ABSTRACT
In a postmodern society, dominated by the over consumption of services and the proliferation of adhesion contracts, it seems both necessary and unavoidable to investigate whether the contractual underpinnings of positive law have lost their juridical sense. Dialogism is the issue of the intrinsic otherness of the interpretative exercise that sustains all contracts, and then appears as a stimulating theoretical approach in countering the contemporary reification of the contracting parties. The chapter explores the dialogic and polyphonic approaches within the contractual genre. The functional definitions of contractual dialogism and polyphony that it proposes are a reflection of this theoretical postulate. The contractual text then becomes a mosaic of voices made up of a multitude of intertextual threads, and the horizontal thread of the discourse appears, implicitly or explicitly, as fractured. Van Leeuwen's conceptual framework of discourse as transformed social practice helps us understand the pertinence of the study of polyphonic discursive traces in the contract.
