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stanbul seminars, I had the On the occasion of the first edition of the I great honour of presenting a paper that was aimed at criticizing the idea that political democracy implies necessarily the substratum of a secularized society. I tried to maintain, implicitly from a Durkheimian point of view, that western not only European conceptions of lacit are frequently biased by a very particularistic idea of religion, understood as a matter of personal choice individualized, spiritualized, basically Protestant-like and by similarly particularistic representations of the self, of the division between public and private, and of the difference between the good and the right. Consequently, I suggested that in order to deal with contemporary religious pluralism we would have to make a
PHILOSOPHY & SOCIAL CRITICISM vol 36 nos 34 pp. 413423
Copyright The Author(s) 2010. Reprints and permissions: http://www.sagepub.co.uk/journalspermissions.nav
http://psc.sagepub.com DOI: 10.1177/0191453709358845
PSC
In Habermas terms, one could say that the law is a bridge between facts and norms,30 but norms do not express only an order consensually legitimated, but also the alternity of another possible order, the imaginative opening to a still unredeemed form of life. I would say that the law, as ritual, is in between a sacred but mundane and always imperfect order and a still not achieved redemption, it is always open to its own selftranscendence.31 As Teubner wrote, law is always self-subversive.32 Self-subversion is, according to Cover, intrinsic to laws nature: it is that the very act of constituting tight communities about common ritual and law is juris-generative by a process of juridical mitosis. New law is constantly created through the sectarian separation of communities.33 The so-called paideic nomos, which establishes normative orders capable of asking for social conformism, is from the very beginning unstable and doomed to hermeneutical mitosis. Juris-genesis is, according to Cover, a too fertile process, that forces paideic law to develop imperial virtues capable of stabilizing meanings over time. Law, in other words, is intrinsically dissociative and incoherent, and meanings-proliferation is part of its DNA. This is why, to come back to legal pluralism, the states monopoly of interpretation restricting communities juris-generative
What I am defending is not a mysticism of the social sphere, but certainly I am opposing those conceptions that consider society as intrinsically anomic and in need of regulation from outside. According to Cover, it is a position not so different from classical anarchy, if anarchy means absence of dominators, not absence of law (1983: 69). I am not sure I share Covers preference for anarchy, but I am quite certain that his position is perfectly consistent with an idea, pluralist from the very beginning of social life, and confident in societys self-organization capabilities. I know no better way to label it than as a sort of Gramscian socialism.
Notes
1 See Massimo Rosati, Ritual and the Sacred: A Neo-Durkheimian Analysis of Politics, Religion and the Self (Farnham, Sy: Ashgate, 2009); Ayelet Shachar, Multicultural Jurisdictions: Cultural Differences and Womens Rights (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 2 S. N. Eisenstadt, The Transformations of the Religious Dimension and the Crystallization of the New Civilizational Visions and Relations, in Religion and Democracy in Contemporary Europe, ed. Gabriel Motzkin and Yochi Fischer (Van Leer Jerusalem Institute and Network of European Foundations: Alliance Publishing Trust, 2008). 3 See Transnational Transcendence: Essays on Religion and Globalization, ed. Thomas J. Csordas (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009). 4 See J. B. Thompson, The Media and Modernity: A Social Theory of the Media (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995). I wish to thank Chiara Moroni for urging me to take this important book into serious consideration. 5 See Axial Civilizations and History, ed. J. P. Arnason, S. N. Eisenstadt and B. Wittrock (Leiden: Brill, 2005). 6 See Marcel Mauss, uvres, vol. II (Paris: Les ditions de Minuit, 1974). 7 Marcel Mauss and mile Durkheim, Note sur la notion de civilisation, in ibid., , p. 453. 8 Johann P. Arnason, Civilizations in Dispute: Historical Questions and Theoretical Traditions (Leiden: Brill, 2003), p. 69.