The Crisis of Normativity and Law
The Crisis of Normativity and Law
Prof. Nataliia Satokhina, Yaroslav Mudryi National Law University (Kharkiv, Ukraine)
Perhaps every generation experiences its contemporary situation as a crisis – a crisis of everything that came before, a crisis of previous values. However, it seems that we are dealing not only with a crisis of values, but also with a crisis of normativity as such, as an aspect of experience, and in this sense – with a crisis of humanity. Hannah Arendt described this trend with striking accuracy more than half a century ago when she spoke of the radical transformation of human experience and “the loss of the quest for meaning.”
Today, the balance between normativity and factuality has been disrupted in favor of the latter: gradually losing the normative dimension of experience, we are becoming increasingly captivated by factuality. This is not felt equally everywhere and is particularly evident for those who experience war as the collapse of normativity and the quintessence of factuality.
It seems that there is no longer any room for law here, which is being replaced by a permanent state of exception. Does the law still make any sense? Or are we witnessing the end of a long history of law? In my talk, I would like to share my thoughts on the nature of the current loss of normativity and its consequences for law as an aspect of experience.