Revista Volumen V - Academia Puertorriqueña de Jurisprudencia y ...

fue quizás el producto de esa misma reflexión que ahora censura. Así, el principio se reviste deautoridad y declara en el lenguaje del imperio: principiorum non est ratio, y se alza sobrecualquier otra declaración que aspire a describir o explicar el mundo, reclamando para sí un lugarprivilegiado, más allá de toda duda razonable 7 . No obstante sus pretensiones, cuando la Razónduda irrazonablemente, cuando se exige a sí misma, no sólo las condiciones para la posibilidadde este o aquel principio, sino las condiciones de su propio quehacer, ésta se muestra insegura,arbitraria, caprichosa. El rasgo sobresaliente de la Razón crítica ha sido siempre su tendencia a laautodestrucción 8 . En este cosificado espacio, donde la reflexión y el principio colisionan, la Ley,mediante un coup de force, se presenta en escena 9 .III¿Y de dónde este coup de force? ¿Qué puño asesta el golpe? El discurso del Derechocontemporáneo navega, como Ulises 10 , entre la Escila del dogma y el Caribdis del nihilismo. Porasumir su propia imposibilidad en nombre de la posibilidad. Pero, frente a la exigencia que por ello mismo refluye sobre él, lapregunta por la realidad o no realidad de la liberación misma resulta poco menos que indiferente". Traducido al español por N.Paz, Monte Avila Editores, Caracas (1975). pp. 265-266.7Maurice Blanchot recoge indirectamente esta idea cuando se refiere a la «teoría»: "Theories are necessary (the theories oflanguage, for example): necessary and useless. Reason works in order to wear itself out, by organizing itself into systems,seeking positive knowledge where it can posit itself, pose and repose and at the same time convey itself to an extremity whichforms a stop and closure [...]." The Writing of the Disaster, pp. 75-76 (elipsis nuestra). Por qué Blanchot considera toda «teoría»como necesaria pero inútil es una de las trenzas que pretende hilvanar en la escritura del desastre.8Dicen Horkheimer & Adorno, al analizar el concepto de la «Ilustración»: "[...] The only kind of thinking that is sufficientlyhard to shatter myths is ultimately self-destructive." Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 4 (elipsis nuestra).9 "[...] The very emergence of justice and law, the founding and justifying moment that institutes law implies a performativeforce, which is always an interpretative force: this time not in the sense of law in the service of force, its docile instrument,servile and thus exterior to the dominant power but rather in the sense of law that would maintain a more internal, more complexrelation with what one calls force, power or violence. Justice-in the sense of droit (right or law) would not simply be put in theservice of a social force or power, for example an economic, political, ideological power that would exist outside or before it, andwhich it would have to accommodate or bend to when useful. Its very moment of foundation or institution (which in any case isnever a moment inscribed in the homogeneous tissue of a history, since it is ripped apart with one decision), the operation thatconsists of founding, inaugurating, justifying law (droit), making law, would consist of a coup de force, of a performative andtherefore interpretative violence that in itself is neither just nor unjust, and that no justice and no previous law with its foundinganterior moment could guarantee or contradict or invalidate. No justificatory discourse could or should insure the role of metlanguage in relation to the performative of institutive language or to its dominant interpretation." Derrida, J.; Force of Law. p.943 (elipsis nuestras).10En Dialectic of Enlightenment, Horkheimer y Adorno le dedican su primer excursus a establecer la conexión entre la figurahomérica de Ulises y la Ilustración. Esta conexión se caracteriza por la mitificación de la «razón instrumental», o sea, de laIlustración, anticipada ya en los orígenes de la civilización occidental. Dicen: "The formula for the cunning of Odysseus is thatthe redeemed and instrumental spirit, by resigning itself to yield to nature, renders to nature what are natures, and yet betrays it inthe very process. The mythic monsters whose sphere of power he enters, always represent ossified covenants, claims from prehistory.Thus in the stage of development represented by the patriarchal age, the older folk religion appears in the form of itsscattered relics: beneath the Olympian heavens, they have become images of abstract fate, of immaterial necessity. The fact that itwas impossible to choose any route other than that between Scylla and Charybdis may be understood rationalistically as a mythicrepresentation of the superior power of the currents over the small, antique ships. But in the mythic, objectifying transition, thenatural relation of strength and impotence has already assumed the character of a legal connection. Scylla and Charybdis have aright to what comes between them, just as Circe does to bewitch those unprepared with the god's antidote, or Polyphemus to eatthe bodies of his guest.[...] Mythic inevitability is defined by the equivalence between the curse, the crime which expiates it, andthe guilt arising from that, which in its turn reproduces the curse. All justice in history to date bears the mark of this pattern. Inmyth, each moment of the cycle discharges the previous one, and thereby helps to install the context of guilt as law. Odysseusopposes the situation. The self represents rational universality against the inevitability of fate. Because, however, he meets withthe universal and inevitable in a mutual embrace, his rationality necessarily assumes a restrictive form - that of an exception. Hemust escape the legal conditions which enclose and threaten him, and which are, so to speak, laid down in every mythic figure.He satisfies the sentence of the law so that it loses power over him, by conceding it this very power. [...]" pp. 57-58 (elipsisnuestras). Esta interpretación se dirige a demostrar, como indican en la introducción del mismo trabajo, que el mito ya es Ilustración,y la Ilustración, a su vez, mitología. En otras palabras, el racionalismo de la Ilustración es la mitificación de la realidad,