Law and Unlaw: Does the Negative Ontology of Law Possible?

Abstract

Fundamental events, which have happened during the ХХ-ХХI centuries, made the radical changes in the existed legal thought. The classical legal studies represented law as changeless ground of the world, aprioristic content of the moral consciousness (natural law), or as hard and stable system of the social norms, which are fulfilled on the basement of the official enforcement(positive law). At the same time, current situation demonstrates the weakness of law directly. World wars, totalitarianism, death camps, genocide, terrorism express itself much more clearly, that the abstract legal norms and values. So, it is possible to presuppose, that law exists not as continual, but as discrete phenomenon, which is reproduced through the human interaction. In the similarsituation legal researchers couldn’t consider changeable and inconsistent legal reality by the way of the dogmatic constructions of the natural or positive law. The legal philosophers are forced to create the new methodological approaches, which give possibility to understand the specifics of legal Being. It’s worth to mention, that the predicate “legal” or “law” doesn’t mark the correspondence ofits subject to the norms of law, whether positive or natural, but means its legal relevance, its ability to be considered in the frames of the legal constructions. From the similar point of view the such non-classical sense figures as “law communication” (A. V. Polyakov), “law event” (A. V. Stovba), “legal reality” (S. I. Maksymov), “legal dialogue” (I. L. Chestnov) already include in itself not legalphenomena only, but illegal phenomena also – such as crimes, law-breakings etc. To the named phenomena corresponds the living experience of the human co-existence. Inside the frame of the similar experience it is worth to mark the “rightless” experience, experience of law-breaking, experience “not-of-law-but-something-else”. Thus, the reasoning of the experience of “unlaw”, whichis experienced in the living corporal co-existence, is perspective direction of the legal researches.