Pierre Legendre - God in the Mirror: A Study of the Institution of Images (Pierre Legendre Lessons III)

In the context of our increasingly global legal order, Pierre Legendres God in the Mirror reconsiders the place of law within the division of existing bodies of knowledge. Navigating the texts of Ovid, Augustine, Roman jurists, medieval canon lawyers, Freud, Lacan, the notebooks of Leonardo de Vinci, and the paintings of Magritte, this third volume of Pierre Legendres Lessons focuses on the relation of the subject to the institution of images. Legendre tracks the origins and vicissitudes of the specular metaphor within western history, carrying out a critique of its dependence on the discourse of the Imago Dei. A crucial landmark within Legendres ongoing reconsideration of a medieval revolution of interpretation, this book dissociates the western normative tradition from its mythic foundation, separating theology and law. It thereby documents the advent of modern rational doubt, as a new legal foundation or ground: one that, for Legendre, was not only a revolutionary invention, but one that produced the modern European idea of the State.

Pierre Legendre is Emeritus Professor at the University of Paris 1, and Honorary Research Director at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes.

Series editors: Peter Goodrich, Michel Rosenfeld and Arthur Jacobson
Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law

This successful and exciting series seeks to publish the most innovative scholarship at the intersection of law, philosophy and social theory. The books published in the series are distinctive by virtue of exploring the boundaries of legal thought. The work that this series seeks to promote is marked most strongly by the drive to open up new perspectives on the relation between law and other disciplines. The series has also been unique in its commitment to international and comparative perspectives upon an increasingly global legal order. Of particular interest in a contemporary context, the series has concentrated upon the introduction and translation of continental traditions of theory and law.

The original impetus for the series came from the paradoxical merger and confrontation of East and West. Globalization and the internationalization of the rule of law has had many dramatic and often unforeseen and ironic consequences. An understanding of differing legal cultures, particularly different patterns of legal thought, can contribute, often strongly and starkly, to an appreciation if not always a resolution of international legal disputes. The rule of law is tied to social and philosophical underpinnings that the series has sought to excoriate and illuminate.

Titles in the series:

Nietzsche and Legal Theory: Half-Written Laws

Peter Goodrich and Mariana Valverde

God in the Mirror: A Study of the Institution of Images

Pierre Legendre

The publisher gratefully acknowledges the support of the Jacob Burns Institute for Advanced Legal Studies of the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law to the series Discourses of Law.

https://www.routledge.com/Discourses-of-Law/book-series/SE1036

Translated by P.G. Young from the 1994 Fayard edition
On the occasion of Psychoanalytic Seminar Tuzla 2014

First published 2019

by Routledge

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English language translation 2019 Taylor & Francis

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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Legendre, Pierre, 1930 author.

Title: God in the mirror : a study of the institution of images / by Pierre Legendre ; translated by P.G. Young.

Other titles: Dieu au miror. English

Description: New York : Routledge, 2019. | Series: Discourses of law | Series: Lessons / Pierre Legendre ; III

Identifiers: LCCN 2018027443 | ISBN 9781138233263 (hbk)

Subjects: LCSH: Image (Philosophy)

Classification: LCC B105.I47 L4513 2019 | DDC 153.3/2dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018027443

ISBN: 978-1-138-23326-3 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-138-23327-0 (pbk)

ISBN: 978-1-315-30989-7 (ebk)

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The image is dogma.

What is at stake is the redefinition of the social bond, taking into account what Western thought, for its own historical reasons, still insistently questions: the mechanism of the institution of images, the gravitational point of every normative system.

Since an indefinably tragic narrative still hovers over humanity today the enigma of Narcissus these extremely difficult problems cant be approached under the banner of scientism. We have to take up the question of the unknown: make room for the dimension of the fantastic, for the poetic order of the discourse of images, for the fable of the divine messenger.

What does the montage Imago Dei signify?

Today, as in the eras of theological fervor, our societies must confront a universal requirement: that of fabricating man to resemble man that is to say, it is necessary to stage the absolute Mirror and so found a bonding to the image.

Logic imposes its law. To manipulate the problematic of the specular is to exercise absolute power: to wield symbolic force. Insofar as they involve the passion of images, the instances that make up the role of the Mirror in culture States, ultramodern media, sciences, psy- jurisdictions, etc. touch on the constitutive alienation of the subject, they exercise a pure force. This knowledge has consequences.

Lessons III define and outline a discipline. After physical, and then social anthropology, the moment of dogmatic anthropology has arrived for contemporary consideration.

To think the similar (semblable) in humanity, to think alterity in order to think identity and the reproduction of the subject is the horizon of every interrogation of the institution of images.

Man is only assured of his being through separation from himself, such that becoming other to himself is the condition of his life, the first supposition of his presence in the world and accomplishment of the faculty of differentiation from the world. The idea of the similar is born from this division. Without representation of the similar arranged in every instance of the species, as dialectic of the other and the subject there would be no reproduction of the speaking animal.