ABSTRACT
(I) Law’s ontology is one of equivalence. Equivalence commensurates the inhabitants of life’s realm as completely as may be necessary for their induction into the universe of legal recognitions and transactions. Restated as legal persons, physical persons become correspondent. Restated as property, physical objects sprout commonalities, homologised by the application of a legal ontology. Discourses of contract render diverse relationships transactionally congruent. Law transubstantiates difference, produces sameness. To manage life, law annihilates liveliness. (II) Law obliterates difference by containing the objects of its attention within an imaginary dimension of perfect exchange, predicated on the fiction that in the now of its apprehension, that which differentiates the object from its equivalent has ceased to be, “like a number without any awkward fraction left over.” But the transubstantiation is never perfect. There is always an uncontained remnant, an “awkward fraction,” a remainder that defies the symmetry of the exchange. We know it is there because it expresses itself to us as the object’s past – its revenant once-was. Let us call this surviving remnant the object’s soul; not just its once-was, but its living-on. And let us think of history as the means by which the soul communicates its living-on. (III) This chapter explores three propositions, or ways of thinking: of law as a dimension of perfect exchange; of objects’ surviving traces as souls; and of history as the means by which those surviving traces live on either with or against (but always separate from) law’s transactional transubstantiations. It offers a gloss on what may happen when the three propositions combine.
