About The Workshop
SW 78- Narrative Rationality, Identity and Law
Convenors: José Manuel Aroso Linhares; Karolina M. Cern; Bartosz Wojciechowski
Contact: jmarolinh@gmail.com
Assimilating heterogeneous heritages (which include Heidegger’s experience of constitutive historicity, Gadamer’s exploration of responsible conversation and Wirkungsgeschichte… and even Habermas’s reinvention of Lebenswelt…), the so-called narrative turn, frequently presented as a plausible assimilation of practical-prudential (subject/subject) rationality — if not directly as an “attempt to recapture Aristotle’s concept of phronesis” (W. Fisher) — , challenges contemporary legal thought under the sign of a disconcerting plurality. This is undoubtedly related to the impressive spectrum of approaches and models that, from Greimas to Ricoeur and from MacIntyre to Lyotard (this one conjugated with Foucault and Derrida), recreate the “modulation of time” and the plurality of discursive genres and language games associated with narrative rationality. This is mainly due to the (often unilaterally conceived) projections of these models and their major voices in the practical world of law, generating the creative assimilations that we owe, for instance, to Bernard Jackson’s and Eric Landowski’s narrative structural semiotics… or to James Boyd White’s ethical-literary narrativism (opening the door to the blossoming of law & literature and law & performance movements)… as well as to Costa Douzinas’ philosophical-political use of grammatology and Goodrich’s critical rhetoric ─ without obviously forgetting the role that community-building counter-storytelling assumes in the so-called narrative outsider jurisprudences (from Critical Race to Postcolonial Legal Theories, passing through Feminist Jurisprudences and LGBT Critical Studies).
Our workshop is an invitation to explore the relevance of narrative rationality (and its possibilities and models) in the practical world of law, but it is also an opportunity to combine this exploration (or the possible wager on one of its many approaches) with the dogmatic and metadogmatic discourse concerning the construction of the legal subject (or juridically relevant intersubjectivity). This means considering the following sequence of questions, making however each of the levels at stake as open as possible. Is narrative rationality only a resource to consider the modus operandi of the judge or also a way of transforming the concept and experience of the legal subject? Should the components relating to personal identity (and its dynamics) be incorporated into the normative configuration of the legal subject and its specific status? Or should this configuration of sui iuris, preserving the intelligibility of a practical-cultural artefactus, resist such incorporation? What specific way of creating meaning distinguishes tertialité (Levinas) and the comparability it allows as a decisive component of the practical world of law? If we accept this incorporation of identity features, should its path be the one that narrative rationality, whilst celebrating “human beings” as storytellers (W. Fisher), helps us (or encourages us) to recognize? Whilst admitting this latter possibility (or its congruence with the social and cultural challenges of our time), how far should this narrative specification effectively go? Will this option have effective dogmatic consequences or only meta-dogmatic implications? Is it plausible to defend that the full inclusion of unique or singular identity components in the configuration of legal subjectivity (whilst overcoming the claim to comparability) opens the door to an alternative to law or to an experience of post-law?
Submission of abstracts: send to jmarolinh@gmail.com no later than the 30th April
