After Law. Laurent de Sutter
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Название: After Law

Автор: Laurent de Sutter

Издательство: John Wiley & Sons Limited

Жанр: Афоризмы и цитаты

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isbn: 9781509542383

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СКАЧАТЬ operate generally; they cannot be dissociated from the place [lieu] in which they operate – you only posit in the setting [milieu] of that which posits: thesmos is both the posited and that which posits. Neither Law nor constitution, it is institution in the most original, elementary and rigorous sense; it is the fiat by which what did not exist suddenly appears in the world, finally obtaining the existence that, until then, it lacked.

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      §4. Nemô. Along with the idea of ‘Law’, there also appeared in Greece the idea that the decisions taken by the leaders of the city required justification – a justification that did not simply take the form of a short circuit with the divine world. The word ‘nomos’ itself conveys the different significations that its history has introduced into it, all of which turn around what we might refer to as ‘measurement’. Nomos comes from metrology: it deals with the weighing of rights and duties within the city, just as, in music, it could signify the temporal unity with which participants must coordinate in order to play together. Because the ‘measurement’ in question is a shared [partagée] measurement – as suggested by the Indo-European root *nem, from which the verb nemô, meaning ‘to distribute’ (which gives us ‘nomos’), is, it would seem, derived. A measurement that was not shared would not be a measurement; it would be a kind of hapax, an incomparable singularity, incommensurable with any other, as arbitrary and without justification as a caprice. The irruption of the word ‘nomos’ into political and juridical discourse signals, therefore, the inauguration of an order of measurement, of a shared mechanism that would at last allow for the measurement of measurements. Nomos is what allocates to each the share to which they are entitled, the sum of which establishes the sharing of the city; it is the medium for ordering the order specific to the city, and of what is shared there. When he sought to institute isonomia in Athens, Cleisthenes did not intend anything but this: to confer on each their share – or to ensure that everyone received their due in the order of Law. Isonomia was the equality of Law and equality before the Law; it announced that from now on there would be a rule shared by all, and no longer only the unilateral imposition of the will of a few. This is the reason why many have seen here the first democratic moment of ancient Greece – and, to the extent that we continue to believe in the ‘Law’, in nomos, it is a moment that is still today our legacy.

      §5. Philosophy. A banal observation: the philosophical tradition followed immediately in the steps of Cleisthenes and his reforms, producing countless meditations on the theme of nomos, which we still read today. The best known of these are by Plato and Aristotle – but they are incomprehensible if we do not keep in mind that they were conceived in response to theories produced by the Sophists. In fact, at the beginning of the fifth century bce in Athens, the debate on the nature of nomos gave tangible form to the fault line that for a long time would delineate the opposition between philosophy and its outside. The nature of this outside is at first difficult to define – but we can say that, in the Sophists, it finds an incarnation through which it can be approached. Were they politicians, lawyers, lecturers or jurists? Maybe a bit of all at once; what is certain, however, is that, in contrast to the philosophers, the Sophists seemed to think that the invention of nomos brought little change to the order of the city. The invention of ‘Law’ was little more than a civilized, polite and dressed-up version of something the inhabitants of Athens had always respected without question – namely, custom, tradition or practice. If Plato and Aristotle decided to follow the change in political vocabulary put forward by Cleisthenes, each in his own way seeking to establish its meaning, it was because they thought otherwise. The order of the city could not be left to customs, traditions or practices, even if its administration should somehow find in them something like an origin or a limit. Be it Plato or Aristotle, after Cleisthenes’ reforms, the philosophers all moved in the same direction: what interested them most in the concept of nomos was not variability, but permanence. For Greek philosophy, the innovation introduced by the idea of ‘Law’ was not only that an order existed, but that this order found all the justification it needed in itself. The order, in other words, before being the result of the imposition of a force on the population, and before being a collection of principles enacting its inequitable division, was an idea.