Translation, intercultural dialogue and the mediation of legal semiotics: outlining the promises of a research agenda

Contemporary meta-dogmatic legal discourse has frequently mobilized the signifier “translation”, in different stages and to face diverse problems ─ the multidirectional interactions between legal language and ordinary language, the plural network of (national and international, state and non-state) legal orders, the dialectics between presupposed legal materials and practical controversies, the intersubjective place of the judge as the impartial third, the invention of exemplarity as concreteness ─ always however with decisive projections in the understanding or experiencing of juridicalness (its aspirations, categories and limits). The purpose of this paper is to explore the claims to inter-semioticity which the mobilization of this signifier and the plurality of its contexts of meaning and performance seem to construct. This means, on the one hand, to resume the dialogue with Boyd White (justice as translation) and François Ost (le droit comme traduction). It also means, on the other hand, returning to the counterpoint between translation and tradition which MacIntyre’s narrativism exemplarily proposes (Whose Justice? Which Rationality?), this time to discuss the relevance of treating Law (a certain Law) as a cultural artifact, i.e. as a non-universal (culturally plausible and civilizationally moulded) answer to the universal (anthropologically necessary) problem of the institutionalization of a social order (law as a form of life, as a project and as a tradition). With an unexpected helping hand coming from Greimassian’s semio-narrative, this means also asking if translation (or the ethics of humility it celebrates) can actually be experienced, in our limit-situation, as the resource (if not the place or the environment) of a plausible intercultural dialogue.