ABSTRACT
Etymologically redundant, the statement “Existence costs” predicates the most general economic constraint under which humans labor to secure their lives. Since we do so in anticipation of what is to come, we are in the position to ask what the relation of law to the economic horizon entails for humans across the globalizing world in the years, decades, or centuries ahead. More precisely, in the current era of “mondialisation,” what futurity does the relation of the law of law to the sacrificial-cum-Darwinian economy that governs living things hold for humankind? This chapter examines a number of seemingly disparate concepts that together provide a means of working toward an answer to this question in relation to a primal human intuition—namely, that existence costs. The first section of this chapter reviews Jacques Derrida’s thinking about the law of law. The second section examines the differences between two forms of we, one of which (the summative we) is modeled on the I, the other of which (the non-summative we) is not, and situates this discussion in relation to the auto-affective monism of the I and the developmentally necessary self-attachment that renders the I susceptible to self-illusion; and explores these issues in order to clarify how the non-summative we that founds the democratic state envisions the possibility of a political association as other than primarily or fundamentally oppositional, which is to say, as other than self-immunizing. The third section of this chapter links this possibility to the prospect of infinite lost opportunities as this concept helps uncover the unremarked cultural innovation that occurs in the final lines of one of the Western world’s founding texts, the Odyssey, and that likewise occurs both in Paul’s New Testament invocation of a peace that surpasses understanding and in the commandment that subsumes all other commandments—namely, the commandment to love. Together, the overlapping concepts of this tripartite discussion suggest why and how the law of law opens the possibility of speaking in the name of a we that is irreducible to the concord of one I and another—a we that is constituted as lifedeath by virtue of being indebted to an infinitude of lost opportunities and that speaks as if it were a voice visiting from a world to come.
