ABSTRACT
If there were to be a Grundnorm in the autopoietic legal system, that would be the paradox. If there were to be transcendence in autopoiesis, this would be in the guise of the paradox. If there were to be an end, that would also be the paradox. And if there were to be sublime, that too would be the paradox.1 In short, if there were to be anything in autopoiesis, that is, if autopoiesis were to have an ontological purchase, that would be the paradox. But there is none of this in autopoiesis: no origin, telos, au-delà or il-y-a. There is only the theory and its observations, and in this circular reference the paradox appears simultaneously as the theory’s superego that dictates without appearing, and its performative opposite: while nourishing, the paradox threatens to demolish the theory (and its observed objects) from the inside.2 In that sense, and if the parallelism can be forgiven in view of its pert anthropomorphising and its somewhat unfashionable appeal, the paradox is autopoiesis’s Jungian shadow, the Dorian Gray-type portrait whose depicted alter ego one would rather keep out of sight. Yet one always confronts it at some point, whether in a dungeon or an auction. As Jung writes, “once one has experienced a few times what it is like to stand judgingly between the opposites, one begins to understand what is meant by the self. Anyone who perceives his shadow and his light simultaneously sees himself from two sides and thus gets in the middle.”3 Getting in the middle in this context means to be on both sides at the same time, riding on prior and
1 See Rasch, 2000a:122 2 See the last chapter of Luhmann’s 1995a Social Systems for the theory’s re-entry into itself.
