Law and Gift: Phenomenology of Legal Experience

Abstract


 
 
 The article aims to reveal the specificity of the legal as such in its difference from political or economic from a phenomenological point of view, that is, to determine what the experience of law is and what is its place in our experience as a whole.
 The key assumption is that while the political and the economic are based on the logic of the equivalent, which implies the establishment of a balance based on the balance of forces or interchangeable goods, the experience of law is fundamentally anti-utilitarian and subordinated rather to the logic of excess, or gift. This idea unfolds in three stages. The first part of article detects the place of gift in human experience. The next one is about the place of law in fundamental experience and the relationship between the experience of law and the experience of gift. In the final part, the question of the transformation of human experience and the corresponding perspectives of law is raised.
 The author argues that law is rooted in the structure of our fundamental experience or way of being in the world. The latter consists in the openness to the infinite otherness of the Other and, in this sense, is subject to the logic of the gift. At the same time this openness is never guaranteed, which gives rise to the experience of law. Aimed at maintaining the logic of excess or gift, law turns out to be not just one of the aspects of experience, but a condition of experience as such. However, today, in the conditions of the spread of the market and its inherent logic of equivalence to all spheres of life, the experience of law, subject to the opposite idea, and with it the experience as such, appears to be under threat.