Law at the Edge of Reason

Violence and the Paradox of Rights in Christoph Menke

Abstract

https://doi.org/10.1590/2179-8966/2026/97250

This paper analyzes Christoph Menke’s critique of subjective rights as a theory of the paradoxical relation between law and violence in modern liberal democracies. It reconstructs this critique through three guiding metaphors that structure Menke’s account of modern law: law as violence, law as domination, and law as paradox. Through these figures, Menke shows how bourgeois law appears formally detached from the state and the economy, while the violence that sustains it persists within the very form of law itself. The analysis demonstrates how the liberal promise of equal rights generates a paradox in which the same legal form that proclaims equality simultaneously reproduces new forms of social domination. In reconstructing Menke’s genealogical critique, the article also raises a critical question concerning the limits of grounding the transformation of law solely in the self-reflection of legal form. By situating Menke’s work within the tradition of critical theory and poststructuralist genealogy, the paper argues that the paradox of rights should also be understood as a site of political contestation in which the relation between law, violence, and equality remains open to transformation.