Perpetually Astride Eden’s Boundaries: The Limits to the ‘Limits of Law’ and the Semiotic Inconsistency of ‘Legal Enclosures’

Mario Ricca1
1University of Parma, Parma, Italy

Tóm tắt

Abstract

Legal systems can be metaphorically taken as semantic and pragmatic enclosures. The ancient world has given us at least three literary loci that display the self-disruptive significance of this kind of metaphor if assumed as a practical guideline in the attempt to steer human experience. The first such loci can be traced in biblical Eden; the second one in the Phaeacian garden described in Homer’s Odyssey; the third in the stories of the first and second mythical Athens included in Plato’sTimaeusandRepublic. In all these tales, human beings ineluctably end up straying across the semantic-spatial borders which certain categories and rules have given them to encompass their experience. All these literary loci offer both a semio-cognitive and a constitutional lesson for lawyers and sovereigns. My intention is to exploit these lessons to show that the most relevant limit of legal systems, if taken as semantic and pragmatic enclosures, consists precisely in their inability to constitutively limit themselves and their semiotic borders. This inaptitude is due, in my view, to the semiotic ‘exceedance’ of the phrastic, or descriptive parts of legal rules even more than the semantic vagueness of the values underlying their legitimacy. Any attempt to define the semantic and spatial boundaries of human experience by means of verbal enunciations implies the use of categorical schemes to define the legitimate and/or forbidden behaviors. But categorical schemes, in turn, comprise boundaries that draw protean verges between the inside and the outside of each category. The categorical ‘inside’ compellingly tends to exceed its borders so as to protrude out toward what is outside the category. In turn, the ‘outside’ shows, more often than not, continuities with the axiological/teleological patterns underpinning the semantic boundaries of legal rules. Any attempt to limit the competence/extension of law, if taken in its semantic/spatial significance, would seem to unveil what law could or should be, but is not. Relying on the above literary loci, I will try to demonstrate that this apparently contradictory implication is inherent in the dialectic between equality/universality and difference/plurality that makes up categorization itself, and thereby the semiotic prerequisites to considering any legal rule.

Từ khóa


Tài liệu tham khảo

Anderson, Ben, Harrison Paul. 2010. The Promise of Non-Representational Theories. In Id. (eds.), Non- Representational Theories and Geography. Farnham – Burlington: Ashgate.

Bachelard, Gaston. 2014 (or. 1958). The Poetics of Space. New York: Penguin Books.

Barthes, Roland. 1979. Lecture in Inauguration of the Chair of Literary Semiology, College de France, January 7, 1977, trans. Richard Howard. October, no. 8 (Spring 1979).

Berger, Alan. 2011. Kripke on the Inconsistency of Adopting a Logic. In Alan Berger, ed. Saul Kripke. Cambridge: CUP.

Bertea, Stefano. 2009. The Normative Claim of Law. Oxford, OR: Hart Publishing.

Bertea, Stefano. 2019. A Theory of Legal Obligation. Cambridge: CUP.

Bertrand, Denis. 2000. Précis de sémiotique littéraire. Paris: Édition Nathan her.

Blumenberg, Hans. 2007. Theorie der Unbegrifflichkiet. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp.

Broekman, Jan M., Backer Catà, Larry. 2013. Lawyers Making Meaning: The Semiotics of Law in Legal Education II. Dordrecht, Heidelberg, London, New York: Springer.

Broekman, Jan M. 2010. Firstness and Phenomenology—Peirce and Husserl on Attitude Change. In Wagner, Anne and Broekman Jan M., (eds.), Prospects of Legal Semiotics. Dordrecht, Heidelberg, London, New York: Springer.

Bruner, Jerome S. 1987. The Transactional Self. In Bruner Jerome S., Weinreich-Haste, Helen (eds.), Making Sense: The Child’s Construction of the World. London: Methuen & Co.

Buzzati, Dino. 2018, Aneddoti sul grande muro, in Id., Le Cronache Fantastiche. Fantasmi. Milano: RCS.

Cardinali Sara. 2010. Giardinosofia. Il sacro recinto della bellezza. In Segni e Comprensione, XXIV, n.s. 72 (Settembre-Dicembre 2010), 133. https://doi.org/10.1285/i18285368axxivn72p133.

Clark, Andy. 2008. Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension. Oxford – New York: Oxford University Press.

Cover, Robert. 1983. The Supreme Court, 1982 Term—Foreword: Nomos and Narrative. Harvard Law Review 97: 4.

Cover, Robert. 1986. Violence and the Word. Yale Law Journal 95: 1601.

Daneš, Frantisek. 1974. Functional Sentence Perspective and the Organization of the Text. In Id., (ed.), Papers on Functional Sentence Perspective. The Hague: Mouton.

Danesi, Marcel. 1993. Vico, Metaphor and the Origin of Language. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Danesi, Marcel. 2012. The Languages of the Law. An Integrated View from Vico and Conceptual Metaphor Theory. International Journal for the Semiotics of Law 25(1), 95. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-011-9250-9.

Dawe, Roger D. 1993. The Odyssey: Translation and Analysis. Lewes, Sussex: The Book Guild.

Della Dora, Veronica. 2016. Landscape, Nature, and the Sacred in Byzantium. Cambridge: CUP.

Derrida, Jacques. 1993. Khôra. Paris: Galilée.

Dewey, John. 1926. The Historical Background of Corporate Legal Personality. Yale Law Journal 35 (6): 655.

Dewey, John. 1938. Logic: The Theory of Inquiry. New York: Henry Holt and Co.

Dewey, John. 1939. Theory of Evaluation. In International Encyclopedia of Unified Science, vol. II, no. 4. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1.

Dewey, John. 1997 (or. 1910). How We Think. New York: Dover Publications.

Paolo, Di, Cuffaro Ezequiel, C. Elena, and Anne De Jaegher. 2018. Linguistic Bodies: The Continuity between Life and Language. Cambridge, MA, London: The MIT Press.

van Dijk, Teun. 1977. Text and Context: Explorations in the Semantics and Pragmatics of Discourse, 1977. London, New York: Longman.

Duff, Patrick W. 1938. Personality in Roman Private Law. London: Cambridge University Press.

Dummet, Michael. 1978. Truth and Other Enigmas. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Ellesworth, Jeffrey A., Semiotics in Legal Theory. In Broekman, The Semiotics of Law cit.

Fleet, Paul. 2011. Tarski, Peirce and Truth-Correspondences in Law: Can Semiotic Truth-Analysis Adequately Describe Legal Discourse? In The Semiotic of Law in Legal Education, ed. Jan M. Broekman and Francis J. Mootz. Dordrech, Heidelberg, London, New York: Springer.

Foucault, Michel. 1966. Les mots et les choses. Paris: Gallimard.

Foucault, Michel. 2000. Truth and Juridical Forms. In Power, ed. James D. Faubion. New York: The New Press.

Freud, Sigmund. 2011 (or. 1905). The Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious. New York: Dover Publications.

Gallagher, Shaun. 2006. How the Body Shapes the Mind. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press.

Gibbard, Alan. 2012. Meaning and Normativity. Oxford: OUP.

Glüer, Kathrin and Wikfross, Åsa 2018. The Normativity of Meaning and Content, in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Available at https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/meaning-normativity/index.html#ref-2. Accessed 24 September, 2019.

Greimas, Algirdas J. 1966. Sémantique structurale. Recherche de méthode. Paris: Larousse.

Greimas, Algirdas J. 1976. Sémiotique et sciences sociales. Paris: Editions du Seuil (English Translation: Id. 1990. The Social Sciences: A Semiotic View. Minneapolis, MN. University of Minnesota Press).

Greimas, Algirdas J. 1983. Du Sens II—Essais sémiotiques. Paris: Editions du Seuil.

Hare, Richard M. 1952. The Language of Morals. Oxford: OUP.

Harris, Judith A. 1985. Recognizing Legal Tropes: Metonymy As Manipolative Mode. The American University Law Review 34: 1215.

Hart, Herbert L. A. 1997 (or. 1961). The Concept of Law. Oxford: OUP.

Heller, Hermann. 1983 (or. 1934). Staatslehre. Tübingen: Mohr.

Heller, Hermann. 2009 (or. 1927). Die Souveränität. Ein Beitrag zur Theorie des Staats- und Völkerrechts. Leipzig: Classic Edition.

Hutto, Daniel D., Myin, Erik. 2013. Radicalizing Enactivism: Minds without Content. Cambridge, MA, London. The MIT Press.

Jackendoff, Ray. 1987. Consciousness and the Computational Mind. Cambridge: MIT Press.

Roman, Jakobson. 1960. Closing Statements: Lingustics and Poetics. In Style in Language, ed. Thomas A. Sebeok. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Johnson, Mark, and George Lakoff. 2003. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Kelsen, Hans. 1949. General Theory of Law and the State. New Brunswick, London: Transaction Publishers.

Kelsen, Hans. 2009 (0r. 1960). The Pure Theory of Law. Clark, New Jersey: The Lawbook Exchange Ltd.

Kevelson, Roberta. 1999. Peirce and the Mark of Gryphon. New York: St. Martin Press.

Klatt, Matthias. 2008. Making the Law Explicit: The Normativity of Legal Argumentation. Oxford, Portland, OR: Hart Publishing.

Kripke, Saul. 1982. Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.

Lakoff, G. 1987. Women, Fire and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Lakoff, George, and Rafael E. Núñez. 2000. Where Mathematics Comes From: How the Embodied Mind Brings Mathematics into Being. New York: Basic Books.

Lambrecht, Knud. 1999. Information Structure and Sentence Form. Topic, Focus, and the Mental Representations of Discourse Referents. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Langacker, Ronald W. 1987/1991. Foundations of Cognitive Grammar: Vol. 1. Theoretical Prerequisites. Vol. 2. Descriptive Applications. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Langacker, Ronald W. 2009. Investigations in Cognitive Grammar. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

Le Breton, David. 2017 (or. 2006). Sensing the World: An Anthropology of the Senses. London, New York: Bloomsbury.

Lo Castro, Gaetano. 1974. Personalità morale e soggettività giuridica nel diritto canonico (Contributo allo studio delle persone morali). Milano: Giuffrè.

Lombardía, Pedro. 1990. Persona jurídica pública y privada en el ordenamiento canónico, in Apollinaris. 63, 139.

Luhmann, Niklas. 1988. The Unity of Legal System. In Autopoietic Law: A New Approach to Law and Society, ed. Teubner Gunther. Berlin: de Gruyter.

Luhmann, Niklas. 1995. Social Systems. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Niklas, Luhmann. 2004. Law as a social system. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Mariani, Andrea. 2008 (ed.). Riscritture dell’Eden. Il giardino nell’immaginazione letteraria: da Oriente a Occidente. Vol. IV. Milano: Mazzanti.

Mariani, Andrea. 2015, (ed.). Riscritture dell’Eden. Il ruolo del giardino nei discorsi dell’immaginario. Vol. VIII. Milano: LED.

Maturana, Humberto R., and J. Varela Francisco. 1980. Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living. Dordrecht, Boston, London: Reidel.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 2002 (or. 1945). The Phenomenology of Perception. London, New York: Routledge.

Miller, Jeannie. 2013. More Than the Sum of its Parts: Animal Categories and Accretive Logic in Volume One of Al- Jāḥiẓ’s Kitāb al-Ḥayawān, Phd. Dissertation. Department of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies: New York University.

Noë, Alva. 2004. Action in Perception. Cambridge, London: The MIT Press.

Orestano, Riccardo. 1968. Il «problema delle persone giuridiche» in diritto Romano. I. Torino: Giappichelli.

Peirce, Charles S. 1868. Questions Concerning Certain Faculties Claimed for Man. Journal of Speculative Philosophy 1868 (2): 103.

Peirce, Charles S. 1998 (or. 1903). Pragmatism As the Logic of Abduction. In The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings. Vol. 2 (1893-1913).

Plato 1969. Plato in Twelve Volumes. Vol. 5 & 6, translated by Paul Shorey. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press. London: William Heinemann Ltd. Also available at http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0168%3Abook%3D2.

Plato 1997. Complete Works. Edited, with Introduction and Notes, by Cooper, John M. Associate Editor Hutchinson, D. S. Indianapolis, Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company. Kindle Edition.

Putnam, Hilary. (1975/1985). The meaning of “meaning”. In Id., Philosophical Papers, Vol. 2: Mind, Language and Reality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Ricca, Mario. 2008. Oltre Babele. Codici per una democrazia interculturale. Bari: Dedalo.

Ricca, Mario. 2013. Culture interdette. Modernità, migrazioni, diritto interculturale. Torino: Bollati Boringhieri.

Ricca, Mario. 2014. Intercultural Law, Interdisciplinary Outlines, Lawyering and Anthropological Expertise in Migration Cases: Before the Courts. www.ec-aiss.itEC. Rivista dell’Associazione italiana di Studi semiotici, March 3.2014. Last Accessed September 20, 2019.

Ricca, Mario. 2016. Errant Law: Spaces and Subjects. https://ssrn.com/abstract=2802528. http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2802528. Accessed 30 June 2016.

Ricca, Mario. 2016a. Klee’s Cognitive Legacy and Human Right as Intercultural Transducers: Modern Art, Legal Translation, and Micro-Spaces of Coexistence. Calumet—Intercultural Law and Humanities Review. http://www.windogem.it/calumet/upload/pdf2/mat_51.pdf. Accessed 6 Sept 2016.

Ricca, Mario. 2017. How to Make Law and Space to Interplay Horizontally: From Legal Geography to Legal Chorology. https://ssrn.com/abstract=2926651. Accessed 2 Mar 2017.

Ricca, Mario. 2017. Ignorantia Facti Excusat: Legal Liability and the Intercultural Significance of Greimas’ ‘Contrat de Véridiction’. International Journal for the Semiotics of Law 31: 101. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-017-9529-6.

Ricca, Mario. 2018. Ironic Animals: Bestiaries, Moral Harmonies, and the ‘Ridiculous’ Source of Natural Rights. International Journal for the Semiotics of Law 31: 595. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-018-9547-z.

Ricca, Mario. 2018. Cultures in Orbit, or Justi-fying Differences in Cosmic Space: On Categorization, Territorialization and Rights Recognition. International Journal for the Semiotics of Law 31: 829.

Ricca, Mario. 2019. Signs across Races: Al-Jahiz’s Cosmo-semiosis and His Trans-racial Mapping of the “Human”. Calumet - Intercultural Law and Humanities Review, 8/2019, 21. Available at http://www.windogem.it/calumet/upload/pdf2/mat_82.pdf. Accessed September 20, 2019.

Ricoeur, Paul. 1975. La metáphore vive. Paris: Édition du Seuil.

Ricoeur, Paul. 1978, The Metaphorical Process as Cognition, Imagination, and Feeling. Critical Inquiry, 5(1), Special Issue on Metaphor (Autumn, 1978), 143.

Ross, Alf. 1929. Theorie der Rechtsquellen. Ein Beitrag zur Theorie des positiven Rechts auf Grundlage dogmenhistorischer Untersuchungen. Leipzig - Wien: Deuticke (republished, more recently, by Scientia Verlag, 1989).

Ross, Alf. 2019 [or. 1959]. On Law and Justice. Oxford: OUP.

Sallis, John. 1999. Chorology: On Beginning in Plato’s Timaeus. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Scafi, Alessandro. 2016. Mapping Paradise: A History of Heaven on Earth. London (Enlarged Italian version Id. 2017. Il Paradiso in terra. Mappe del giardino dell’Eden. Milano: Bruno Mondadori).

Sparrow, Tom, and Adam Hutchinson (eds.). 2015. A History of Habits: From Aristotle to Bourdieu. Lanham: Lexington Books.

Stewart, John, Oliver Gapenne, Di Paolo, and A. Ezequiel (eds.). 2010. Enaction: Toward a New Paradigm for Cognitive Science. Cambridge, MA, London: The MIT Press.

Tarski, Alfred. 1944. The Semantic Conception of Truth and the Foundations of Semantics. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 4: 341.

Tarski, Alfred. 1956. The Concept of Truth in Formalized Language. In Id. Logic, Semantics, and Metamathematics. London: OUP.

Teubner, Gunther. 1993. Law as an Autopoietic System. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers.

Thompson, Evan. 2010. Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind. Cambridge, MA, London: Belknap. Harvard University Press.

Thrift, Nigel. 2008. Non-representational Theory: Space, Politics, Affect. London, New York: Routledge.

Varela, Francisco J., Thompson, Evan, and Rosch, Eleanor. 1991. The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience. Cambridge, MA – London: The MIT Press.

Vico, Giambattista. 2000. The Universal Right. Translated and edited by Pinto Giorgio and Margaret Diehl). Amsterdam – Atlanta: Rodopi (or. De universis iuris 1720/21).

West, Donna E., Anderson, Myrdene. 2016, (Eds.). Consensus on Peirce’s Concept of Habit Before and Beyond Consciousness. Cham, Switzerland: Springer. Kindle Edition.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1989, or. 1939. Lectures on the Foundation of Mathematics, (ed. By Cora Diamond). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Wroblewski, Jerzy. 1969. Legal Reasoning in Legal Interpretation. Logique et Analyse 12 (45): 3.

Zalewska, Monika. 2017. Cognitive Theory of Metaphor and Jerzy Wróblewski’s Concept of Legal Interpretation. Hybris 39: 56.