Pierre Legendre and the Possibility of Critique: Myth, Law and Shelley's Prometheus Unbound

Abstract

What can Prometheus, the over-reacher, the thinker of crooked thoughts, tell us about a way of reading the work of Pierre Legendre? Pierre Legendre's contribution to the study of law is his insight into the essentially mythic nature of the legal institution. The positive order of law is profoundly dependent on "another scene" a truth to which legal modernity is blind. However, despite Legendre's championing of the other scene of law, his work is not normally associated with critique;2 it tends to lead to an overemphasis on fixed and immutable structures associated with the inescapable presence of Roman law. The subject is always "captured" by the institution. The way to read, or re-read Legendre, is not necessarily to see his work as inherently reactionary.3 Indeed, there is a strong critical element to his work that has certain points of contact with other critical approaches to modernity. Legendre describes a structure that is of radical potential, and if this sense becomes lost in his own work, it can be re-connected with a radical poetic myth of opposition to the tyranny of law. Uncovering a myth of opposition in Legendre's work can be initiated by reading Shelley's Prometheus Unbound as a work that covers the same mythic territory but stages a different beginning of community and politics. The Shelleyan text tells of an escape from established structures; a revolt in the name of love. Elaborating this revolt will mean extending the sense in which key Legendrian terms can be recast. Love is not to be identified with the desire for the institution, but with a poetic and utopian imagination of human possibility. At the same time, reading Legendre against Shelley assists in an approach to the poet that does not simply re-