| Summary: | Radomir Konstantinović’s Descartes’ Death has the characteristics of a novel, an autobiographical essay and a philosophical treatise. The protagonist of the novel, Father, professor of Civil Law, lives a life paved by the rules founded on Descartes’ rationality: for him, to serve the Law means to serve Order, perfect legality, repetition. Son admires his Father, but at the same time fears his infallibility and suffers from his tyranny of law, order and habit. In the Son’s eyes, Father is simultaneously almighty law and fear of law, as well as the law that terrorizes everyone around him. Everything changed in the 1990s when chaos ruled the outside world, Serbia and Belgrade: Son endeavoured to establish with this man of form and order such intimate relationships that he could not have achieved during Father’s life, because the Father was Law itself and the Son always and only an imperfect(ed) Disciple. The image related to Father–Lawyer or rather to Law as the art of equilibrium, is the image of a bicycle with the front wheel turned to the left which frequently reappears in the novel. <br/>Both in this novel–treatise and in his earlier works, Konstantinović expressed familiarity with postmodern thinking and the philosophical concepts of Montaigne and Pascal; one of the founders of scepticism, Montaigne, witnessed the crisis of values and heralded the impossibility of reaching the truth and the absolutes, while Pascal was doubtful of the proof of bare evidence, placing belief in irrational sensations above the rational conviction. However, in the 1990s one had to find a space also for Descartes, the author of the treatise on method, reason and the value of law. The Son now knows that Pascal’s world belongs to what is direct, to the market, „since directness kills: naivety has bloody hands“. He understands that Father’s world of rules is closer to him, that the world of dignity, rhetoric, equilibrium and law is closer than the law of directness and the world that lacks legal organization. In the overwhelming darkness the Son first repudiated Montaigne, then Pascal. Descartes remained. Father’s Descartes.<br/>When in 1989 Jacques Derrida thought for the first time of a parallel between literature, philosophy and law, he emphasized the precision of the English language in the definitions of the functioning of law: „to enforce the law“ reminds us that justice cannot be properly of the law or right in law if it does not possess force or refer to force from the start. At the beginning of justice there was logos, word or language, but this does not contradict another of Derrida’s statements: in the beginning there was force. And there, when discussing law and force, law as the force, Derrida brings from oblivion the philosophers most prominent in Konstantinović’s work: Descartes, Pascal and Montaigne. Not only with the first, but with the other two as well, Derrida finds the term: the mystical basis of authority, which refers to the authority produced by law and is the result of law. „Laws are not rightful in themselves, we do not respect them because they are rightful but because they possess authority.“<br/>We are faced with two beginner’s works: for the first time Derrida enters in deliberations about the relations between law, literature, philosophy and deconstructivism, while Konstantinović writes a novel–treatise, new in terms of structure and content (and still unperceived), where he explicates the ideas which Derrida deals with more densely and in a philosophical framework in his American Lectures. Derrida propagated the concepts which Konstantinović’s Son–narrator would present in his imaginary discussions with his Father and in his quotations from the thinkers quoted by Derrida. As if the author, Radomir Konstantinović, himself inclined to associative references and quotations applied as verifications of the narrative, believed that the crucial fact in his novel is that the main protagonist is a lawyer, the one who writes the law, defines legislations and deals with legal justice.<br/>
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