ABSTRACT
The position of the law is not merely expressed across statute; case law and common law stare decisis but is also posited as thinkable in very particular ways. There are two common approaches to law's thetic positing. The first is a construal wherein law is a quilting of substantial legal and para-legal fragments that function as a type of normalised disorder or anarchy that is given normative value by the quilting of purpose. The second view, in what kind of jurisprudential modernism, rejects para-legal materials or metaphors of purpose in favour of what is literally 'there' in the formal writ of the law itself. The dialectic of law and anarchy for the purposive position's radical treatment of anarchy does not, however, assist a literalist reasoning that is instead mired in the elaboration of endless differentiation. The literal position remains trapped in the fantasy that there is something substantive to be taken away from the rule of law.
