ABSTRACT
The person brings together law and performance, philosophy and religion, metaphysics and ritual. Contemporary jurisprudence however, with a few exceptions, is unaware of or uninterested in the history and philosophical provenance of the legal person. Plaintiffs and defendants, corporations and contractors are legal persons. The legal person is a creation of law denoting a rights-holding and duties-bearing entity. A legal person is a trope, the personification of a bunch of publicly recognized social relations. The Argentinian legal philosopher Carlos Nino analysed the legal person from a neo-Kantian perspective. Following these hyperbolic eulogies, legal personality appears to give recognition and support to always-already existing moral qualities. The contemporary legal person is a secular heir to the Christian division of matter and spirit, body and soul, universal and particular. The legal person and its variations are grounded on a permanent, univocal and stable identity in the service of the dominant socio-economic order.
