Thinking about Law in Silence with Heidegger by Oren Ben‐Dor
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2230.2009.00780.x |
| Published date | 01 November 2009 |
| Date | 01 November 2009 |
| Author | Louis E. Wolcher |
REVIEWS
Oren Ben-Dor,Thinking about Law in Silence with Heidegger,Oxford: Hart
Publishing, 2007, 414 pp, pb d32.00.
Traditional academic philosophers generally expect a work of philosophy to con-
tain true propositions about something else, and not to o¡er itself primarily as a
speech act.AlthoughThinking about Law in Silence with Heidegger seems on the sur-
face to say much‘about’ law in the foregoing sense, this is a book which refuses to
be understood ^ and ultimately cannot be understood ^ within the analytical
opposition between co nstative and performative utterances. On the one hand,
the book is not a mere compend ium of truthful a nd/or useful propositions about
the law; but on the other hand, neither is it a poem or work of performance art
that exhibits the symbol‘law’to achieve a merelyaesthetic e¡ect. Heidegger’swell-
known re£ections on the intimate relationship between philosophy and poetry
resonate in both the form and the content of the book’s meditations on the man-
ner of being ^ the ‘how’ (7) ^ of what conventional legal thought calls law and the
legal. Not only does the book rely extensively on Heidegger’s later, largely poetic
works, it also echoes his well-known fascination with the etymology of Greek
and German words by cleverly exploiting what it calls the ‘enormous poetic
potential’ of the Hebrew language (38) to elucidate many of its themes.
More than halfway through the book, the author makes explicit what in any
case was always implicitfrom the outset:‘This book on law is turning out to be a
meditation on ethics and on otherness’ (258). A meditation, not a conventional
ethical argument or demonstration: one might even say that the book as awhole
o¡ers itselfprimarily as an ethicalact or plea. Oren Ben-Dor,who teaches lawand
political philosophy at Southampton University, reveals that his motive for writ-
ing the book stems from his own personal experiences of having felt ethical dis-
comfort with the tendency of traditional legal philosophy to perpetuate a
pernicious illusion: namely, that an objective (and objectively measurable) dis-
tance separates rational thinkers from what they are thinking about in the realm
of the actual (4). For Ben-Dor, whatmatters most in philosophy, if not in law, is ‘a
process of internal enlightenment that involves becoming a good person . . .
[which is] a di¡erent and more primordial e¡ort to that of morality ofobligations
and law’ (7-8).The book does not aim at stati nga new theory or societal vision of
law; instead, it aspires to bring about radical change in the very process of think-
ing itself. In short, it thinks about thinking about law. In typical Heideggerian
fashion, the book insists on distinguishing between genuine philosophy as an
event of thinki ng that which is most thought-worthy (more on this later) and
the kind of ‘metaphysical’, or‘ontical’, thinking that Heidegger never tired of cri-
ticising.
To employ a pair of terms that have become quite familiar in continental phi-
losophy, this book is best viewed as a‘saying’ rather than a‘said’ (68).The extreme
elevation of saying over said in the book ultimately can be traced to Heidegger’s
r2009 The Authors. Journal Compilation r2009 The Modern LawReview Limited.
Published by BlackwellPublishing, 9600 Garsington Road,Oxford OX4 2DQ,UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA
(2009) 72(6) 1035^1056
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