Lefebvre or Derrida: Deconstructive Questioning the Concept of the Right to the City

To date, a large number of researches have been published in terms of Lefebvre’s concept of the right to the city within social sciences without a serious critique of the concept. This article, drawing upon Derrida, has attempted to provide a critical analysis of the concept based on the following two questions: 1) on what assumptions has the concept been formulated? 2) What kinds of theoretical and ethical paradoxes does the concept suffer from? The article has argued that the essential assumptions of the concept have been distorted by scientists because they, contrary to Lefebvre, seek to operationalize the concept within the context of the capitalist city. In addition, the operationalization of the concept within Lefebvre’s utopia is still subject to critique, because while utopia is not a place of violence, Lefebvre’s utopia is, according to Derrida, the space of law-making violence and law-preserving violence. Lefebvre’s utopia is only a movement from one type of violence to another one. On the other hand, the concept is unethical for the working class, as the only legitimate force of actualizing the concept, acts under historical necessity and without free will. As far as the labor force, as the only legitimate force for the actualization of the concept of the right to the city, acts under historical necessity and without its own will, it cannot and should not be regarded as a just class or lacking in justice and responsibility or be considered irresponsible because justice and responsibility are true in the case of free will agency. Therefore, if ethics is the sphere of free will, then the concept of the right to the city is free of ethics.