other words, deconstruction’s radical (re-)beginnings.

Such re-conceptualizations of the misreading and anxiously truncated reception of deconstruction, especially within philosophy and legal studies, require the sophisticated re-engagement with Derrida’s body of work that threads throughout Law’s Trace. However, they also set in motion a necessary circuitous elaboration of the many dialogues, echoes, and traces contained within Derrida’s own writing, including those with philosophers like Hegel but also with other deconstructive languages emerging simultaneously and sometimes with, sometimes against deconstruction, such as those of feminism, queer theory, and critical legal theory.

One of the most interesting of those dialogues to emerge from Law’s Trace—in equal parts historical, critical, and discursive—is one between psychoanalysis (its discovery of the unconscious as the foundation of unknowability as a permanent condition) and the desire, both culturally and politically, to be able to claim that “I know with certainty” (the drive of not just scholarship and academia but also law, jurisprudence, sex differentiation, heterosexuality, the family and its private domain, and so on). This dialogue threads throughout the text to enable that modern subject to land in a doubled location that most suits her affective and epistemological quandry: first, a complex and critical openness in the face of that fissure and unknowability, and second, strategically occupying the place of impossible undecidability with the deconstructive impulse of the fetish, that is, with the desire to, indeed necessity of “playing in two scenes at once.” A full elaboration of the constitution of the fetishist is beyond the scope of a book review, but suffice it to say that if mastery, binarized and therefore knowable, foundational, doctrinal Truths—including those of law—have accomplished their work servicing the interests of power in modernity, then the fetishist has much to offer. The fetishist occupies a strategic subject position relinquishing mastery at the same time that she revels—indeed, thrives most—in the fold (but not cut) that defers definitive differentiation (“this” or “that”) and enables their simultaneity instead (“this” and “that”). The fetish...