Michele Lowrie - Exemplarity and Singularity: Thinking Through Particulars in Philosophy, Literature, and Law

This book pursues a strand in the history of thought ranging from codified statutes to looser social expectations that uses particulars, more specifically examples, to produce norms. Much intellectual history takes ancient Greece as a point of departure. But the practice of exemplarity is historically rooted firmly in ancient Roman rhetoric, oratory, literature, and law genres that also secured its transmission. Their pragmatic approach results in a conceptualization of politics, social organization, philosophy, and law that is derived from the concrete. It is commonly supposed that, with the shift from pre-modern to modern ways of thinking as modern knowledge came to privilege abstraction over exempla, the general over the particular exemplarity lost its way. This book reveals the limits of this understanding. Tracing the role of exemplarity from Rome through to its influence on the fields of literature, politics, philosophy, psychoanalysis and law, it shows how Roman exemplarity has subsisted, not only as a figure of thought, but also as an alternative way to organize and to transmit knowledge.

Michle Lowrie is Professor of Classics at the University of Chicago, USA

Susanne Ldemann is Professor of Languages and Literatures at the Ludwig-Maximilians University, Munich

Discourses of Law

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 par-ticular 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.

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Forthcoming:

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Genealogies of Legal Vision

Edited by Peter Goodrich and Valerie Hayaert

Varieties of Liberalism: Nineteenth Century Contract Between Literature, Law and History

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Crime Scenes: Forensics and Aesthetics

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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.

First published 2015

by Routledge

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and by Routledge

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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

2015 Selection and editorial matter, Michle Lowrie and Susanne Ldemann; individual chapters, the contributors

The right of Michle Lowrie and Susanne Ldemann to be identified as editors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

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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

Exemplarity and singularity : thinking through particulars in philosophy, literature, and law / edited by Michele Lowrie and Susanne Ludemann.

pages cm. -- (Discourses of law)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-138-02049-8 (hbk : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-1-315-77841-9 (ebk : alk. paper) 1. Tropes (Philosophy) 2. Haecceity (Philosophy) 3. Individuation (Philosophy) I. Lowrie, Michele, editor.

BD460.T76E94 2015

190--dc23

2014037157

ISBN: 978-1-138-02049-8 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-315-77841-9 (ebk)

Typeset in Minion by

Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire

Hans Lipps, translated by Erica Weitzman

Bernhard Waldenfels

Anselm Haverkamp

Eva Geulen, translated by Erica Weitzman

Rebecca Langlands

Matthew Roller

Melanie Mller, translated by Jake Fraser

Clifford Ando

John P. McCormick

Peter Goodrich

Christiane Frey

David Martyn

Robert Morrissey

Paul Fleming

The following institutions granted generous support for the conferences in Berlin, Konstanz, and Chicago respectively, for which we give grateful thanks: the German Research Foundation DFG for Lebensformen und Lebenswissen at the International University Viadrina; the Exzellenscluster Kulturelle Grundlagen von Integration at the University of Konstanz; the Franke Institute, the Center for Interdisciplinary Research on German Literature and Culture, the Department of Classics, and the Department of Germanic Studies, the Rhetoric and Poetics Workshop, and the Metaphor Workshop at the University of Chicago, as well as the Max-Planck Award Project Memoria Romana, headed by Karl Galinsky. Additionally, a grant from the Center for Advanced Studies at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitt in Munich enabled Michle Lowrie to work closely with Anselm Haverkamp and Susanne Ldemann during the summer of 2014. We are particularly indebted to Christiane Frey for helping to define operative categories at the beginning of the project. Our translators, Jake Fraser and Erica Weitzman, have patiently worked with both authors and editors on multiple revisions. Rebekah Jenkins has ushered us through the process with expertise. Beyond the material assistance given by Peter Goodrich to help subsidize the translations, we also appreciate the intellectual support and boundless humor he has provided as series editor. Most especially, we warmly thank Anselm Haverkamp: consultation with him was decisive for the decision to move forward with the volume and his guidance through the process has been invaluable.