The law of law

Law Text Culture Volume 4 Issue 2 1998 The law of law M. Dos Santos-Lee Follow this and additional works at: http://ro.uow.edu.au/ltc Recommended Citation Santos-Lee, M. Dos, The law of law, Law Text Culture, 4, 1998, 153-174. Available at:http://ro.uow.edu.au/ltc/vol4/iss2/7 Research Online is the open access institutional repository for the University of Wollongong. For further information contact the UOW Library: Article 7 The law of law Abstract Philosophy or law? Cause or effect? Does Philosophy name the laws through which things become known or are deemed as true, or must Philosophy itself be compelled by a law; guarded by an order that grants it the authority to write that such-ana-such is indeed so? And what would be the nature of such a law? What would name it as being 'true'? Philosophy? Another law? An infinite regress in the orders of Philosophy and law? ... Can we ever hope to arrive at an absolute origin in this schema, from which knowledge or truth may begin? This journal article is available in Law Text Culture: http://ro.uow.edu.au/ltc/vol4/iss2/7 The Law of Law Maria Dos Santos..Lee Introduction Philosophy or law? Cause or effect? Does Philosophy name the laws through which things become known or are deemed as true, or must Philosophy itself be compelled by a law; guarded by an order that grants it the authority to write that such-ana-such is indeed so? And what would be the nature of such a law? What would name it as being 'true'? Philosophy? Another law? An infinite regress in the orders of Philosophy and law? ... Can we ever hope to arrive at an absolute origin in this schema, from which knowledge or truth may begin? Or have we perhaps misconstrued the nature ofPhilosophy and this notion of law at its most abstract? Misaligned their relation to each other? Were we perhaps in error to assert a separation between the idea of Philosophy and this abstract conception of law, by seeking to allocate them in the distinct roles of 'cause' or 'effect'? Do they, rather, share one-and-thesame identity? Philosophy as law; a 'first-cause' - an uncausedcause - that announces itself in the very pronouncement of the laws of knowledge and of truth. Philosophyllaw, here, would mark an absolute origin from whence the 'laws' of the knowable would be written; designating the limit therefore, beyond which things would be unintelligible. And by conceiving of Philos-ophyllaw as a 'first-cause'; the origin of truth and of knowledge, have we thereby resolved the Dos Santos-Lee question of Philosophy and of law at its most abstract? Does its law (a self-law) simply mark it as the ma(r)ker of the laws of what is knowable? Self-cause as the 'law ofthe law', writing itself, and therefore writing itself beyond question; beyond doubt or further discussion - immutable. Philosophy/law as absolute arbiter of truth and knowledge. End of story(?) Would this be the necessary conclusion? Is it a satisfactory resolution? Is there 'truly' nothing more to discuss on the law of the laws of truth and ofknowledge? No room left from which to question intelligibly this abstract conception of the law/ Philosophy; since it designates absolutely the limits beyond which things are unintelligible? Or does something more happen when a limit is drawn? Is not the space of the beyond precisely opened up? A site of absolute difference; complete otherness. And is this not specifically the space from which discussion may begin? Discussing the Law of Law... We begin, then, with a proposition; an announcement of the law that pronounces that: ~t its most abstract, the law designates a limit beyond which things are unintelligible: Yet, it seems impossible to even begin discussing this statement without in some way translating it; transforming it through a series of our own designations. We would need to, for example, delineate what law 'at its most abstract' connotes, along with delimiting what constitutes the 'intelligible'. In so doing, the proposition becomes re-configured, re-ordered in order to be elucidated, or illuminated, in the first instance - made legible ... perhaps intelligible? And the idea of'translation' here is translated as: 'the action ofchanging one thing to another form'; 'bearing something, from one place 154 The Law ofLdw to another'; 'the expression of one thing, in other terms': And here, it is critical to note that the change that is necessarily involved in translation is not j~st any type of shift; without parameters, without limits. A translation after all is not a restoration or a duplication - a movement which carries us back to an identical location; a reproduction of exact sameness. Indeed, the idea of translation always involves the idea of difference; the separation from an 'original'/origin. But then, neither is translation simply alteration either. To constitute itself as a translation it must still bear a resemblance to its original. Its connection must remain recognisable; communicable, else it would simply become distinct; a totally separate entity. What, however, allows translation? What bestows the order of semblance between two entities that are necessarily different? What guarantees the safe journey here, ofone thing to its recognisable, translated other? A set of rules, or a code of ordering? A law? But we seemed to have travelled in a circle; to translate is to transform according to a code or an order ~ however, what determines the movements of this ordering? A higher level ofordering? Another law? An infinite order of laws? To begin then, we have had to translate. But, in so doing, it appears that we have enacted our very opening propositionthat we can only proceed by enacting what it designates - to impose a law, a set ofrules, which would both confine, and define our discussion, allowing its shape to emerge in the very sketching ofthis boundary. Would this necessity, then, gesture at the 'truth' of such a proposition? And would this thereby constitute it as a 'Law' - a principle? That is: 'Is it a 'truth'fLaw that things must be ordered under a law/rule, in order that they become intelligible, comprehensible, knowable?' But this movement already seems 155 Dos Santos-Lee to presuppose another 'layer'lorder of law - our acceptance that intelligibility or knowledge is constituted by a series oforderings or laws would suggest that we are already subject to a certain conception of what knowledge is. It writes itself: therefore, as a 'Theory of Knowledge'; another tier of law we know as Philosophy. And certainly it would seem that much of Western Philosophy has been compelled under the 'truth' of this conception of knowledge - to further this 'truth', by seeking out and delineating the laws of this law, and the rules this 'truth' would engender - from Plato's Forms to Kanes Pure Categories of the Understanding, from Hegefs self-conscious Spirit to the structures derived from the theories of Semiotics. Indeed, the history ofWestern Epistemology (...truncated)