Derring Literarity: The Case of Negative Comparative Law

Abstract

Abstract, To dare is to risk, and to err is to blunder. I suggest that the neologism “to derr” can helpfully refer to the audacious inscription of deliberately erroneous and therefore fictitious information, which is the literary strategy that I discreetly pursued in my Negative Comparative Law: A Strong Programme for Weak Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022). In this way, I sought to enhance the literarity and the correlative depositivization of the comparative enterprise in law. This essay probes this initiative and explains how it must withstand disqualification as mere whimsy.

Keywords:

• comparative law
• legal theory
• critique
• literarity
• negative dialectics

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Part of this text appears in an anterior version in Pierre Legrand, “Negative Comparative Law: The Sanitization Enterprise,” Revista de Investigações Constitucionais/Journal of Constitutional Research 10, no. 1 (2023): 1, 50–5. I am indebted to Professor Daniel Wunder Hachem for his editorial hospitality. I made a brief presentation of the argument on the occasion of the “World Literature and Law” conference at Cardozo Law School in New York on 13–14 August 2023. I am grateful to Professors Peter Goodrich and Marco Wan for their generous invitation to join their eclectic and analeptic gathering. The usual disclaimer applies. Unless I indicate otherwise, translations are mine.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Pierre Legrand https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3945-183X

Notes

1 Michel de Montaigne, Les Essais, ed. Jean Balsamo, Michel Magnien, and Catherine Magnien-Simonin (Paris: Gallimard, 2007 [1595†]), bk III, ch 9, 1009 [“Les imperfections mesme ont leur moyen de se recommander”].

2 I draw on Theodor Adorno’s negative dialectics, which thoroughly informs my comparative epistemology. Adorno defends the idea that no thing or entity can be equalled either by way of words or through the mobilization of a concept, that every thing or entity is other than what it is said or conceptualized to be. Adorno refers to an “unreconciled condition” (“unversöhnte[r] Stand”) between world and word: Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialektik (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1966), 41. Cf. Samuel Beckett, “Closed Place” in Fizzles in Texts for Nothing and Other Short Prose, 1950-1976, ed. Mark Nixon (London: Faber & Faber, 2010 [1976]), 147: “[N]o two ever meet”. Adorno’s admiration for Beckett, whom he saw and with whom he corresponded, is well documented. Note that according to Adorno the impossibility of consensuality is not in the least a predicament but rather an opportunity since it allows for the kind of interpretive deepening that disagreement fosters. It ensues that “to keep alive the capacity for experience of the nonidentical” is crucial: Susan Buck-Morss, The Origin of Negative Dialectics (New York: Free Press, 1977), 189. See also Jacques Derrida, Papier machine (Paris: Galilée, 2001) 306: “The risk of misunderstanding, the wandering of an answer beside the question, there is what must always remain possible […]. There would be no […] ethic of discussion otherwise” [“Le risque du malentendu, l’errance d’une réponse à côté de la question, voilà ce qui doit toujours rester possible (…). Il n’y aurait pas (…) d’éthique de la discussion autrement”].

3 Pierre Legrand, “Negative Comparative Law,” Journal of Comparative Law 10, no. 2 (2015): 405–54; Pierre Legrand, “Negative Comparative Law and Its Theses,” Journal of Comparative Law 16, no. 2 (2021): 641–91.

4 See also Pierre Legrand, Comparative Law and the Task of Negative Critique (New York: Routledge, 2023); Pierre Legrand, The Negative Turn in Comparative Law (New York: Routledge, 2024).

5 Konrad Zweigert and Hein Kötz, Einführung in die Rechtsvergleichung, 3rd ed. (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1996), 44 [“wissenschaftliche Exaktheit und Objektivität”]. For a further (discipular) contention emphasizing the need for comparatists-at-law to acquire an “objective comprehending”, see Uwe Kischel, Rechtsvergleichung (Munich: C.H. Beck, 2015), 169 [“objektiv nachvollziehen”]. The German verb “nachvollziehen” suggests an apprehension more all-encompassing than the straightforward “Verständnis” (“understanding”).

6 Zweigert and Kötz (note 5), 13 [“Physik”/”Molekularbiologie”/”Geologie”]. In Kischel (note 5), 173, one finds this matter-of-fact assertion: “Comparative law is a part of legal science” [“Die Rechtsvergleichung ist ein Teil der Rechtswissenschaft”].

7 Zweigert and Kötz (note 5), 11 [“neutraler”]. In Kischel (note 5), 99, the author alleges that it can be “easy” to form a “neutral standpoint” on such topics as contract law [“einfach”/”neutraler Standpunkt”].

8 Zweigert and Kötz (note 5), 42 [“vor allem ohne kritische Wertung”].

9 Ibid., 33 [“das reine und zunächst zweckfreie Forschen”].

10 N.J. Enfield, Language vs. Reality (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2022), 2.

11 E.g., Jacques Derrida (with Derek Attridge), “‘Cette étrange institution qu’on appelle la littérature’,” in Derrida d’ici, Derrida de là, ed. Thomas Dutoit and Philippe Romanski (Paris: Galilée, 2009 [1989]), 263: “Literarity is not a natural essence” [“La littérarité n’est pas une essence naturelle”]. The words are Derrida’s. Cf. Andrew Benjamin, Philosophy’s Literature (Manchester: Clinamen Press, 2001), 151: “In the place of transcendence, […] there is the materiality of language”.

12 See Derrida (note 11), 264.

13 Samuel Beckett, Worstward Ho in Company/Ill Seen Ill Said/Worstward Ho/Stirrings Still, ed. Dirk Van Hulle (London: Faber & Faber, 2009 [1983]), 82.

14 Ibid., 95.

15 John Guillory, Professing Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022), 343.

16 Ibid.

17 See Ibid., 202n5.

18 E.g., Peter Lamarque, The Philosophy of Literature (Oxford: Blackwell, 2009), 174: “Fictionality is a characteristic feature of literary works”. See also Michel Foucault, Le Discours philosophique, ed. Orazio Irrera and Daniele Lorenzini (Paris: Gallimard, 2023 [1966]), 24, where Foucault characterizes literary discourse as “fictive” discourse [“fictif”].

19 Jacques Derrida, Psyché, vol. 1, 2nd ed. (Paris: Galilée, 1998), 23 [“distribue ses deux valeurs essentielles entre les deux pôles du constatif (découvrir ou dévoiler […]) et du performatif (produire, instituer, transformer)”].

20 Ibid., 25 [“oscillation infiniment rapide”].

21 Instead of having anything to do with method, comparative law depends on experience or “flair”. I quote from Jacques Derrida, De la grammatologie (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1967), 233 [“flair”]. See Simone Glanert, “Method?” in Methods of Comparative Law, ed. Pier Giuseppe Monateri (Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar 2012), 61–81; Günter Frankenberg, “The Innocence of Method – Unveiled: Comparison as an Ethical and Political Act,” Journal of Comparative Law 9, no. 2 (2014): 222–58. Cf. T.S. Eliot, “The Perfect Critic,” Athenæum, no. 4708 (23 July 1920): 102, 103: “[T]here is no method except to be very intelligent”.

22 Julian Wolfreys, Literature, in Theory (New York: Continuum, 2010), 225.

23 According to the Roman liturgical rite, this feast used to take place on 3 May until it was abolished by Pope John XXIII in 1960. However, it remains a major moment for the Church of the East, which celebrates it on 13 September.

24 Derrida (note 19), 35–6 [“l’invention (…) produit ce qui (…) ne se trouvait certes pas là mais n’est pas pour autant créé, au sens fort du mot, seulement agencé à partir d’une réserve d’éléments existants et disponibles, dans une configuration donnée”].

25 C.Z. Elgin, True Enough (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2017), 3.

26 Is authority wanted? Consider Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015 [1958]).

27 Elgin (note 25), 3.

28 Ibid., 250.

29 Derrida (note 21), 227 [“(la lecture) ne peut légitimement transgresser le texte vers autre chose que lui”].

30 Rodolphe Gasché, The Wild Card of Reading (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 13: “[A] performative act, itself no longer referential[,] […] can include within itself, as part of itself, an act of reference”. Meanwhile, I accept that “there are no […] constraints on interpretation that are not themselves interpretive”: Stanley Fish, Doing What Comes Naturally (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1989), 8. In other words, even the contention that I defend opposing the illimitability of interpretation with a view to excluding perverse ramblings, is itself interpretive.

31 Cf. Hans-Georg Gadamer, Wahrheit und Methode, 5th ed. (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1986), 302: “It suffices to say that one understands differently, when one understands at all” [“Es genügt zu sagen, daß man anders versteht, wenn man überhaupt versteht”].

32 Derrida (note 11), 285 [“Ma loi, celle à laquelle j’essaie de me rendre ou de répondre, c’est le texte de l’autre, sa singularité même, son idiome, son appel qui me précède. Mais je ne peux y répondre de façon responsable (…) qu’en mettant en jeu, et en gage, ma singularité, en signant, d’une autre signature”]. The words are Derrida’s.

33 “Invention” is therefore a word that is “suspended undecidably”: “[I]t hesitates perhaps […] between creative invention, the production of what is not – or was not earlier – and revelatory invention, the discovery and unveiling of what already is or finds itself to be there”: Jacques Derrida, “Le parjure, peut-être,” Etudes françaises 38, no. 1–2 (2002): 15, 23 [“suspend(u) indécidablement”/”Il hésite peut-être (…) entre l’invention créatrice, la production de ce qui n’est pas – ou n’était pas auparavant – et l’invention révélatrice, la découverte ou le dévoilement de ce qui déjà se trouve ou se trouve être là”].

34 I refer to Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 2017 [1973]), 5–11. Geertz discusses Gilbert Ryle.

35 Of course, this development would mean that “one must today reinvent invention”: Derrida (note 19), 37 [“il faut aujourd’hui réinventer l’invention”]. Indeed, “one would not say today that Christopher Columbus invented America […]. […] [U]sage or the system of certain modern, relatively modern, conventions would prohibit us from speaking of an invention whose object would be an existence as such”: Ibid., 41 [“on ne dirait plus aujourd’hui que Christophe Colomb a inventé l’Amérique (…). (…) (L)’usage ou le système de certaines conventions modernes, relativement modernes, nous interdiraient de parler d’une invention dont l’objet serait une existence comme telle”].

36 Enfield (note 10), 35.

37 Crucially, it is precisely because the self cannot be the other that the other can protect itself as other, that it can eschew (colonial) assimilation or (imperial) appropriation at the hands of the self – that it can remain other than the self. This key epistemico-existential advantage arising from the irreducibility of otherness is a leitmotiv in Derrida’s work.

38 Cf. I.A. Richards, Coleridge on Imagination, 3rd ed. (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962), 56–7: “[N]othing of which we are in any way conscious is given to the mind. Into the simplest seeming ‘datum’ a constructing, forming activity from the mind has entered”.

39 Ming Xie, Conditions of Comparison (London: Bloomsbury, 2011), 20.

40 Ibid., 48.

41 Ibid., 33.

42 Ibid., 2.

43 Cf. Jacques Derrida, “Pas d’hospitalité” in De l’hospitalité, ed. Anne Dufourmantelle (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1997), 71–137. Derrida’s text appears on the sequence of impar pages.

44 Marina Vitkin, “The ‘Fusion of Horizons’ on Knowledge and Alterity,” Philosophy & Social Criticism 21, no. 1 (1995): 57, 75n8.

45 Ibid., 58.

46 R. Radhakrishnan, “Why Compare?” in Comparison, ed. Rita Felski and Susan S. Friedman (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), 16.

47 Xie (note 39), 43.

48 Cf. Jacques Derrida, Force de loi (Paris: Galilée, 1994), 59: “Every constative utterance itself rel[ies] on a performative structure at least implicit” [“Tout énoncé constatif repos(e) lui-même sur une structure performative au moins implicite”].

49 Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Wahrheit in den Geisteswissenschaften” in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 2 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1986 [1953]), 40 [“Geisteswissenschaftliche Erkenntnis hat immer etwas von Selbsterkenntnis an sich”].

50 Harry Collins, Tacit and Explicit Knowledge (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010) 55–6.

51 Cf. Walter Benjamin, “Der Erzähler” in Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser, vol. 2/2 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp 1991 [1936]), 447: “Thus sticks to the narration the trace of the narrator as the trace of the potter on the claypot” [“So haftet an der Erzählung die Spur des Erzählenden wie die Spur der Töpferhand an der Tonschale”].

52 Note that foreign law can itself be said to constitute a narrative inasmuch as it exists as the legal story of a given “community”. I use quotation marks advisedly. In the end, there are only individuals.

53 Robert M. Cover, “Nomos and Narrative,” Harvard Law Review 97, no. 1 (1983): 1, 4n3. See also Ibid., 4: “No set of legal institutions or prescriptions exists apart from the narratives that locate it and give it meaning”. If one inserts the word “foreign” so as to make the statement about “foreign legal institutions or prescriptions”, one prompts an enunciation correlating with comparative law’s enterprise.

54 Peter Brooks, Seduced by Story (New York: New York Review Books, 2022), 17.

55 Ibid., 52.

56 It is remarked that Zweigert and Kötz’s book has exerted “aggressive” epistemic governance over comparative law since the 1970s: David Kennedy, “New Approaches to Comparative Law: Comparativism and International Governance,” Utah Law Review, no. 2 (1997): 545, 627n19.

57 Günther Teubner, “Legal Irritants: Good Faith in British Law or How Unifying Law Ends Up in New Divergences,” Modern Law Review 61, no. 1 (1998): 11, 14.

58 I am thinking of what Adorno’s aesthetic of negativity names a “Nicht-Mitmachen”, a “not-playing-along” or a “non-participation”. E.g., Theodor W. Adorno, “Erziehung nach Auschwitz” in Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, vol. 10/2 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1977 [1966]), 679, where Adorno refers to the “force” (“Kraft”) of this oppositional stance.

59 I quote from the epigraph that I retained in NCL, which draws on Foucault: Michel Foucault, “Qu’est-ce que la critique?” in Qu’est-ce que la critique? – La Culture de soi, ed. Henri-Paul Fruchaud and Daniele Lorenzini (Paris: Vrin, 2015 [1978]), 37 [“comme cela, par ceux-là, au nom de ces principes-ci, en vue de tels objectifs et par le moyen de tels procédés”/”pas comme ça, pas pour ça, pas par eux”].

60 Ibid. [“l’art de ne pas être gouverné comme ça et à ce prix”]. I lift the reference to my “strong programme” from the sub-title of NCL.

61 Cf. Jacques Derrida, Positions (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1972), 56–7: “[W]e are not dealing with the peaceful coexistence of a vis-à-vis, but with a violent hierarchy. One of the two terms dominates the other (axiologically, logically, etc.), occupies the upper level” [“(N)ous n’avons pas affaire à la coexistence pacifique d’un vis-à-vis, mais à une hiérarchie violente. Un des deux termes commande l’autre (axiologiquement, logiquement, etc.), occupe la hauteur”].

62 Claude Lévi-Strauss, La Pensée sauvage in Œuvres, ed. Vincent Debaene et al. (Paris: Gallimard, 2008 [1962]), 577 [“‘les moyens du bord’”].

63 Ibid. [“la composition de l’ensemble (…) est le résultat contingent de toutes les occasions qui se sont présentées”].

64 Ibid., 578 [“hétéroclites”].

65 Ibid., 579 [“Ses possibilités demeurent toujours limitées par l’histoire particulière de chaque pièce, et par ce qu’il subsiste en elle de prédéterminé, dû à (son) usage originel”].

66 Ibid. [“les éléments que collectionne et utilise le bricoleur sont ‘précontraints’”] (my emphasis).

67 Ibid. [“ingénieur”].

68 Ibid., 580 [“intégralement transparent à la réalité”].

69 Ibid., 582. The expression appears in italicized English in the French text.

70 Jacques Derrida, L’Ecriture et la différence (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1967), 418 [“un mythe”].

71 Ibid. [“L’idée de l’ingénieur qui aurait rompu avec tout bricolage est (…) une idée théologique”] (my emphasis).

72 Ibid. [“qu’on cesse de croire à un tel ingénieur”].

73 Ibid. [“l’ingénieur ou le savant sont aussi des espèces de bricoleurs”] (my emphasis).

74 Ibid. [“admet(tre) que tout discours fini est astreint à un certain bricolage”] (my emphasis).

75 Ibid. 418 [“on doit dire que tout discours est bricoleur”] (my emphasis).

76 Jonathan Culler, Literary Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 40.

77 Michel Foucault, “Qu’est-ce qu’un auteur?” in Dits et écrits, ed. Daniel Defert and François Ewald, vol. 1 (Paris: Gallimard, 1994 [1969]), 811n* [“régulateur de la fiction”].

78 Indeed, play and seriousness need not be opposites, which is Hans-Georg Gadamer’s claim as he observes that “[p]laying has its own […] seriousness”, and as he notes that “seriousness in play lets the play be wholly play”: Gadamer (note 31), 107, 108 [“Das Spielen hat einen eigenen (…) Erns(t)”/”der Ernst beim Spiel läßt das Spiel ganz Spiel sein”]. For an influential argument articulating scholarship as serious play, see Pierre Bourdieu, Raisons pratiques (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1994) 221–36. See also Roland Barthes, Le Bruissement de la langue (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1984), 35, where Barthes remarks that play must not be understood as “distraction”, but as “work” [“distraction”/”travail”]. Gadamer, Bourdieu, and Barthes are mobilizing the Renaissance humanist tradition of “serio ludere”.

79 Peter Goodrich, Judicial Uses of Images (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023), 6.

80 I am quoting (if sans quotation marks) an expression that belongs to the realm of Beckett’s favorite neologisms. See Mathieu Lindon, Une archive (Paris: Editions P.O.L, 2023), 73. Lindon is the son of Jérôme Lindon (1925–2001), Beckett’s French publisher to whom the playwright was particularly close. As Lindon fils recounts his childhood and teenage years, his autobiography features many reminiscences of Beckett.

81 E.g., Tim Conley, Joyces Mistakes (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003); Matthew Creasy, ed., Errears and Erroriboose: Joyce and Error (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2011); Salman Rushdie, “‘Errata’: or, Unreliable Narration in Midnight’s Children” in Imaginary Homelands (London: Granta, 1991 [1983]), 22–25.

82 Meanwhile, there are many examples of critique of institutional expectations in the literary world. E.g., Annette Gilbert, Literature’s Elsewheres (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2022).

83 Letter from Samuel Beckett to Georges Duthuit in The Letters of Samuel Beckett, ed. George Craig et al., vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011 [11 August 1948]), 95. An English translation could be: “Nothing to me will ever be against enough”. Cf. Jacques Derrida, Penser, c’est dire non (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 2022 [1960]).

84 Lorenzo Bonoli, Lire les cultures (Paris: Kimé, 2008), 98 [“agrammaticalité”] (emphasis omitted).

85 I have in mind the Harvard system of uniform legal citation. Recent releases have numbered almost 400 pages.

86 Jacques Derrida, Béliers (Paris: Galilée, 2003), 36 [“pensive(s) et suspensive(s) interruption(s)”].

87 Cf. Goodrich (note 79), 226: “Every representation is a transformation”.

88 Other subversive interventions concern photography, in particular the refusal to be photographed or the decision to be photographed according to certain unconventional modalities. I recall, for instance, Duncan Kennedy’s determination, upon his formal installation as Carter Professor of General Jurisprudence at Harvard Law School in 1996 (a position he held until his retirement in 2015), to be officially photographed adopting a certain posture and wearing a certain attire, neither of which one would habitually associate with the formal institutional ways prevailing at a leading US law school. The photograph that I discuss is easily accessible at Bruce A. Kimball and Daniel R. Coquillette, The Intellectual Sword (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020), 773. I am grateful to Duncan Kennedy and Daniel Coquillette for helpful correspondence [on file].

89 I refer, of course, to Samuel Beckett, Stirrings Still in Company/Ill Seen Ill Said/Worstward Ho/Stirrings Still, ed. Dirk Van Hulle (London: Faber & Faber, 2009 [1989]), 105–15.

90 Albert Camus, La Chute (Paris: Gallimard, 1956), 139 [“Au bout de toute liberté, il y a une sentence”].

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Pierre Legrand

Pierre Legrand teaches comparative law at the Sorbonne.