To take or think history seriously, The Concept of Liberal Democratic Law tells us, is to comprehend it as a constant process of denaturalization. Having presented us with a conception of history as an on-going earthquake that ruins and denaturalizes everything, does Van der Walt not in the end step back from this seismic vision of history? This engagement seeks to circumscribe this question in the textual body of The Concept of Liberal Democratic Law. It does so under the auspices of the following bet: to submit one’s literary enterprise as a reading is tantamount to submit one’s work to a process of denaturalization. After all, in other interpretations, the text does not live on. Interpretation marks off the text’s posteriority, its after-life. Therefore, by interrogating the way the text posits its possible readership, declaring silence to the foreseeable unreasonable reader, arguably one makes room to evaluate whether the text’s representation of what liberal democracy is about does not end up being a dissemblance between its maxim and practice when it declares that before an unreasonable reader, the discussion must come to an end.
