Abstract

The following considerations do not take their point of departure in legal logic, legal pragmatics, or in the critique of law but rather in the genesis of law, its emergence, and its place in actual experience. In particular, I would like to look at law as a special form of order and ordering power. Reference to “the law” can only be provisional, as it concerns a variable term that also changes in its linguistic designations.I will concentrate on the pre-juridical and supra-juridical aspects of legal practice itself. Accordingly, although the law will not hereinafter be the object of an inquiry from an external point of view, I assume that legal thinking, as all thinking that takes place in determinate orders, has its own peculiar outside.Here I follow Foucault’s injunction concerning a penser du dehors. Close scrutiny of the internal/external difference opens up critical perspectives that spring from “the very core of law.” In general, the following pages take their cue from the responsively oriented and ‘pathically’ grounded phenomenology I have developed hitherto