On the evening of Thursday, February 5, visiting 2008-09 Theodor Heuss Professor of Philosophy, Christoph Menke, gave the annual Heuss Lecture. Menke presented a paper entitled, ‘Law and Violence’, in which he reflected on the relationship between these two themes. First he looked at law as the opposite of violence, creating a domain in which the self-perpetuating violence of a fictional ‘state of nature’ is mitigated. Secondly, he looked at the implementation of the law itself as a kind of violence that tends towards its own manner of ‘fateful violence’ against individuals as it seeks to preserve its own power. Menke then made use of The Oresteia Triology of Aeshylus next to a reading of Walter Benjamin on the violence of law. He concluded by asserting the importance of ‘subjective rights’ in the pursuit of a relationship between life and the law that allows for cases individual arbitrariness.

Christoph Menke has most recently served as a professor at Potsdam University and will soon begin teaching at the University of Frankfurt. He has published extensively in the areas of aesthetics, law, politics, and deconstruction. His translated works include The Sovereignty of Art (MIT Press, 1998), Reflections on Equality (Stanford University Press, 2006), and Tragic Play: Irony and Theatre from Sophocles to Beckett (Columbia University Press, 2009).

The Heuss Professorship was begun by Theodore Heuss as a gesture of appreciation for the honorary doctorate provided him in 1958 by the New School for Social Research. The fund was established permanently in 1975 with an aim to preserve the strong historical bonds between German scholars and their American counterparts.