Crossing

A book that presents Niklas Luhmann as a critical legal thinker is like a Giorgio de Chirico painting. The inappropriateness of the parallelism is blatant: de Chirico is the founder of the metaphysical school of painting; Luhmann has no time for metaphysics. De Chirico professed to be a constantly metamorphing god – philosopher – novelist – sculptor – painter – mythological personage – critic – surrealist – classicist – Italian – Greek – metaphysician; Luhmann professed sternly and unflinchingly to be a sociologist. De Chirico famously finds reality intolerable and is in constant pursuit of ‘another reality’; Luhmann consistently refers to the futility of trying to imagine ‘another’ reality. The list can go on with various degrees of simplification. It serves, however, the purpose of showing that it is as improbable to put Luhmann and ‘critical’ together, as it is to put Luhmann and de Chirico together. And the result of such a fusion is in fact not unlike the de Chirico

painting on the cover of this book. De Chirico’s metaphysical period is filled with dream landscapes: at first instance, a characteristic Italian piazza, empty but for its arches, statues and elongated shadows. The disorientation comes afterwards, when one realises that the arches flanking the piazza end up in different vanishing points; the statue in the middle looks as if seen from below; the figures in the background float about in an immaterial void, unconnected to the rest; the edges of the city stop abruptly and give way to expanses that reflect a collapsing sky. Juxtaposed architectural structures and dehumanised figures, palimpsestic temporal zones, noncausal perspectives, surfaces, light sources and shadows: all strictly confined in a claustrophobic canvas. But, and this is where the antithesis comes forcefully in, this very claustrophobia reserves its pivotal space for an all-an otherwise hermetically

closed piazza.1 The effect of bringing forth the horizon through the grounded horizon-blocking structures is precisely the aim of the book: a trompe l’oeil that conflates structure and horizon, description and critique. Indeed, trying to balance Luhmann’s perspectival acrobatics with a space of critique requires considerable dosages of horizon in an otherwise seemingly solid piazza – and this is what this book attempts to do. This book reads Luhmann through and against Luhmann – it constructs

Luhmann’s constructions according to Luhmannian tools and exposes them to their internal horizon. Although Luhmann’s texts have often been (superficially, I hasten to add) read as a positivist, dry and conservative account of society, they will hopefully be revealed here to be nothing short of a labyrinth of elusive vantage points in constant contrast to a horizon of ‘transcendental’ opportunities – except that transcendence can only be already found within the fluctuating confines of the piazza. But how can the horizon fit in a piazza? Pictorially speaking, this is the paradox that this book attempts to tease out: the ‘enigma’ (to use de Chirico’s favourite term) that trails the distance between, on the one hand, law’s location in society, and, on the other, the paradoxes of law and their painstaking and almost compulsive hiding, dissimulating, postponing, burying. In other words, the present text tries to render visible the continuum and simultaneous rupture (the enigma of presence and absence that is everywhere in Luhmann) between the paradox and its utterances. It has to be said, however, that it does not perform anything that is not already there in Luhmann’s texts, in full readiness to be brought forth. The book does not constitute a critique of Luhmann but a critical reading of Luhmann’s text. In that sense, I do not assume a different, ‘critical’ position from which I read Luhmann’s texts; on the contrary, I position myself well in the thick of the various edifices, immanently describing and playing with the various contingencies on offer. In so doing, this text moves around: in the centre of the square, underneath the arches or closer to the shadow of the passer-by. It changes perspectives, thus engendering different vistas and allowing the space to be observed in an occasionally surprising light. Ultimately, the space is inverted, turned inside out, subsequently only to return to its starting point of apparent ‘normality’. Again, this is not a conservative point: on an abstract level, it is an attempt at anchoring the kind of critique performed in this book; on a legal level, it is the awareness of law’s societal function and location; and on a textual level, it is a return of the present text to Luhmann’s texts despite critical perambulations. The latter return does not serve as a guarantee of authenticity or, worse, as a manifestation of the desire to maintain things as they are. Rather, the return is the precondition for a rereading, or better, for a continuous reading, interrupted only by the act of reading itself.

1 It is fortunate that art forms are not easily translatable to other art forms. But if Luhmann’s texts were paintings, this description, all things considered, may not would be whether it would be