9 - Can Law Be Emancipatory?

Summary

In Chapter Nine I attempt to answer the following question: Can Law Be Emancipatory? The answer takes into account the previous analyses, and aims to give political-juridical content to the oppositional postmodern conception of law. Drawing on examples of concrete political-juridical practices occurring in various parts of the world, I formulate the conditions for an emancipatory use of law. The set of these conditions and the practices into which they translate themselves, I designate as subaltern legal cosmopolitanism. This chapter was written under the logic of the sociology of emergences. My aim was to unfold the signs of the reconstruction of the tension between social regulation and social emancipation, as well as the role of law in such a reconstruction. The credibility of the signs was built on excavation work upon the foundations of the paradigm of modernity - a work that confirmed the exhaustion of the paradigm, while revealing as well the wealth and vastness of the social experience it rendered possible at the beginning, and later went on to discredit, marginalize or simply suppress.