[en] This paper will scrutinize the relationship between law and utopian thinking and the different trajectories that they must maintain should they seek to sustain some significant relationship between them. It will proceed to do so as follows. After the discussion of the transformation of European thinking in Section II, Section III will explain what is meant by the notion of the primordial event from which law and utopian thinking emerge and commence with their divergent trajectories. Sections IV and V will look at the respective trajectories of utopian thinking, on the one hand, and legal thinking, on the other. Section VI thereafter explores the way in which the two trajectories of law and the utopian imagination can be considered to relate to one another. It does so by invoking the notion of a Stoic difference regarding the different trajectories of law and utopian thinking. Stoic difference concerns the way the different and divergent trajectories of law and the utopian imagination can be understood as a differential relationship that results from two different responses to significant events. The different trajectories of law and utopian thinking need not render them indifferent to one another. But the return of renewed wrist-locked continuity between legal and utopian discourses is no longer to be hoped for. The time for that kind of utopian thinking is over, at least in modern and postmodern societies that may wish to lay claim to the acrobatic act called liberal democracy. This act turns on the sustenance of an essential distance and difference between law and the utopian imagination.
This article is a translation of Law, Utopia, Event: A Constellation of Two Trajectories published in Austin Sarat et al (eds) Law and the Utiopian Imagination, Stanford University Press, 2014.
This article is a translation of Law, Utopia, Event: A Constellation of Two Trajectories published in Austin Sarat et al (eds) Law and the Utiopian Imagination, Stanford University Press, 2014.
[University of Luxembourg > Faculty of Law, Economics and Finance (FDEF) > Department of Law (DL) >]
