Abstract
Contemporary legal theory cannot be referred solely to the concepts of text and norm, but must take into account the connection between image and law. One of the most interesting contemporary contributions to the study of the relationship between myth, image, history and law is Legendre’s analysis of emblem theory. He identifies a single mechanism of legitimation of power – from Roman Empire to globalisation – the dimension of the Third (Tiers). It is a structural anthropological device on which the Western concept of power and law is founded that brings together different concepts such as God, state, democracy, science and the market and places them in a single legendary fictional place, visually perceptible on the aesthetic plane of representation. This chapter analyses the historical and philosophical elements of this conceptual framework, showing both application to the fields of marketing and advertising (the communicative strategies of multinational car companies such as Fiat Chrysler) and also implications for hermeneutics and aesthetics (the analysis of the painting by Piero della Francesca The Flagellation). The final aim of this chapter is to begin to develop a theory of legal sources suitable for the contemporary society of the image moving from the idea of nomogram designed as the unifier tool of the written and unwritten forms of the law.
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Notes
- 1.
The texts of Legendre have drawn upon a vocabulary developed from the history of Roman law, canon law, mediaeval legal texts and contemporary psychoanalysis and semiotics. So, the definition of technical words as Third (Tiers) will aid the reader: ‘Third. …Power is never directly present but is always triangulated, which is to say mediated through the space of the third. In a theoretical sense, the Third is the structural site of the absolute, the empty space, abyss or nothingness upon which both value and power depend. As the founding principle of the social, the logic of the Third is the logic of the distance of lack which makes power possible, it is the inaugural space or theatrical stage of social value and subjective attachment. In theology, the power of God or absolute place of the mythical Third must thus always pass through a mediating figure – that of the Pope, the emperor or the priest – before it becomes an object of subjective attachment. The logic of the Third thus refers to a logic of exchange between the subject and the absolute, which takes place across the space or distance of interpretation. To communicate with, or to love, the enigmatic figure of social authority or of divine power, the subject must address that figure as a lack, as something absent or in Lacan’s terms, as the objet of an impossible desire. Thus Legendre variously refers to the Third as the absolute Other, as the Image, Emblem, Mirror or Text. At the level of the Western institutions, the necessary yet empty space of the Third to which desire is addressed is replicated most prominently in the practices of penitence and law…’ (An Abbreviated Glossary in Goodrich (1997)).
- 2.
‘Development, the Revolution, God, the Class War, the Republic, the Toyota brand, these are examples of axioms that present the guaranteed truth’.
- 3.
- 4.
Legendre’s reconstruction of the normative history of the West is inevitably forced to select some aspects of the normative experiences, inasmuch as it is conditioned by theoretical choices and assumptions.
- 5.
- 6.
11th chapter.
- 7.
12th chapter.
- 8.
To see the video of the construction of the Fiat 500 ‘made of men’: http://tv.repubblica.it/home_page.php?playmode=player&cont_id=11480&ref=search, Title: 500, la festa di Torino – L’auto umana.
- 9.
That the event was experienced as a ‘mythical’ moment is evident from the newspaper reports ‘500 DAY REPORTAGE. The history of Italy becomes a performance for the stands. And a car “takes off” from the Po’ (title of an article by Alberto Mattioli in La Stampa dated 15 July 2007). ‘Who knows, perhaps when the shows in the town square were organized by Leonardo or Bernini the effect was similar. […] So, the 59 minute show organized for the presentation of the new 500 […] ceases to be the most beautiful advertisement ever dedicated to a car and becomes a performance in its own right, a “total” work of art both concrete and visionary, realistic and futuristic, technological and baroque…. It begins with the 500 that was, the car that ferried Italy-past from the Longanesian strapaese to a satisfied modernity. And then here it is, amidst ext☺racts from vintage films and songs, the mythical cinquino protagonists of the changing country, with Alberto Sordi’s traffic warden, the Brambilla family leaving for their first paid-for holiday, Coppi passing the water bottle to Bartali… in a remote Giro d’Italia accompanied by a pink 500 like the jersey of the leader, Anita Ekberg diving into the Trevi fountain, and life seems truly sweet … then it’s rock and the Beatles are here: modernity is four unique voices singing “I want to hold your hand”. The 500 is the history of Italy, the true history, not the list of ‘summertime’ or institutional governments, but always Christian Democrats, but the people who travelled, loved, hoped in this great little car, in a word, lived.
- 10.
‘The reference is a place, and the legitimacy is the recognition of this place which places the figure of the Third founder […] in an apodictic position, that is to say incontrovertible…’ (Legendre 2001).
- 11.
Here we see at work, through the iato, the same structure identified elsewhere by the author with regard to the relationship meaning/significant: the constitutive separation (of the subject, of the theatrical scene of society, of the sense).
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- 13.
However, Legendre came back recently to the concept of nomograms in Leçons IX (Legendre 2009).
- 14.
I analysed the position of Robilant in the chapter Dalla teoria generale all’epistemologia e all’estetica giuridica, in Società post-hitleriane? pp. 3–82. This article is the critical re-elaboration of material sketched out in that text and in other articles on Legendre.
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Heritier, P. (2014). Law and Image: Towards a Theory of Nomograms. In: Wagner, A., Sherwin, R. (eds) Law, Culture and Visual Studies. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-9322-6_2
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