Greimas, Law, Discourse and Interpretative Squares: An Author, his Squares and Legal Discourse Analysis

Abstract

Jacques M.E.Lacan (1901–1981), the third godfather of semiotics, is the Parisian psychologist/psychoanalyst who wrote his 1932 PhD dissertation on the “délire à deux”, a clinical picture that describes the inability to develop an established identity and to create the awareness of a single individual. That is the supreme nightmare for a lawyer: a fundamental uncertainty about the ‘who is who’, the subject concerned, the evident addressee. The issue is an appeal to language in itself, concerns the fact that each individual is educated in a language in which it has to learn to accept and manage an identity that is told to him or her. The mirror stage, the word of the mother and, in a different sense, of the father are themes to understand the subversion of the command structures of law and legal discourse. Semiotics suggests that each “I” has to become developed—in language, culture and (above all) in the presence of an other person. Language, identity and law appear coherent but by no means congruent social events.