ABSTRACT
Just as negative dialectics is directed at the consistent consciousness of nonidentity, a negative-dialectical approach to law is directed at making the non-identical aspect of law critical to its concept. In more concrete terms, this is directed at making the prisoner's experience central to the concept of law. Law is also imaginative, its expressive scope as limited as the human imagination. Law is the Ur-phenomenon of irrational rationality. The norms of law cut short what is not covered, every experience of the specific which is not preformed, for the sake of the seamless systematic, and then raises instrumental rationality to a second reality sui generis. Recht, as law – expressing right – gives form as a conceptual matter to things, as "this, the law"; thus the law, as Gesetz – an expression of right – takes form as "the rationality of the thing", as a matter of law.
