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A Prophecy of Possibility: Metaphorical Explorations of Postmodern Legal Subjectivity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2024

Austin Sarat
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Extract

Pleasure precedes business. The child at play is practicing for life's responsibilities. Young impalas play at fencing with one another, thrusting and parrying. Art for art's sake was the main avenue … to ancient technological breakthroughs. Such also is the way of metaphor: it flourishes in playful prose and high poetic art, but it is also vital at the growing edges of science and philosophy.

—W. V. Quine (1979)

What is truth? A moving army of metaphors, metonymies and anthropomorphisms, in short a summa of human relationships that are being poetically and rhetorically sublimated, transposed, and beautified until, after long and repeated use, a people considers them as solid, canonical, and unavoidable. Truths are illusions whose illusory nature has been forgotten, metaphors that have been used up and have lost their imprint and that now operate as mere metal, no longer as coins.

—Nietzsche (1956)

Type
Charting a Course for Sociolegal Scholarship: A Symposium
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 29 , Issue 4 , 1995 , pp. 615 - 630
Copyright
Copyright © 1995 by The Law and Society Association

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Footnotes

I am grateful to Kristin Bumiller, Tom Dumm, and Stephanie Sandler for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this essay.

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