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Passionate Kisses?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 December 2018

Kenneth Cmiel
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Extract

Marianne Constable's Nietzschean foray into American legal writing is a contribution simultaneously to both theory and history. The latter deserves special mention, for despite the very important legal theory currently being played in a Nietzschean key, legal history has largely remained immune, caught in a range of liberal and critical approaches. Constable in this essay takes a familiar body of thought and interrogates it with a stunningly new set of questions. What looks like the checkered career of “democratic culture” to a writer like Morton Horwitz becomes the descent into the lowest stages of hell for Constable, a journey to the deepest recesses of nihilism.

Type
Article Commentary
Information
Law & Social Inquiry , Volume 19 , Issue 3 , Summer 1994 , pp. 591 - 597
Copyright
Copyright © American Bar Foundation, 1994 

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References

1 Marianne Constable, “Genealogy and Jurisprudence: Nietzsche, Nihilism, and the Social Scientification of Law,” 19 Law & Soc. Inquiry 551 (1994).Google Scholar

2 The interest in governmentality has shown promise not only in writing intellectual history, as Constable does here, but also for legal and institutional history. See Francois Ewald, L'Etat providence (Paris: Bernard Grasset, 1986); Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, & Peter Miller, The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).Google Scholar

3 Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays 3-35 (New York: Garland Publishers, 1977).Google Scholar

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6 The “amenities” of strolling, wandering, and loafing were, according to Douglas, “in part responsible for giving our people the feeling of independence and self-confidence, the feeling of creativity. These amenities have dignified the right of dissent and have honored the right to be nonconformists and the right to defy submissiveness. They have encouraged lives of high spirits rather than hushed, suffocating silence.” Papachristo v. City of Jacksonville, 405 U.S. 156, 164 (1972).Google Scholar

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