ABSTRACT
In a particularly powerful passage in Language and Symbolic Power, Bourdieu argues that legal discourse is a distinctive form of speech because it ‘brings into existence that which it utters’.2 However, although he goes on to argue that in this sense it is ‘the word of divine right’ he crucially identifies the necessity of collective acknowledgement of the authority of the utterance in its accomplishment:3
One should never forget that language, by virtue of the infinite generative but also originative capacity – in the Kantian sense – which it derives from its power to produce existence by producing the collectively recognized, and thus realized, representation of existence, is no doubt the principal support of the dream of absolute power.4
