ABSTRACT
The relation of literature to law is a question of genre. In the most immediate or contemporary of senses, the status of the legal genre is predicated upon a paradox. Law is a literature which denies its literary qualities. It is a play of words which asserts an absolute seriousness; it is a genre of rhetoric which represses its moments of invention or of fiction; it is a language which hides its indeterminacy in the justificatory discourse of judgment; it is procedure based upon analogy, metaphor and repetition and yet it lays claim to being a cold or disembodied prose, a science without either poetry or desire; it is a narrative which assumes the epic proportions of truth; it is, in short, a speech or writing which forgets the violence of the word and the terror or jurisdiction of the text. Law, conceived as a genre of literature and as a practice of poetics, can thus only be understood through the very act of forgetting, through the denial, the negation or the repression by means of which it institutes its identity, its life, its fictive forms.
