As a time of successive linguistic turns (and heterogeneous experiences of textuality), creating (and recreating) diverse resources and framework possibilitiesFootnote 1, but mostly as a time of radical reflection on Otherness ─ seeking to “associate the difference in sign regimes with the difference in state of affairs”, as well as to intertwine the sets of occasions for the creation of meaning with the plurality of possible forms of life (demanding a “transition between different ontological regimes”) [3: 75] ─, ours is unavoidably a time (or an Age) of translation, if not of translational recreation. And yet, to acknowledge this specific feature of our present condition opens up an ensemble of different interrogations (or levels of interrogation), the most significant of which is surely the one that asks whether we can attribute to translation, as far as Humanities or even Social Sciences are concerned, the quality of a transversal integrative paradigm. Answering this question actually involves two complex fields of reflection: the first focussing on the signifier “paradigm” (paying attention to the importance of limiting its use, thus avoiding the abuses that trivialize and mischaracterize it), the second concerned with the performative contexts of the so-called Age of translation, asking what the relevance and reciprocal weight of its inspiring poles of emergence are (or could or should be) ─ these involving, on the one hand, cultural anthropology and indigenous ethnology and, on the other hand, moral, political and juridical narrative philosophies, as well as comparative historical civilizational analysis. If this concern opens the doors to an indispensable interdiscursivity (the context of which establishes, moreover, a kind of global framework), the path which I propose means choosing (modestly?), without forgetting these challenges, another starting point, and with it, an alternative (expected) leading question.

The starting point is actually a simple and indisputable ascertainment: contemporary meta-dogmatic legal discourse, exploring however different stages and facing diverse problems (thus fully justifying the pragmatics of plurality that characterizes it), has frequently mobilized the signifier “translation”. Notwithstanding this plurality of contexts (concerning both meaning and performance, aspirations and borders), do those mobilizations in juridically relevant contexts of the signifier “translation” build or allow an effective claim to inter-semioticity, i.e. a productive exploration of inter-semiotic aspirations? This is obviously the expected leading question. Once this starting point and its correlative interrogation are admitted, the answering path to be pursued justifies (almost naturally) two asymmetrical steps, the first (very restrainedly) alluding to some major distinct examples of the meta-dogmatic use of the signifier “translation” [Using the signifier translation], the second admitting that the implicit (but also the explicit) claims to inter-semioticity which those examples manifest (all of them as claims concerning the “identity” and the “place” of Law or a certain Law) may be intertwined in a plausible (and productive) argument of continuity in order to construct a research agenda and its work in progress [Reconstituting Law as a Form of Life, a Project and a Tradition].

1 Using the Signifier Translation

Five diverse uses are here considered, all of them as opportunities to recap, in a sequence of brief flashes, expected (more or less well-known) dialogues.

1.1 Justice as Translation

The first one considers Boyd White’s approach (Justice as translation), certainly not by chance, since we have here the most extensive and integrated use of the possibilities of the signifier. It could be said that it is just a matter of illuminating the relationship between two distinct languages, and yet the reconstitution of the correlative movement, in its permanent reinvention ​​(from common language to legal language, and from legal language back to common language) [38: 36], justifies not only a global conception of praxis and practical discourse, but also an experience of law as a way of life and a system of meaning. Concerning this global conception, the core is certainly the defence of narrative as the archetypal form of praxis and practical thinking [38: 175], the revaluation of which not only imposes an alternative type of discourse and rationality (justified as a productive encounter of phronêsis and aesthesis, of practical-normative and cultural-literary discourses) but also opens up a renewed experience of community and communitarian meaning (the community as (…) a group of people who tells a shared story in a shared language)[38: 172]Footnote 2. As far as the second dimension is concerned, the movement between languages gains a specific intelligibility, based on the binomial law as literature /literature as law and the successful heterophonic development of its components (we must read law as a kind of literature, we must read literature as a kind of law) [38: 122–123, 131; 39:16–20]Footnote 3. At last the intertwinement of these two dimensions (the global and the specific ones) combines a conception of translation ethics (in its constitutive requirement of humility) with a critical reconstruction of Law as a “complex intellectual, ethical and imaginative activity”, inseparable from a continuously inventive culture of argument and its set of “dynamic and dialogic” (translational) tensions [41: 34, 42]. This means treating Law as a set of occasions and opportunities for the creation of meaning”[40: 52], but also as “a rather fragile piece of our culture, requiring those who live with it to remake it constantly, over and over” [41: 44].

1.2 Law as Translation: Three Thematic Cores

Notwithstanding its concentration in the juridical arena, the dialogue with François Ost brings us no less than three new uses of the signifier translation, thus establishing indispensable bridges with the issue of legal pluralism and with the institutional and methodological situations of jurisdictio [28: IX-XXIV; 29: 9 ff., 13–35, 88 ff.; 30: 57 ff., 66–82, 98–106, 341–344]. This means autonomizing three decisive thematic cores and the exercises in translation that they demand, namely,

  1. a)

    The one which is required by the plural network of (national and international, state and non-state) legal orders ([cherchant] la grammaire du “droit en réseau”) [29: 11],

  2. b)

    The one which the judge’s modus operandi (interconnecting the world of practical controversies and legal materials) manifests (lorsque le fait et le droit sont rapprochés (…) au terme de la double opération de qualification du fait et d’application-interprétation de la loi) [29: 31]Footnote 4,

  3. c)

    And the one which this same judge develops whilst assuming his/her role as third (“le tiers qui triangule le différend opposant les parties [et qui traduit] (…) leurs discours dans le langage de la loi commune”) [29: 91].

1.3 Two Complementary Meanings

By recalling that this thirdness (also as a fonction tièrce “internalized by legal subjects”) [30: 57 ff.] is precisely the feature which distinguishes Law, its discourses and practices (Le droit ou l’empire du tiers), we are certainly ready to move forward, explicitly considering the issue of inter-semioticity. Before that step, I shall however add two last uses of the signifier “translation”, bringing non-negligible complements to the previous ones.

Whilst exploring the implications of a methodological approach (and its concentration on a “theory” of adjudication) to thematize Law’s specific aspirations (if not its archetypal concept), the use of translation can be productively justified to express the conversion of unrepeatable singularity (“uniqueness”) into analogically comparable concreteness (and exemplarity), a conversion that is fulfilled when the event-problem (deprived of the full blossoming of its incomparable “novelty”) becomes a juridically relevant case: this means actually involving the content of the “legal materials” (seriously taken as a pluri-dimensional legal system) to respond (not as an unilateral application but as a dialectically conceived experimentation) to methodological issues of “relevance” and “qualification”, whilst experiencing comparability as the decisive manifestation of Law’s specific thirdness [18: 90–98; 24: 154–165; 1: 175 ff., 308–313].

Last but not least, the use of the signifier is also fully pertinent when we consider the possibilities of intercultural dialogue, not just as a component of the global practical-cultural reflective horizon but also as a procedure constitutively incorporated by juridical discourse. This is for instance the case when we consider the method of “legal chorology”: according to this method, to translate means to “dismantle” a “regime of sensorial invisibility” whilst pursuing the goal of “redefining in a non-ethnocentric way the significance of people’s behaviours before the multiplicity of national laws” and this is a goal which (providing human rights with new possibilities in the acknowledgement and treatment of differences) promises a significant renewing and deepening of democratic practices and institutions [31: 1–27,125–204].

2 Reconstituting Law as a Form of Life, a Project and a Tradition

Notwithstanding the obvious plurality of contexts and conceptions, do those mobilizations of the signifier “translation” allow a productive exploration of inter-semiotic aspirations? The return to this main question could (and perhaps even should) be fulfilled by delving into the differences (only touched on) that separate the examples that were selected. The path I propose is however another one.

It is as if, without failing to recognize the differences (and to admit that another occasio may explore them justifiably in detail), we could here and now start from the undisputable acknowledgment that all the uses at stake have decisive projections in the understanding or experiencing of juridicalness (its aspirations, categories and limits), which after all is the same as simply admitting that the claim to inter-semioticity which matters here is strictly the one that can simultaneously be said a claim of juridical relevance. Is this a redundant assumption? I would say rather that it is an assumption which gives us the cue to proceed … and in a relatively unexpected way: the intention (although without any guarantee of a unanimous outcome) is certainly the search for a plausible integrating or aggregating assimilation of the previous meanings (produced in diverse juridical contexts), the reflective horizon in which this search is inscribed demands however an enlargement of scope, favouring an answer which may go beyond the institutional situations of juridical environment. It is to meet this requirement that I proceed by recalling a certain counterpoint between translation and tradition: more precisely the one which MacIntyre’s narrativism exemplarily proposes (Whose Justice? Which Rationality?).

2.1 Translation and Tradition (“Listening” to MacIntyre)

I must clarify right away that my purpose is not to explore the possibilities and limits of this counterpoint (and the link between tradition and rationality that it presupposes) while I discuss MacIntyre’s narrative philosophy and the conception of community that it urges us to acknowledge. I admit that it could be productive here and now to thematize this very special return of a conception of communitas, on the one hand in its contrast with the experience of a tradition-independent societas (which not only the Enlightenment’s moral enquiry but also the post-Enlightenment relativism and perspectivism seem to justify), and on the other hand in the specific type of practical rationality that its reinvention of a continuum phronesis/sophia (prudentia/sapientia) demands, whilst conjugating an Agustinian and Thomist reflexive heritage with an explicit diagnosis of plurality and particularism (and the corresponding societal challenges). Even acknowledging the undisputable productivity of this reconstitution, my purpose is actually another. I will consider selectively and allusively some of the precious contributions attributable to MacIntyre’s approach of the counterpoint tradition/ translation, less however to explore them as autonomous categories of intelligibility (in its specific context-horizon or reflexive agenda) but rather to combine them with other (more or less heterogeneous) contributions and thus arrive (through a new top-down dive into the specificity of the practical world of Law) at a distinct (but integrating or agglutinating) meaning of the signifier “translation”.

2.2 What Contributions am I Referring to?

  1. 1)

    First of all, I would highlight an understanding of tradition as an argument or as an ensemble of arguments, if not as a pathway which, while it exists (or is practically-culturally assimilated or performed), we could say continuously pursued (and thus recognized in their constitutive iterability), but none the less permanently reinvented, under the fire of external and internal interpretative debates: “A tradition is an argument extended through time in which certain fundamental agreements are defined and redefined in terms of two types of conflict…” [22: 12].

  2. 2)

    I consider, secondly, the time of determination and recognition (if not awareness) of that persistence or iterability: “Traditions are defined retrospectively. It is only on looking back that the unity of a project to which over considerable stretches of time there have been many different contributors, each with their own goals and concerns, becomes apparent…” [23: 165].

  3. 3)

    The third remark is a complement to the previous one and draws attention to the importance that, as far as tradition is concerned, the so-called “conflicts with external critics and enemies“[22: 12] constitutively have. “When (…) [the tradition becomes apparent], it is sometimes because of some challenge (…) from outside it, a challenge that awakens in those whose lives and work are informed by that tradition a new awareness…” [23: 165]. As if these challenges made their adherents aware that all of them, whatever their differences, are contributing to the same enterprise.

  4. 4)

    What comes next is the well-known recognition of the capacity that traditions have to “listen” to what is said in another tradition (despite the possible untranslatability or incommensurability that separates them): this means actually admitting rare but crucial types of situations justifying a judgement of superiority of resources (“by the standards of one’s own tradition”, the other tradition “seems” to offer “superior resources for understanding the problems and issues which conform one own´s tradition”) [22: 370], or even beyond that (and more globally), the conclusion-claim arguing that the only rational way for adherents of one tradition to approach their rivals is the one which “allows for the possibility that, in one or more areas, the other tradition may be rationally superior to it” (“in respect precisely of that in the alien tradition which it cannot as yet comprehend”) [22: 388].

  5. 5)

    Last but not least, we have the (even most well-known) acknowledgment that there is no equidistant (tradition-free) tertium comparationis or meta-discursive horizon (every perspective, presupposition or category of intelligibility is actually produced within a specific tradition, is as such, tradition-bound) the “standards” which determine what is and is not “meaningful” as well as “the standards of good translation” are “internal to languages” [22: 370 ff.].

These are the contributions which I would like to emphasize (even if perfunctorily). As I have already said, the purpose is to combine them immediately with other (relatively heterogenous) elements….

2.3 The Three Vertices and Their Specifying Role: A Research Agenda

Beyond the thematic core which the intertwining tradition/translation justifies, two other unmistakable cores will be at stake here: the first (a very composite one) mobilizing the signifier “form” or “way of life” (and the plurality of contexts it allows), the second (in contrast, a very specific one) developing a concentrated meaning of the signifier project (inseparable from the “signifiers” practical circularity and constitutive historicity and involving as such a permanent re-writing of memory). To conjugate these three cores (and their centripetal dynamics) means actually defending that our contemporary limit-situation needs a reflexive (if not reflexively radical) experience of Western Law which, taking the autonomy of its aspirations seriously (both in themselves, as practical commitments or desiderata, and in their effective social institutionalization) treats this Law simultaneously and inextricably as (a) a (communitarian) form of life, (b) a practical project and (c) a tradition (this one retrospectively attributed to a rigorously located context of emergence, taking us back to the 2nd century B.C. and a certain Roman “rise” of the jurists) [13, 16].

2.3.1 The Conditions of Possibility

An ensemble of transversal components, all of them highlighted as (convergent) conditions of possibility (each of them in itself necessary and insufficient), allow this treatment, not only opening up the doors to the subsequent distribution among the three vertices but also clarifying that this distribution, far from tolerating closed thematic compartments, has a purely analytical relevance.

What transversal components and justifying what conditions? I would say that we have three steps here, with the first identifying a broad territory of conceptions of Law and the next two introducing-adding (comprehensive) specifications that successively reduce the extension of this territory.

  1. (1)

    The first step is the one which defends that the experience of Law and Legal Thinking (eventually also that the construction of the concept of Law) should be sustained on an archetypal or aspirational internal perspective ─ so that the identity features to be reconstituted (concerning the autonomy, specificity and limits of juridical arenas, its goals and/or values, its general or specific practical cultural meaning, as well as the intentions of legal thinking) do not represent all or nothing characteristics but rather guiding intentions or constitutive aspirations or promises (eventually commitments or desiderata), “by reference to” which (as if in an exercise in gradations) past or present expressions and their institutional instances should permanently be “judged”Footnote 5.

  2. (2)

    The second step (introducing a specification that, within the spectrum that the first could accommodate, already excludes a significant number of perspectivesFootnote 6!) imposes in turn the challenge that the determination/concretization/performance of the aspirations or practical commitments in question should be fulfilled through a dominantly material or substantive discourse.

  3. (3)

    The last step (perpetrating a much more drastic specification … whilst excluding most of the candidates peacefully included in the previous ones!) requires that the experience of the (so-called) aspirational substantive approach and its contexts of justification ─ despite the vocation of universality that, especially at certain moments in its historical trajectory, is constitutively-dogmatically associated with it ─ is (should be) meta-dogmatically reconstituted (not only in terms of specific contents but also in terms of warranting grounds or foundations) in contexts of intelligibility and justification explicitly (consciously) free from claims of (a-cultural) universality or (ontological or onto-anthropological) necessityFootnote 7.

According to this last step. it is as if, productively refuting the aphorism ubi societas, ibi jus [25: 287-289], we were consciously fighting against a kind of dominant flow which, despite its plurality, continues to rely (to say it with Charles Taylor’s formulations) on a culturally neutral (or a-cultural) perspective [36]. On the positive side, this obviously means demanding that the combination (if not overlapping) of the three vertices (form of life, project, tradition) is pursued not only in the name of a full historical-cultural contextualization (with identifiable conditions of emergence and diverse cycles of institutionalization), but also explicitly and decisively fed by an understanding of juridicalness which, reconciling the claims of autonomy and substantive validity, can sustain these claims (or their conjugation) as correlates of an argument of historical-cultural continuity ─ so that all these claims and arguments (and the corresponding acquisitions) can be significantly experienced as constitutive cultural artifacts and as performative guiding elements of a non-necessary and non-universal (culturally plausible and civilizationally moulded) answer (among other plausible answers) to the universal (anthropologically necessary) problem of the institutionalization of a social order. This means that we need a metadogmatic (legal-philosophical) discourse explicitly addressing (explicitly reconstituting) ─ as well as questioning the practical-cultural survival of ─ a certain Law: the one that, from Roman isolation onwards (from the “first known” expression of “humanism” onwards) [8: 12], we may treat as a (persistently reinvented) manifestation of the Western Text…

Admitting that this is a complex research agenda (to be pursued on other stages), what follows is nothing more than a very brief sampling of the specifying role played by these three vertices (with a more attentive consideration of the third, which is directly linked to the meaning “translation”).

2.3.2 Law as a Form or Way of Life

Concerning the first vertex of the triangle, the assimilating centripetal force comes from the plurality (and the circulation) of contexts (of meaning and performance) with which the corresponding signifier is expected to intervene.

Although concentrated on an immediately socio-cultural, if not anthropological-cultural, intentional content — free (freed!) from the constructive hesitation that the reception of Philosophische Untersuchungen [42] has raisedFootnote 8 —, the signifier at stake in fact mobilizes two diverse organizing axes. These are in fact sufficiently open and flexible in their intension and sufficiently broad in their extension to be able to evoke:

  1. (a)

    on the one hand (with the help of Wittgenstein), the inventio or concipere or the “presentation” of a language ([u]nd eine Sprache vorstellen heißt, sich eine Lebensform vorstellen) [42: 24 (II § 19)]— if not also already of a game of language (das Sprechen der Sprache [ist] ein Teil (…) einer Tätigkeit, oder einer Lebensform) [42: 28 (I § 23)]… — and with this creation-invention (without thereby diminishing the plausibility of a critical openness and its infinite argumentation), also the indispensability of a dogmatic stabilization and its finite argumentation (Das Hinzunehmende, Gegebene —könnte man sagen—seien Lebensformen) [42: 363 (II, xi)];

  2. (b)

    on the other hand (combining contributions as heterogeneous as those by Boyd White, Landowski, Bubner and Castanheira Neves!), an order-ordinans of “occasions” or “opportunities for creating meaning” (law not as a system for producing material results in the world, but as a system of meaning) [40: 52], opportunities all of them organic-structurally institutionalized (although offering distinct normative-intentional modalities of “existence” and bindingness) [26: 241], which, when lived from the inside (viewed from the inside, by someone who lives on its terms, and thus seen as a field of life and practice) [40: 103]— whilst imposing themselves on us (also under a strictly semiotic point of view) as practical-existential expressions or resources (il y a place, en sémiotique, pour la vie!) [12: 2]Footnote 9—, establish on the horizon of their communitarian meanings (as a reference to a commune that is always also a search for that commune) an unmistakable culture of argument (“perpetually remade” by the subjects who participate in it) [38: 215–237].

It is precisely the culture of argument which distinguishes Western Law and that the vertex Lebensform claims to illuminate, whilst selecting as a kind of a generating component the invention of the case-controversy… and allowing as such the retrospective (narrative) acknowledgement which takes us back to a certain republican “rise” of the prudentes or iuris consulti. It is as if we were recognizing a culture of argument distinct from all other cultures of argument and the (ethical or philosophical) thematizations that consecrate them; but also as if we were recognizing an equally differentiated language, which (being homologous to common language) [26: 230–251, 282–283], establishes specific (autonomous) links with everyday practice and its existential dispositions, if not, in a word, with the particularity and concreteness of the human life-world (Lebenswelt) [2]. This is, I think, a very productive visée, giving the corresponding cultural artifacts (or chain of artifacts) an unmistakable weight: as if we were testifying to the beginning of an autonomous, practical world and simultaneously acknowledging its continuity and permanent transformation, but also its fragility. The opportunity is not in fact only that of testifying to the invention of a specific problem of inter-subjectivity or comparability, involving two subject-parties and an impartial third, it is rather that of following the institutionalization (the emergence and the work in progress) of a microscopic model of community (of thirdness) which relativizes the subjects (which interrupts the face-à-face immediately experienced in the subjects’ encounter) and which, as such, justifies the emergence of an entirely new practice of respondereFootnote 10.

This is a respondere which, as far as virtues are concerned, may be treated on the one hand as a specification of phronesis, and on the other hand as an emergence and development of humanitas. That specification of phronesis brings actually the dogmatic stabilization of thirdness (as a common context-order, made of differently binding normative materials, either treated as a catalogue or as a system) and with it… (among others!) the overcoming (if not the refuting) of a respondere which could appear (as it was the case with the pontiffs’ responses) as a self-sufficient (causa sui) expression of an inspired voluntas, a change of emphasis concerning the temporal dimension (highlighting the constitutive present of the controversy to be assimilated)Footnote 11, last but not least, the possibility of distinguishing concreteness from singularity, i.e. an analogically comparable concreteness from pure, unconditional and absolute singularity [18]. However, this specification of phronêsis would not be identifiable if it represented less of a specification of humanitas, a word invented in this contextFootnote 12 to translate the consecration of a community of comparable equals, namely a community which the Roman Republic could only conceive of as an implacably circumscribed circle (overlapping an explicit status civitatis and the munus of paterfamilias), the intentional meaning of which represents however a remarkable acquisition, opening up the way to a specific institutionalization of audiatur et altera pars and thus to the consecration of a pragmatic of respect (considered as a source of normative claims). In this work in progress, distinct experiences of dignity are inscribed and overlapped (from the juridically intrinsic dignity as rank to the juridically assimilated dignity as value) [19, 37], without forgetting, however, that the decisive role is played precisely by a specific experience of the subject-person ─as an axiological autonomous artifact-acquisition, significantly different from the ethical, moral, philosophical, religious or political conceptions of personhood developed by the same Western canon.

2.3.3 Law as a Project

The knotty point of the second vertex lies in the formulation projecting (explicitly borrowed from Heidegger’s understanding of constitutive historicityFootnote 13) or, more directly, in the way the signifier projecting (mobilizing explicit signifiers justified by an experience of Geworfenheit-thrownness) identifies the development of a practical-cultural autonomous circle as a simultaneous experience of throwing and being thrown (within its own throw), with the coherent refusal of necessity and contingence [7: 142–148, 310–316 (§§ 31 and 63)] Footnote 14.

As this projecting rejects the pre-determined nature of a plan (in the ontic or ontic-teleological pre-modern sense of a universal a-historical order of excellences), as well as rejecting the identity of a programme (in the contingent-pragmatic sense which modern Zweckrationalität self-sufficiently justifies)Footnote 15, we can say in two words that its precious contribution concerning the identity of Law lies precisely in its capacity to experience the permanent constitutive tension between continuity and change — involving a communitarian self-availability which is simultaneously and inextricably self-transcendentality.

This treatment of the communitarian meanings, in its juridical relevance, as a self-transcendentally conceived artefactus, actually opens different stimulating analytic opportunities. Two examples must suffice here.

The first one (a specific one) concerns the claim for consonance between juridical normative principles (taken seriously as foundational warrants) and adjudicative practices and allow us to explore the practical circularity which, as a true experience of constitutive historicity, interchanges and overlaps the tasks-roles of guiding and guide-following, specifying and transforming, fixing and developing, and these ones whilst involving on the one hand the governing normative context offered by principles and on the other hand the determining dynamics imposed by problem-solving practices — here precisely as the novum introduced by principled realization, i.e., by the practices which follow those principles (and whilst they follow them) [17].

The second example is a global (and certainly a more decisive one), whilst regarding the construction of the so-called argument of continuity. To understand this argument (and the productive intertwinement that it attributes to the different historical cycles), it is in fact essential to allude to the outlines of a certain dialectical counterpoint. This is the counterpoint which emerges when we distinguish the core of law’s project — identified as a continuous attempt to institutionalize a specific kind of intersubjectivity (between relativized, comparable and limited spheres of autonomy and responsibility and the corresponding masks of subjects-persons) — from the different cultural, political and economic environments in which this tentative institutionalization has been (and continues to be) pursued — and where we may recognize a situated context of questions and problems (conditioning the criteria and the balance of comparability, whilst still able to identify the autonomous sense of “this” specific comparability as an unmistakable task of ius suum cuique tribuere) [19: 273, note 25].

2.3.4 Law as a Tradition

What about the last vertex, treating the continuity of these responses as a retrospectively reconstituted tradition? Beyond the five contributions which we have already considered when we invoked MacIntyre (or as a synthesis of their overlapping), I would highlight another reflective opportunity, which submits the argument of continuity to a negative challenge. More than the “conflicts with external critics and enemies” that we have already considered, the negative challenge brings to the fore the problem of the limits of Law or this problem under the fire of a radical thematization. The attention paid to difference could not actually be taken seriously without explicit consideration of its radicalization or reflexive intensification, which brings us to a troubling borderline area where the possibility of the practical-cultural self-availability of identifiable projects overlaps with the demands of a contextually plausible decay, erosion or overcoming (progressively threatening the sustainability of the invoked argument of continuity).

One step further and we will be considering the so-called debate of alternatives to law [15], at least in the terms that Castanheira Neves teaches us to recognizeFootnote 16. And yet, here it interests us less the conceivable alternative responses developed in the Western canon ─opposing to Law’s order of validity the order of necessity justified by pure power, the order of possibility rationalised by techno-science, the order of finality supported by politics [25], eventually the order of incomparability justified by ethics (or a certain ethics) [15]─, than the responses constructed under alien civilizational horizons and which expose Western Law to the demanding challenge of inter-cultural dialogue — such as those that may be found in the orders of the Islamic Sunna, Navajo beehaz’aanii or Hindu sanatana dharma.

It is true that the internal debate itself can be thought of in the light of the translation paradigm ─ with the productive implication of allowing us to distinguish traditions within traditions … and of drawing the corresponding steps or gradations (a resource which can also be useful to distinguish the different historical cycles and their diverse legacies, namely those which we can retrospectively attribute to pre-modernity and to Aufklärung). When the intercultural dialogue is in action (when the responses assumed by the Western canon are confronted with alien responses), the model of translation gains however an unmistakable intelligibility and intensity. The heterogeneity (if not incommensurability) at stake concerns here actually a counterpoint between a response that bets (that assumes le pari, in the well-known Pascalian sense) on the separability or autonomy of a certain practical world (instituting the subject-person of comparability) and another ensemble of responses that consider the same problem of life in common whilst assuming a demand for inseparability and the holistic solution of a practical continuum — a kind of horizon-ethos in which communitarian morality, religious (and mystical) practices, shared narratives, concepts of good life, self-understanding exempla and other social canons are experienced as constitutively inseparable and law (or the corresponding order) is not a specific identifiable (separable) voice (determined by an explicit claim to autonomy) but only a (relatively effective and subsidiary) regulative or coercive projection of the content of this continuum. It is precisely because this inter-cultural dialogue is (or should be) explicitly pursued without the a-problematic presupposition of a trans-civilizational meta-discourse that the translation model becomes indispensable here.

Concerning this model, I would like to highlight two performative resources, the first an internal one, considering the possibilities of juridical principles (seriously taken as jus and thus also explored as intentions of realization or practical commitments, in the light of an aspiration for practical consonance with the novum introduced by the practices which follow them), the second an external one, exploring the possibilities of Greimassian narrative grammar and the way this articulates analytical tools and empirical claims to explore speech behaviour and meaning construction processes.

The first ensemble of possibilities provides an eloquent specification of the claims for cultural humility, sincerity and creativity with which Boyd White identifies the “ethics of the translator” [39]. We have here actually a process or path of translation that is entirely nurtured by (and pursued through) an experience of practical circularity: the experience which, as we have already said, involves on the one hand the governing normative context offered by the aspirations or commitments of the principles (assumed as prius interrogandi in the immanence of their Lebensform, project or tradition) and on the other hand the determining dynamics imposed by certain problem-solving practices — practices whose specificity and novelty coincide precisely with an irreducible emergence of Otherness, as a configuration of problems and material reality presuppositions dominantly built and exposed from the perspective of another way of life, project or tradition, thus bringing with it the challenges and ways of resistance of alien arguments, warrants and aspirations. As if the aspirations and desiderata of the juridical principles (in a way which other systemic legal materials would allow only with difficulty) had found for once their performative context in practices which dominantly resist them and which at least implicitly manifest alternative aspirations (thus providing a precious field of experimentation of the convergences and differences, when not différends) [14, 17].

But there is also the possibility of an external mediation, which, as I have already anticipated, can find an eloquent resource in the semio-narrative. The patrimony of informative contents that this narrative grammar (preserving its external point of view) can offer to philosophical-legal reflection focused on the cultural-civilizational identity of Law as a form of life, as a project and mainly as a tradition (as an internal reflection which, as we have seen, appears dominated by the thesis of the artefactual “nature” of Law and the need to consider exclusively a certain Law) is, in fact, absolutely crucial [20]Footnote 17. There is first the accessible organization of the empirical stock of social knowledge ─ concerning the contingently historical material presupposition (or its ensemble of political, economic and cultural experiences and frames, if not pre-judgments or stereotypes) ─ that the so-called thematic level (justifying the convergence of nomological and narrative resources) is able to offer. And yet the specific productivity of the intervention of narrative grammar is actually beyond this organization of the informative stock. We can actually say that this specificity is mostly due to the possibility of submitting all these contingent empirical data (including those which describe the content of messages expressing aspirations or conclusion-claims to validity) to the possibilities of the so-called deep level and its tools. Here, it matters little if the proposed tools, demanding the interplay of two axes (the syntagmatic and the paradigmatic) are effectively protected by the conclusion-claims of universality, naturalness or empirical corroboration that, in one way or another, this semiotic trend defends. Regardless of the success or failure of these claims, the tools at stake – and most especially the syntagmatic axis, whilst allowing us to reconstitute the construction of meaning in a three-part narrative sequence (contract /performance /recognition) – proves to be especially apt to make available the informative dimension which the consideration of a practical-cultural project (seriously taken as an institutionalized form of life and significantly defended as a specific tradition… and not only as an episodic or contingent manifestation) certainly needs. It is true that the common association of the Greimasian narrative syntagm (semio-narrative stricto sensu) with a teleological representation of human action may raise some difficulties. This frequently explored association – as well as the acronic pretension linked to the “elementary structures of signification” in general – do not, however, prevent what seems fundamentalFootnote 18: the very promising possibility of (always from an unequivocal external perspective and through an analytically constructed game of objectification) treating the hard core of that project, its aspirations and its sense-effects ─ i.e. the ensemble of signs or traces which appear in the initial stage and which persist as more or less explicitly constitutive features of identity in the subsequent trajectory ─ under the mask of a plausible actant, i.e. inscribed in the process of interaction which entrusts this actant with the role-mask of a Sender (“Thus, a ‘Sender’ may even be an impersonal agency, a custom, a social force”) [11: 148]. This means distributing the other diagnosed contextual elements (the unrepeatable “material” realities, involving diverse social-institutional and cultural-ideological factors or dimensions) across the remaining actants and across the distinct situations of the narrative sequence, giving also specific attention to the game of choices and alternatives which the paradigmatic axis and its semiotic square productively allow. All this without excluding another possibility concerning the syntagmatic axis: the possibility of recovering the Helper-Opponent pair of actants beyond the level of “competences required to perform action” (savoir-faire/pouvoir faire) ─ this possibility can actually be particularly productive when we want to weigh the obstacles posed by the diagnosis of the alternatives to Law or by the narratives about practical-cultural decadence, erosion or death of its project…Footnote 19 This external objectivation is actually precious for the development of an internal radical reflection that, as an intertwinement of commitment and critic, developed (lived) from the inside by those who take Law as their form of life ─ i.e. as a specific way of creating intersubjective meanings, following a persistent, albeit permanently reinvented, claim to autonomyFootnote 20─, dares however to question the plausible contemporary endurance or congruence of the form of life itself ─ i.e. dares to explore the meaning of its argument of continuity and as such discuss the persistence or the survival of jus and its practical world, all this without avoiding the possibility of a negative answer. Contemporary intercultural dialogue needs actually, more than ever, the cultural humility which sustains this reflection.