The Phenomenology of Modern Legal Discourse

Originally published in 1998, The Phenomenology of Modern Legal Discourse recovers the suffering which is concealed as lawyers, judges and other legal officials resignify a harm through the special vocabulary and grammar which constitutes legal language. At the moment of re-signification, an untranslatable gap erupts between the knowers' special language and the embodied meanings of the non-knower. The Phenomenology claims that the gap can be unconcealed if the knowers of the special language reconsider their assumptions about legal meaning, the body and desire. With a broad grasp of diverse problematics from the legal procedures, legal discourses and legal theory of three jurisdictions to exemplify his claims, the author interweaves arguments which draw from Edmund Husserl's and Maurice Merleau Ponty's insights about meaning. The author's effort demonstrates how one may unconceal lived laws through a re-reading of the role of the experiential body in legal signification. The author's effort to retrieve the embodiment of legal meaning de-stabilizes deep assumptions of contemporary lawyers and legal theorists.

William E. Conklin, University of Windsor, Canada

Preface. Introduction: The Problematic of Modern Legal Discourse 1. The Paradigms of Legal Consciousness and Legal Language 2. The Transformation of Meaning into a Modern Legal Genre 3. The Silence of Suffering 4. Does the Knower Face External Constraints? 5. The Retrieval of the Knower's Evolving World 6. The Idealism of a Modern Legal Discourse 7. Consciousness of the Absent Final Object 8. The Retrieval of the Dialogic Relation. Conclusion: Living Laws. Bibliography. Index