A New Book from Laterza
"Monateri's project in this book is to try a complete new reappraisal of comparative law and legal origins.
He tries to oppose the apparently flat world of political globalization to the world of law, since the styles of the law, as different presentifications or visualizations of the 'invisible' of the law, are still very diverging.
For him 'style' has an 'ontological' value, because it captures a local conception of the law which supersedes words and language, creating different 'spheres' in the globe : an anglo-sphere, a french sphere and so forth, having a geopolitical impact, moulding world spaces in diversified jurisdictions, resisting political globalization.
Specially he maintains that every legal system came out of a 'state of exception' - the 30 years war, the Glorious Revolution, the French Revolution,the American War of Independence, etc. - and that style represents the ontologicized memory of this peculiar origin of the Legal for each system.
In this way the theory of the 'State of Exception' is both confirmed and localized in its historical concreteness, where archeology of concepts coincide with genealogy of patterns of government.
As someone has said this book open the possibility of an explicit post-Schmittian paradigm, retaining some of the most relevant suggestions of it, through a strong critique of its 'universal' validity. Schmitt's theory of the political is more an actual memory of XVIII century conditions, than a real universal doctrine; its main importance lies in the very fact of the ongoing working of the dispositifs which started to operate on the Western Political Mind at that age."
"The most counterintuitive theory of the Book is that it sees the 'Political' as such much more embodied - notwithstanding any received idea - in the Common Law systems than in the Civil Law as it actually evolved; and in the structure of United States government much more than in the 'the dissolution of the political bodies' now almost realized within the European Union."
"Law is an invisible, bypassing words, and the place of its 'uncanny presence' is that of 'style' as more than an aesthetic concept, but rather as a threshold between aesthetics, politics and the law"
In breve
A dispetto dell’immagine corrente della globalizzazione giuridica, l’uniformità senza confini degli ordinamenti che sembra caratterizzare il mondo contemporaneo non azzera il peso delle diverse tradizioni giuridiche: le diverse immagini della ‘legge’ continuano a segnare differenze, scarti che interrompono lo spazio globale. Persino lo stile, i linguaggi e le modalità di legittimazione della giustizia divengono, seppur in modo più sotterraneo e indiretto, elementi pregnanti di una nuova ‘geopolitica’, gli strumenti culturali di una lotta per l’egemonia dei modelli giuridici. In particolare due forme della legge si stagliano ancora nel mondo e nell’Occidente: quella anglo-americana della ‘legge orale’ e quella continentale della ‘legge scritta’. Si tratta di due forme antitetiche, che marcano una profonda dualità dell’Occidente.
Recensione di Alessandra Quattrini su Nomos
