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The ideal object of transmission

An essay on the faith which attaches to instruments (de fide instrumentorum)

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References

  1. Collins Spanish-English Dictionary, 1971.

  2. Ibid.

  3. Diccionari Catala — Valencia — Bailia, Tom IX (Palma de Mallorca: M. Arimony, 1959).

  4. Enciclopedia Universal Illustrada Europeo-Americana (Barcelona: Himos de J. Espasa Editores, 1923), Tomo L, 428.

  5. J. Corominas,Diccionario Crítico Etimológico de la Lengua Castellana (Madrid: Editorial Gredos, 1975), Volumen III.

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  6. For Lucretius, the sun communicates its power in idols —eidolon. “Bright things moreover the eyes avoid and shun to look upon. The sun too blinds, if you try to raise your eyes to meet him, because his own power is great, and the idols from him are borne from on high through the clear air heavily, and strike upon the eyes, disordering their texture ...” SeeDe Rerum Natura, Book IV, translated by C. Bailey 379, vv. 324–31, in Vasco Ronchi,The Nature of Light (London: Heinemann, 1970), 33.

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  7. “Three chronological times can be distinguished in the Roman Catholic Churches in predominantly Arab sections of Spain. During the first, windows were constructed large enough to allow the passage of ample light, but unfortunately also that of thieves seeking the treasures found inside the cathedrals. Rather than protect these openings, men next created small windows, which widened toward the inside of the wall. At the end of this second period, windows returned to at least their original sizes, and were protected byrejas, which were invented right around this very time. The notably defensive character of these objects can be observed in therejas of the Treasury at Canterbury. Therejas are armed with barbs.”Enciclopedia Universal Ilustrada, 428.

  8. “... the invention of rejas coincides with the beginning of division within the church, whereby people are segregated by location, according to class. The social segregation was stressed by physical separation by means of rejas.”Enciclopedia Universal Ilustrada, p.428.

  9. “A passage is sometimes, or perhaps I ought to say is usually, made with low iron or brass screens or rails leading from the eastern gate of theCoro (choir) to the screen in front of the altar. This is especially necessary here, as the choir proper is deep, and the people are thus kept from pressing on the clergy as they pass to and fro in the long passage from the altar to theCoro. Gates in these screens admit of the passage of the people from one transept to the other whenever the services in the Coro are not going on ... High metal screens are placed across the nave to the east of the Coro, and across the entrance to the choir, or ‘capilla mayor,’ as its eastern part is called. These screens are calledrejas.” George Edmund Street,Some Account of Gothic Architecture in Spain (London: John Murray, 1865), 16–17.

  10. As in the ambulatory of the cathedral of Toledo, for example. Oskar Hagen,Patterns and Principles of Spanish Art (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1936), 73.

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  11. “‘[las monjas para verse con sus amantes suelen] fermar escales,/tirar esportes,/rexes e portes/ fer levadices’” Jaume Roig, h. 1460, vv. 8493, 5460. Quoted in Joan Corominas,Diccionario Critico etimologico castellano e hispanico (Madrid: Editorial Gredos, 1980), Volumen III, 860.

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  12. Hagen,supra n.10, at 77.

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  13. P. Legendre,Le Désir Politique de Dieu: Étude sur les montages de l'État et du Droit (Paris: Fayard, 1988), 234.

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  14. Legendre,supra n.13, at 235.

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  15. Hagen,supra n.10, at 77. Gerhart B. Ladner, “The Byzantine Iconoclastic Controversy”, inImages and Ideas in the Middles Ages, I, (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1983), 67, notes that “It is a lasting consequence of iconoclasm, that sculpture in the round disappears completely from Byzantine art, while reliefs are admitted. There was no official prohibition of statues; the old association of statuaric art with pagan idolatry as well as the oriental artistic trend which transformed plastic forms into pictorial patterns led to this result.”

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  16. Hagen,supra n.10, at 75–76.

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  17. See Patrick Heelan,Space-Perception and the Philosophy of Science (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 249. “The physical measurement of distance depends on the availability of rulers that are transportable, physically rigid bodies.” The inflexibility of the altarpieces, the geologic fixity of the sculptures, their rigid adherence to the background, create this visual frame of reference to Euclidean space.

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  18. Hagen,supra n.10, at 77.

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  19. Hagen,supra n.10, at 75.

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  20. As Prawer points out in “Palestinian Agriculture and the Crusader Rural System,” inCrusader Institutions (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), 159, the ‘objective size’ of such a unit can only be evaluated approximately.

  21. “As thefaddan represents the area ploughed during one day it is obviously smaller in rough mountain soil than in the plain.” “... thefaddan, even today, does not have the same value everywhere. In mountainous regions like Jerusalem, for example, it is evaluated at 734 square metres; but, in the valleys and plains it is almost twice as large.” Prawer, “Palestinian Agriculture and the Crusader Rural System,” inCrusader Institutions, supra n.20, at 159.

  22. “Labor Time in the ‘Crisis’ of the Fourteenth Century,” in J. le Goff,Time, Work and Culture in the Middle Ages (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1980), 44.

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  23. J. Derrida,Edmund Husserl's Origin of Geometry: An Introduction (New York: Nicholas Hays, 1978), 81.

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  24. E. Husserl,The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970), 126.

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  25. The maxim,accessorium sequitur principale, the accessory follows the principle, refers to the theory of accession, through which for example writing,scriptura, accedes to the parchment on which it is written; the manuscript thus belongs to the owner of the parchment — considered here as the principle. See Legendre,supra n.13, at 37. See also R.W. League,Roman Private Law (London, New York: Macmillan, 1906), 125: “Accessio is where a thing becomes one's property by accruing to something which one already owns. The property so gained may have been previously either ares nullius, or ares aliena.” It is the latter that is at stake in the case ofScriptura andPictura.

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  26. Institutes, 2.1.33. See alsoInstitutes 2.1.29, T.G. Watkin, “Tabula Picta: Images and Icons,”Studia et documenta historiae et iuris 50 (1984), 383–399; League,supra n.25, at 125–131.

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  27. Note in this respectDigest 50.239.6 (ed. Watson, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985, volume 4): “The termurbs is derived fromurbo; urbo is to mark out by plough (urbare est aratro definire.). And Varrus says thaturbus is the name for the curved part of a plough which is customarily used in the foundation of anurbs.”

  28. For Husserl on the earth as the basis-body, see also his fragment dated 1934 “Fundamental Investigations of the Phenomenological Origin of the Spatiality of Nature,” inHusserl: Shorter Works, ed. P. McCormick and F. Elliston (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), 222–233.

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  29. See Jacques Le Goff, “The Symbolic Ritual of Vassalage,” inTime, Work and Culture in the Middle Ages, trld. by A. Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 243–248. It was after the second stage of the ritual of vassalage, the fealty, that the vassal became the “man of mouth and hands” of the lord. According to Marc Bloch, it is in a gesture of the hand that the essential act (of fealty) must be sought. “In 1110, for example, Bernard Atton IV, Viscount of Carcassonne, swore homage and faith in return for a number of fiefs to Leon, abbot of Notre-Dame-de-la-Grasse in the following terms: ‘In the name of each and everyman, I do homage and faith by my hands and mouth to thee, my lord Leon, abbot and to thy successors.’” And more explicity, the expression can be found “... in thecarta donationis of 1109 of Dona Urraca, in which Alfonso the Battler uses it in addressing his wife: ‘Let all the vassals (homines) who today hold this fief (honor) from you, or will hold it in the future, swear fealty to you and become your vassals (men) of mouth and hands.’ ... This expression is manifestly important because it shows the essential place occupied by the symbolism of the body in the cultural and mental system of the Middle Ages. The body not only reveals the soul but is the symbolic site where man's fate — in all its forms — is fulfilled. Even in the hereafter, at least until the Last Judgement, it is in corporeal form that the soul meets its fate, for better or worse, or for purgation.

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  30. The production of even surfaces and their perfection (polishing) ushers the cases where just distribution is intended. “Here the roughestimate of magnitudes is transformed into themeasurement of magnitudes by counting the equal parts.” Husserl,The Origin of Geometry, in Derrida,supra n.17, at 178.

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  31. Derrida,Edmund Husserl's Origin of Geometry, op. cit. 78.

  32. “Reading ... is a kind of cognitive activity that bkdoes not require attention to the descriptive specificity of the phonemes, syllables, and so forth that serve as clues for a reading ... After successful interpretation, the clues ... ‘drop out of consciousness,’ and become ‘transparent’ to the new objects of perception.” Heelan,supra n.17, at 269.

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  33. Derrida,supra n.17, at 88.

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  34. P. Goodrich: “Pro Lectione Pictura Est: The Picture takes the place of knowing how to read: Images of the Legal Body in Pierre Legendre”, inSemiotics and Law III (New York: Plenum Press, 1990). According to Grabar, this textualization of the image may have been the practice much earlier, as it was in the 6th century that Gregory referred to the picture in the manner of a substitute for the book: “No image maker needed to consult the text of the Gospels in order to make a rapid sketch of a Baptism of Christ or an Entry into Jerusalem. He composed the scenes from memory, especially when they were addressed to everyone, including the illiterate, as was the case with paintings in places of worship or on objects in everyday use. It is imagery of this kind, the most widespread sort, that, according to the celebrated statement of Pope Gregory the Great (in a private letter, about the year 600), took the place of the book for those who could not read.”Christian Iconography (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968), 93.

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  35. Derrida,supra n.17, at 87.

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  36. Hagen,supra n.10, at 34.

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  37. Derrida,supra n.17, at 81.

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  38. See Hagen,supra n.10, at 35. The deployment of geometric ornaments is especially noticeable in this structure, whose plan of decoration we can trace from its initial composition by the Mudejares, the Moorish artisans employed by the Christians and the Jews, to the sixteenth-century practitioners of theestil plateresco (the ‘silversmith's manner’).

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  39. Legendre,supra n.13, at 249.

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  40. “This accounts for the stability of the iconographic types in the East: there is no room for an artistic ‘invention.’ The iconographic types belong to tradition, and are stabilized by the authority of the Church. Only the execution belongs to the artist. Thus was it formulated at Nicaenum II. The final appeal is not to an artistic imagination or to an individual vision, but to history, — to things seen and testified.” George Florovsky, “Origen, Eusebius, and the Iconoclastic Controversy,”Church History 19:3 (June 1950), 93.

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  41. Legendre,supra n.13, at 228.

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  42. On the relation between repetition and repression, see G. Deleuze,Difference et Repetition (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1968), especially 138–39 where Freud's notion of ‘primary repression’ is discussed in the following terms: “one does not repeat because one represses, but one represses because one repeats.” In terms of memory one can thus argue that the primary repression establishes an unconscious that repeats so as not to remember. In Lingis' words, it constitutes “a system that does not remember, that is, represent, its past, because it repeats it. It does not reinstate its past in the nonactuality of representation but in the actuality of its repetition.” A. Lingis,Deathbound Subjectivity (Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1989), 158.

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  43. See Walter Ong,Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1958), 243. This is the logic of Aristotle in thePosterior Analytics. For Aristotle both enunciations (laws) and definitions are arrived at by an inductive process, “by an ascent from experience of singulars to universal principles. At the top of this ascent (ascensus in the Latin commentators) are the axioms or ‘dignities’(dignitates) so called because they are the highest, most unexceptionable enunciations on which conclusions depend.” It is interesting to note that Ong emphasizes that Aristotle is not thinking of universal categories or ideas but of what is said of a subject, ... of the condition of universality as constituted in predicates and by means of predication or categorizing — not in the sense of classifying but in the sense of crying out against, accusing a subject. The basic imagery is auditory, not visual. With the laws of Ramist method, such orientation will be changed.” The logic becomes visual and in this fact lies the unwritten genealogy of the image.

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  44. Legendre,supra n.13, at 154.

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  45. See P. Goodrich, “Rhetoric, Grammatology and the hidden injuries of law,”Economy and Society 18:2 (May 1989), 185.

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  46. See Le Goff,supra n.29, at 247: “... the ritual of vassalage must be studied on what I call its two slopes, entry and exit: the breaking off of homage, to which we must add abandonment. The symbolism of a ritual intended to create a social bond can be completely understood only if we consider both the establishment and the destruction of that bond, even if the latter occurs only rarely.”

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  47. “Deleuze reminds us that the Greeknomos, law may be traced to ‘division’ or ‘sharing’, and he describes this kind of distribution — the establishment of a realm of strict boundaries and limits — as ‘the sedentary structures of representation’. (Difference et Repetition, 53). It is overshadowed by Being in the transcendental or ontological meaning which divides in an hierarchical and nomadic way, a wandering with no fixed boundaries, a power which surpasses limits. The equalities of the first hierarchy are suspended unequally within the second which is univocal only in this ontological boundlessness or ‘unmeasure’ (demesure ontologique), — everything is equally subjected to this inequality: ‘Univocal being is at the same time nomadic distribution and crowned anarchy’ (Difference et Repetition, 55).” Gillian Rose,Dialectic of Nihilism: Post-Structuralism and Law (New York: Blackwell, 1984), 104–05.

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  48. Legendre,supra n.13, at 160.

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  49. Legendre,supra n.13, at 160. The inaugural refers to the science of augury — the most ancient branch of Roman law — and implies the reconnoitring of a place of certitude, a divine zone of the ‘It is known’.

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  50. Legendre,supra n.13, at 160.

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  51. “Inhibition is due to the system which controls motility: establishing the activity of complex thought, which moves from the mnemonic image to the transformation of objects in the world by motory means, inhibition places movement in the service of memory...” Michel Gribinski, “L'Arret,”Nouvelle Revue de Psychanalyse: L'attente 34 (1986), 54.

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Hachamovitch, Y. The ideal object of transmission. Law Critique 2, 85–101 (1991). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01128439

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