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1 L. & Critique 3 (1990)

handle is hein.journals/lwcrtq1 and id is 1 raw text is: Law and Critique Vol.I no.1 [19901 THE LOST TEMPORALITY OF LAW: AN INTERVIEW WITH PIERRE LEGENDRE* Translated by ALAIN POTTAGE Before we start the interview proper, as it were, would you summarise for us the main issues which have informed your work, and perhaps indicate briefly the main influences on it? This will help readers to situate the discussion. The questions which have guided me will become apparent only when my work has reached its conclusion. I am still finding my way, allowing myself to be carried along the particular course which my studies are taking. In considering the great problems of our time, I have never separated learned research (particularly the history of texts) from direct experience. If one seeks to understand the Western form of normativity, one must lose sight neither of the scope of these problems nor of their tragic quality. Given a recognition of the tragic, it is possible to see that fate - social fate and subjective fate - is linked to institutional constructions. If I were to summarise my basic approach without caricaturing it, I would say that the most fascinating problem of our time is to understand how societies and their cargoes of individuals shoulder the dreadful burden of the human condition. This uncertain and sometimes terrifying condition is not an invention of the twentieth century. To recognise this is to engage in a general reflection on the question which all human soci- eties at all times have had to address in order to live and to reproduce; the question why have laws? At the time when I worked as an expert with international or- ganisations, I witnessed the collapse of millenary institutional structures, and the conversion of their subjects to industriality. I now see the spread of Management. I note that, contrary to the predic- tions heralded by the large management firms with which I was in- volved throughout the Sixties, the classical religions have been nei- * This interview was conducted by Peter Goodrich and Ronnie Warrington. Legendre is currently Professeur in the D1partement de Science Politique de la Sorbonne, Universite de Paris I.

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