Understanding legal semiotics

Abstract

The historical analysis of the relationship between semiotics and law does not allow us to unravel the enigma of its emergence. Rather, following Broekman, it is the interpretation of sign making that allows us to identify the existence of two types of different legal texts: one related to the system of state norms, the other to non-state governance related to the processes of globalization. This is a duplicity of texts that leads to the assumption of the existence of two types of reading semiotics in law. There is law within other systems besides the legal one like economics, morals, religion, art, science-technology, information-communication; the appropriate language to understand the point is that of legal aesthetic analysis, rhetoric, semiotics, of communicative phenomena. Legendre’s analysis of De Verborum Significatione in the Decretals and of the connection with the structure of the Trinity in Hilary of Poitiers indicates how the problem of meaning related to a metaphysics of presence is anticipated by legal thought in its connection with theological thought and psychoanalysis. Kristeva’s semanalysis allows a theological-legal hypothesis of an affective turn in metaphysics and of a legal chorology: to clarify the relevance of another semiotics - a semiotics that does not limit itself to thinking the normative in relation to the law posed by the state, but as to the identification of a system of nomograms linked to the sphere of the affective, to the aesthetic constitution of the subject and society as texts. The comparison of Derrida’s and Sallis’s opposing readings of Chôra between absence and presence raise the problem of the generative or simply negative character of Chôra itself, of its ethical value beyond being. Isar’s Byzantine theory and Goodrich’s emblematic-legal theory re-propose the same problem in the context of liturgy and of a legal aesthetics and semiotics of the image: what is the (critical and generative) space of a legal chorology? The article refers to Sequeri’s and Ricca’s ongoing work for the configuration of an intercultural legal semiotics linked to an affective and generative turn in metaphysics.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 10 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.