Translation in the Dark

This concluding chapter asks how the varied experiences of night undertaken in this book can best inform legal analysis and legal philosophy. Modern legal thought is ambivalently reliant on metaphorical and analogical reasoning, which, the chapter shows, are both beholden to images of light, indirectly paying homage to the day. Following the philosophical deconstruction of metaphor by Jacques Derrida, who has written on the significance of the heliotrope—the centralizing image of the sun integral to all metaphorical thinking—the chapter explores the revealed aspects of night and darkness and their significance for law's ideological claims. The chapter argues that law's potential for justice requires accounting not only for what it does in and with light, but also for its cultivation of violence in the dark and the creative possibilities of freedom and equality at night.