The performativity of metaphors: into and beyond the "balancing" exercise of the European Court of Human Rights

一些法律学者已经开始挑战隐喻在法律和法律推理中的纯粹装饰性意义。然而，隐喻在创造权威性意义中的确切作用仍然是充满活力的跨学科讨论的主题，本文希望从一个尚未探索的角度对此做出贡献。这篇论文试图通过隐喻来理解语言表达的恰当创造性--或者确切地说，隐喻如何通过它们在理解中引发的感知和情感参与，对这种创造性(如果不是表演性的性质)是特别必要的。为此，隐喻不能仅仅被理解为认知结构或尚未观察到的相似性的表征。这些观点忽略了对自发表达交流的时刻的认识，其中隐喻语言被理解为适当小说的现象存在，但尚未被共同决定的意义。本论文的第二部分考察了人权法和裁决中的隐喻，特别是欧洲人权法院判例法中的隐喻。这些隐喻既不是接近普遍和客观的概念，也不是空洞和有缺陷的修辞工具，它们将被置于它们的历史语境中。这一部分从平衡的隐喻入手，运用本文所发展的理论来阐释这些具体的隐喻所传达的体现形式。

A few legal scholars have started challenging the exclusively ornamental significance of metaphors in law and legal reasoning. However, the precise role of metaphors in the creation of authoritative meaning is still the subject of vibrant and cross-disciplinary discussions to which this thesis aspires to contribute from a yet unexplored perspective. This thesis seeks to understand the properly creative nature of linguistic expression through metaphors - or precisely, how metaphors, through the perceptual and affective participation they prompt in their understanding, are specifically necessary to this creative, if not performative, nature. To this end, metaphors cannot only be understood as the representation of cognitive structures or of yet unobserved similarities. What these views miss is the recognition of a moment of spontaneous expressive communication, wherein metaphoric language is understood as the phenomenal existence of a properly novel, and yet to be communally determined sense. The second part of this thesis examines the metaphors found in human rights law and adjudication, and specifically in the case law of the European Court of Human Rights. Approached neither as near universal and objective concepts, nor as empty and flawed rhetorical tools, these metaphors will be (re)situated in their historical context. Starting its examination with the metaphor of balancing, this part mobilises the theory developed in this thesis to shed light on the forms of embodiment that these specific metaphors convey.