Legal Liturgies: The Aesthetic Foundation of Positive Law

Abstract

To the contemporary jurist it may seem quite nonsensical to describe law as a not-exclusively textual but also iconic phenomenon. The idea that there is some form of ``normativity of the image'' relevant to the theory of law would certainly appear unfounded. The difference between the rational normativity of the text and the mythical irrationality of the image and the symbol appears however to be clearly set out in the difference between Kelsens's and Schmitt's theories. The paper proposes an aesthetic of law intended to recompose the unity of the problem of law, placing it anthropologically between the rational and the irrational, between the normative text and the symbolic mythology of its basis, reconstructing the common root of these two theories in Hobbes' thought. Following the formulation of the legal canonist and philosopher Pierre Legendre, law is not a rational systema iuris composed only of rationally interpretable norms, but also and always a corpus iuris wrapped in images, symbols and myths, and which upholds the norm aesthetically and dogmatically, makes it presentable, credible and anthropologically communicable, and considers the ``legal liturgies'' as an aesthetic foundation of the ``third'' in contemporary theories of law.