Otherness, elsewhere, and the 'Ecology' of law's implications: The semiotic oceans surrounding legal signification and its discriminatory exteriority/objectivity

Abstract Modern legal systems’ efficacy and self-consistency rely upon semantic/cultural conditions that they do not engender and are unable to maintain without resorting to the cognitive provisions gushing out from freedom—this is the preliminary assumption of this essay. Some factors play a generative role in this direction. The cornerstone of legal modernity is the ‘exteriority’ of law. This means that legal qualifications have to draw from the morphological appearances of human behaviors and relate to only their empirical/factual signification and consequences. The domain of intentions, the internal forum, is out of law’s cognitive reach. The whole grammar of modern liberties is somehow imbued with the idea that freedom can exist only insofar as a ‘zone’ of behavioral autonomy is granted by means of objectively determined rights and duties. The formal features of these rights and their pragmatic implications cannot therefore be opined just because their exterior significance allegedly assures a shelter for individual freedom. In a sense, freedom is considered as an epiphenomenon of the protection afforded by the past reification of rights. The ensuing silent assumption is that should freedom redefine the content and the objective behavioral implementations of those rights, it would annihilate itself. What this approach overwrites, however, is that the morphological appearances of gestures and things stem from cultural and inter-subjective-discursive activities—a kind of semantic social contract—that can never be considered accomplished once and for all. This is because the very molding of the shapes and features of morphological appearances implies that freedom, viz. a non-indifferent differing is at work. But freedom, in turn, is a ‘phenomenon’ the origin of which dwells in the individuals’ internal forum, their own experiences, including their mnestic environment and the semiotic crossroads that constitute their minds. Nevertheless, legal terminological apparatuses—as shown above—are treated/used as systems of signs that encapsulate a semantic discontinuity in their legitimacy, a setback in the definition not only of what it is to be, but also the factual dimension to which legal categorizations implicitly refer. This discontinuity is often passed off as an objectivity normatively granted and absorbed by legal language that includes not only the meanings of what ‘ought to be’ but—silently—even of what ‘is.’ The exteriority of modern law and the objectivity of the related morphological assumption make up, therefore, the lexicon of ‘an’ equality somehow immunized against freedom and its semantic-political differentiating significance. The equality of differences before the law, but not inside the law, is the Kafkian liberticidal and mystifying outcome of the above Cartesian-fashioned misuse of law’s mythologized exteriority/objectivity and the epistemological sleight of hand for which such a binomial paves the way. The paper will analyze the extent to which the self-evidence bestowed upon morphological features encapsulated in official legal discourse epitomizes semiotic ideological assumptions and eases their instrumental/discriminatory use. Moreover, the normative and partisan misuses of the ‘cognitive’ will be explored to bring to the surface its function in the obscuring of the semio-ecological surroundings of human conduct and the resulting impairment of the relevance of ‘Otherness’ and ‘Elsewhere’ (including chronological remoteness) in the semantic construction of legal cases. Ultimately, the paper will examine how law’s exteriority—namely, an objective exteriority of facts and the related meanings under its lens—is often transformed into a (pseudo) cognitive instrument of power employed to deny freedom its constitutional-democratic role as an unremitting source of law.