Unitas Personae: On Legal and Biological Self-Narration

Abstract

The theme of this symposium edition invites re ection on the role of scientiŽ c narratives within law. Here, I take the liberty of modifying the terms of the inquiry so as to elicit an older analogy, which refers scientiŽ c narration to legal narration. If the latter theme is taken to encompass both the story and its telling, both the semantic and the pragmatic dimensions of communication, then the analogy arises from the role of narrative (or narration) as a very particular kind of technology. Various histories of law and legal procedure describe the role of legal rhetoric as a techne; that is, as an art, technique, craft or strategy. In the classical sense, techne described a power or capacity to produce things whose eventual existence was contingent upon the exercise of that power, things whose existence was “caused” by the craftsman, rather than by the operation of necessity or nature. In short, techne was the art of producing a thing that could just as well exist as not exist. This mode of production generates both legal and scientiŽ c artefacts, and it inevitably bears on the question of how scientiŽ c and legal narratives “combine.” The particular nexus of combination or intersection that is considered here — the legal person — is interesting because the emergence of genetics and biotechnological therapies has prompted the dissolution of one “person form,” which was constituted by mutually-reinforcing and highly generalised models of human individuality in law and biology, and has opened the way to a newer form, which takes account of the fact that the legal person is not underwritten by a coextensive biological individual, but instead has to be produced from law’s own resources. In one moment, the in uence of these biological narratives is corrosive, in that it dissolves an existing interrelation, but in another moment one Ž nds a productive parallelism between law and biology, in which multiple forms of self-narration are exchanged “between” the two. But the starting point is the question whether law — or, more precisely, the narrative technique of legal rhetoric — might not now be seen as a prototype of scientiŽ c production.