The essays collected here under the governing signs, Law, Text, Terror have their origins in a singular and topical desire. Their motive is most immediately that of acknowledging the massive and eccentric contribution of the philologist, psychoanalyst and Romanist jurist Pierre Legendre to the study of legal institutions and juridical practices. He has unceasingly asked the question 'why law?' and in endeavouring to answer that question, in the course of over twenty-five books published during the last forty years, he has traversed a unique and uniquely idiosyncratic body of disciplines and knowledges relevant to the symbolic forms and institutional functions of the Western legal order.

These essays reflect that singularity of drive as well as that diversity of scholarly interests by taking up, playing with, varying and developing the themes of text and terror, law and territory, that Legendre either introduced or made peculiarly his own.

The essays collected here under the governing signs, Law, Text, Terror have their origins in a singular and topical desire. Their motive is most immediately that of acknowledging the massive and eccentric contribution of the philologist, psychoanalyst and Romanist jurist Pierre Legendre to the study of legal institutions and juridical practices. He has unceasingly asked the question 'why law?' and in endeavouring to answer that question, in the course of over twenty-five books published during the last forty years, he has traversed a unique and uniquely idiosyncratic body of disciplines and knowledges relevant to the symbolic forms and institutional functions of the Western legal order. These essays reflect that singularity of drive as well as that diversity of scholarly interests by taking up, playing with, varying and developing the themes of text and terror, law and territory, that Legendre either introduced or made peculiarly his own.

Western legal professionals habitually rely on a version of legal history that bolsters their own sway over the present. The legal mythologies undergirding these self-serving proposals are divided between doctrines of law's immemorial nature, and of its sacred (Roman) origins. Thomas's de-mythicized jurisprudence dismisses these sagas.

This book provides a genealogical mapping of the universalisation/secularisation thesis that is both widely saluted and mistrusted as master narrative of modern political and normative history. While accepting that foundational issues of religions weigh heavier than political philosophy's aspirations, the authors question the outdated suggestions of Carl Schmitt's political theology, building instead upon a refined version of Giorgio Agamben's close-reading of Christian government as management. The book identifies Western-Christian tensions within jurisprudence and concludes that the West's secular universality is passing off as politics or law what is really the management of its own dwindling primacy.

This book provides a genealogical mapping of the universalisation/secularisation thesis that is both widely saluted and mistrusted as master narrative of modern political and normative history. While accepting that foundational issues of religions weigh heavier than political philosophy's aspirations, the authors question the outdated suggestions of Carl Schmitt's political theology, building instead upon a refined version of Giorgio Agamben's close-reading of Christian government as management. The book identifies Western-Christian tensions within jurisprudence and concludes that the West's secular universality is passing off as politics or law what is really the management of its own dwindling primacy.