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Jari Kauppinen, "Law Without Place: Topology and Decision. Questions of Line and Literature", Law and Critique IX/2 (1998), 225-248: The article deals with the question of decidability and undecidability (of law or text in Jacques Derrida's Force of Law) in a topological context. The topology is here thought more as a futural event's taking place; instead of temporality, time of decision, the ethical (ethos means a place, dwelling) is connected to a topos or utopos. There is the atopical level (of law) that keeps the decision open although in (the procedural level, for example) one must always make decisions. Therefore law's place is atopological, it is without a place - we could neither decide the law nor know its place.

The question of decision, line and place is read through different texts by Derrida, Carl Schmitt and Paul Celan. Finally, the democracy to come in Derrida's recent theory is connected to Maurice Blanchot's notion of literary space (The Space of Literature). Also the Politics of Friendship (Derrida) is discussed in relation to the question of friend, enemy and the becoming of a community.

The decision here means also a meridian (in Schmitt, Nomos der Erde and Celan, Der Meridian) that decides the law and the line (Heidegger, The Question of Being) in a metaphysical topology. The decision must be without a ground; it is the impossibility of a decision that means re-searching for a place, a line that decides between tropo-topological and the turning between poles. If the place of undecidability is atopological it refers to the place of becoming, like the becoming of literature (Blanchot) and of democracy (Derrida, Specters of Marx).

In Force of Law the law is undecidable and that is also in relation to law's force - the force is thought in relation to the truth (aletheia) and force as physis and therefore the "force" behind the law could be physis as aletheia as Heidegger proposes.

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