François Ost’s recent Raconter la loi (Odile Jacob, Paris 2004) is a fascinating venture that has the great merit, among many others, of thinking about the conceptual nuclei of Law & Literature especially in the direction he adopts of law in literature from a typically European perspective. The author’s central theme is that every policy and every law always springs from a foundation of a tale, which actually acts as a literary matrix for every symbolic struc-ture of human cohabitation. He argues that it is from the imaginative artistic dimen-sion underlying the tale, comprising the imaginative component and the structural component given by language and by the rules that govern narrative, that all the cul-tural products of a given human society derive, with the consequence that law (like any other semantic) should be understood more properly as literature, at least as far as its origins are concerned. Ost then moves from this basic premise to analyse some of the most intense works of literature in the history of Western culture, such as Genesis, The Oresteia, Anti-gone, Robinson Crusoe and Faust, concluding with Kafka’s The Trial, always focus-ing on how literature not only underlies law and with it human cohabitation, but also gives a critical vision of law, while continuing to design and propose possible new rules.
