Originally published in 1998, The Phenomenology of Modern Legal Discourse recovers the suffering which is concealed as lawyers, judges and other legal officials resignify a harm through the special vocabulary and grammar which constitutes legal language. At the moment of re-signification, an untranslatable gap erupts between the knowers special language and the embodied meanings of the non-knower. The Phenomenology claims that the gap can be unconcealed if the knowers of the special language reconsider their assumptions about legal meaning, the body and desire. With a broad grasp of diverse problematics from the legal procedures, legal discourses and legal theory of three jurisdictions to exemplify his claims, the author interweaves arguments which draw from Edmund Husserl s and Maurice Merleau Ponty s insights about meaning. The author's effort demonstrates how one may unconceal lived laws through a re-reading of the role of the experiential body in legal signification. The author s effort to retrieve the embodiment of legal meaning de-stabilizes deep assumptions of contemporary lawyers and legal theorists.
