Between History and Politics: Allegories of Language of Language and the Law in Rousseau and Kafka

Abstract

This article advances a crucial parallelism between philosophy of language and political philosophy following the thought of Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida and Rainer Schürmann. Philosophy of language and political philosophy share a common root, a transcendental condition of possibility in the Kantian sense. This is what I here elaborate as the fracture between history and politics —that existing between already established norms and the creation of new ones—. I call this fracture, following Kant’s cursory remarks in the Logic, the «intuition» of language, i.e., the fracture of temporality intrinsic to the law. As an attempt to illustrate what I mean by the «intuition» of language and the law, the article concludes with two allegorical readings of Rousseau’s The Social Contract and Kafka’s fragment «Before the Law».