Political Force and the Grounds of Identity from Rousseau to Flaubert
Political Force and the Grounds of Identity from Rousseau to Flaubert
复制标题
从卢梭到福楼拜的政治力量和身份基础
作者：
J. Strauss
1988年，D.A.米勒以19世纪小说为例指出，文学文本的颠覆性力量被极大地夸大了，而小说往往只是复制现有社会权力结构的诡计。然而，最近，一群法学家和文学学者在耶鲁大学会面，讨论法律和文学话语之间的关系。他们更关注法律话语的修辞本质，而不是其在文学作品中的表现，他们得出了与米勒截然不同的结论。例如，法学教授雷瓦·b·西格尔（Reva B. Siegel）认为，“虽然人们通常认为法律虚构的范畴中只有少数古怪的反事实，但事实似乎相反，法律虚构的范畴相当大——我们在其中与当今一些主要的社会冲突作斗争”（228）。要理解其中一些“重大冲突”，最好追溯到18世纪中期到19世纪中期，当时是现代欧洲和美国的法律基础奠定的时期。特别是，通过回到这一时期，人们可以开始破译“图形地形”与如此普遍和如此基本的冲突之间的关系
In 1988, D.A. Miller used the example of nineteenth-century novels to argue that the subversive power of literary texts was greatly exaggerated, and that the novel tended instead merely to reproduce the ruses of existing social power structures.' More recently, however, a group ofjurists and literary scholars met at Yale University to discuss the relations between legal and literary discourses. Focusing more on the rhetorical nature of legal discourse than on its representation in literary works, those assembled came to very different conclusions than Miller. Reva B. Siegel, a professor of law, argued, for instance, that "while it is conventionally assumed that the category of legal fictions is sparsely populated by a few quaint counterfactuals, it seems instead that the category of legal fictions is quite large-the figural terrain on which we fight some of the major social conflicts of our day" (228). Some of those "major conflicts" can best be understood by tracing them back to the period between the mid-eighteenth and the mid-nineteenth centuries, when the legal grounds of modern Europe and the U.S. were being laid. In particular, it is by returning to this period that one can begin deciphering the relation between that "figural terrain" and a conflict so pervasive and so fundamental