THE MURMUR OF BEING AND THE CHATTER OF LAW

most painstaking and patient endeavours to locate the difference between the world of Heidegger’s thought and the world of the law to date. In a way, it is nothing less than Heidegger’s central concern with the ontological difference between Being (Sein) and beings (Seienden) that is at issue in Ben-Dor’s exploration of the difference between Heidegger’s ontological thinking of Being and the ontic concerns of the law. The law is indeed a good point of departure for locating this ontic-ontological difference, for there is hardly anything else (the discipline of accounting may be another example) in the affairs of mankind that marks itself as so thoroughly concerned with the fully defined and identified aspects of things. Heidegger himself never said much about the law, but another tradition of philosophical thought, namely Marxism, refers repeatedly to the law as the apex of the human attachment to identification and calculation. Law, wrote Marx in his Critique of the Gotha Programme of 1875, “can by its nature only consist in the application of an equal standard, but unequal individuals (and they would not be different individuals if they were not unequal) can only be measured by the same standard if they are looked at from the same aspect, if they are grasped from one particular side, e.g., if they ar