Ironie der Legalität

This study traces the failure of the liberal promise of freedom on the basis of contemporary german critique of right(s). The concept of judgment is central to a critique of rights, since every use of rights always represents a judgment. The form of liberal judgment is legality. This legality is critically reconstructed as an ironic practice of judgment that is incapable of liberating subjects. For the lustful disposition of ironic judgment does not produce practice, but merely a bad infinity. In order to save the promise of freedom in modernity, it is therefore necessary to transcend irony, which is conceptualized in this study as the ironization of irony.