Lacan: The Semiotics of Law’s Voices

Abstract

The three godfathers differ in scholarship, philosophy, cultural backgrounds and types of insights. All have a peripheral knowledge and experience of law, but greatly delivered to the lawyer’s toolkit because they focused on language, the major instrument of lawyers. Peirce’s interest and feeling for law has been underestimated. Greimas was interested in law because law-as-text could serve as an object for his discourse analyses Lacan excelled in understanding the metaphoric essence of the concept of law in human affairs. Greimas was interested in a grammar of narratives and discovered in that context a finite number of functional themes, which could be placed in binary opposition and be noted by means of systematically placing and replacing squares that represent those themes. Any transference of semiotics into functionalism would alienate the semiotic enterprise and loosen ties with the sign-concept. The process of meaning making has priority in all situations. Linguistics, including semiotics, has a power that transcends language itself, and provides knowledge of its own structures, which in their turn leads to knowledge of reality in and of itself.