Law Between the Symbolic and Imagination: A Confrontation Between Pierre Legendre’s and Yan Thomas’s Readings of the Function of Law
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Abstract
The article offers a comparative reading of Pierre Legendre and Yan Thomas to rethink the function of law. For Legendre, law fulfills a symbolic-dogmatic function: it institutes human life by inscribing it within a genealogical order mediated by a Third, whose loss would lead to civilizational collapse. In contrast, Thomas conceives law as a technical-imaginative art—an institutional practice grounded in fiction and contingency. Drawing on the French debate around the Civil Solidarity Pact (PACS), the text shows how Thomas shifts law from its role as guardian of symbolic reference to that of an instrument for inventing social bonds and forms of life. The confrontation between them reveals two irreconcilable legal anthropologies: one culminating in a kind of tyranny of the symbolic, and another marked by the freedom of the technical-imaginative.
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