Art and Legal Form

Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, The Westminster International Law and Theory Centre, University of Westminster,has published Repetition: Deleuze and Kierkegaard on Law, Justice and Art, in Law and Art (Oren Ben-Dor, ed; London: Routledge, 2010). Here is the abstract.

In the final stage of his career, Giorgio de Chirico produced an interminable series of almost identical paintings that copied and only partly developed his successful early metaphysical period style. This was less of a performance and more of an income-generating exercise based on the high demand for his metaphysical paintings, especially the ones of the Piazza d’Italia. Still, the practice amounted to the production of what de Chirico called ‘extremely exact variations’. This poses questions on whether repetition is capable of generating difference. From this perspective, I compare de Chirico’s obsessive repetition with the normative repetition in law. The text considers the edifice of the law as the repeating practice of normative production and questions whether this can be repetition in the sense of producing difference. In such an edifice, awnings of justice can be observed, artfully posited against the horizon, as awnings capturing spaces of transcendence. This connection between the edifice and the horizon is described here as the awnings of justice. The argument is substantiated through a discussion on Kierkegaard and Deleuze’s theories of repetition.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link.