This paper explores what is apparently a non-topic for Luhmann. Luhmann is preoccupied with decision-making rather than with judgment. The paper argues that Luhmann, attempting to find a way out of the dilemma between the fundamentalism of positivistic legal theory and the relativism of anti-foundationalist post-modern thinking, presents the epistemological–ethical doublet of a “self-binding” of the law. In this bootstrapping manoeuvre decision plays the central part. The paper begins by examining judgment in its relation to decision as considered by non-system-theoretical (...) thinking. Against that background it unfolds the distinction between distinction, form and decision in systems theory and in the system-theoretical observation of the law. The article then discusses Luhmann’s description of the functioning of decision(-making) within the legal system. The hypothesis is that Luhmann blends here cognitive with ethical aspects. Finally, the article addresses Luhmann’s polemics against alternative approaches to his own. The suggestion is that ‘judgment’, in Luhmann’s systems theory, re-enters by the back door as an ethical–theoretical imperative that commands theory’s responsibility for society and law. (shrink)

Today there is no sophisticated theory, which continues to rely on subjectivist premises. It is important, however, that anti-humanism theory's disinterestedness in the subject of voluntarism does not lead to an indifference towards being's constitutive non-essence and passivity in the manner of the worst kind of humanism. Emmanuel Levinas' places ‘absurd’ suffering in the place of essence as the knot of subjectivity; his view of the quiddity of suffering as mode of being passively rather than as psychological content and of (...) the modality of disinterested compassion are used in order to formulate the question `who comes after the subject' in ways which allow us to continue thinking of what it means to be affected in an individuated manner without returning us to the subject of self-presence and autonomy. (shrink)