This chapter synopsises and synthesises the contributions of the preceding chapters. Approaching cosmos as a ‘distribution of the sensible’ (in Jacques Rancière’s phrase), it traces the way kosmos operates to organize reality on the level of aesthetics, politics, ethics and epistemology and to integrate these various domains into a holistic vision. The chapter also stresses, however, the provisionality and partiality of that cosmic whole and considers the alternative visions of reality it precludes, the disorderly order that Heraclitus characterised as ‘the sweeping of random things scattered’ and that James Joyce terms ‘chaosmos’.

ATHENS' AMNESTY AND LAW'S ALĒTHEIA

Forensic oratory, as Aristotle notes, is oriented toward the past. The law can try only events that have already happened. The speaker of Isocrates 20 bemoans this limitation. It would be best, he says, if criminals bore some mark (sēmeion) that enabled us to punish them before they committed their crime, “inasmuch as it is better to find a means of averting future problems than to punish those that have already occurred” (12). As it is, one should consider it a windfall when a criminal does come before the court, and punish him before he does something worse (12–14). Inherently retrospective, dikē is associated in Greek thought with memory. Zeus “does not overlook (or “forget,” lēthei) that sort of justice that a city holds in it,” says Hesiod (Erga 268–69). The avenging spirit of the murder victim, a demonic agent of justice, is called the alastōr, literally the “unforgetting one.”

Athenian law is a notorious historical dead end. Unsystematic, with no formal legal theory, no unified lawcode, no written verdicts or system of precedent, it falls off the map of Western jurisprudential history, whether common law or civil. Both as forensic practice and as jurisprudential philosophy it is “before the law” as we know it, an evolutionary oddity. The subject of this book is neither the practice nor the philosophy of Athenian law, but something between the two, the juridical discourse generated by and embedded in the courtroom speeches of the fifth and fourth centuries bce. These texts, as I hope to show, offer complex (though not necessarily coherent) meditations on law and justice. They create and sustain a juridical world-view and a juridical world, a world not completely segregated from its surrounding cultural environment, of course, but recognizably distinct in its rules, logic, and structure. While Athens' legal practice may be deemed an irrelevant detour on the path of jurisprudential history, Athenian legal discourse, I suggest, is an important part of that history, offering an early example of a developed, if unsystematic and largely latent, body of jurisprudential thought and a self-consciously juridical relation to life.

This book is not a quest for origins although, as Derrida has remarked, that is one temptation created by the law's apparent resistance to history. Instead it is the archaeology of a neglected site of legal knowledge.

LAW, CODE

Modern jurisprudence is characterized by an ideal of systematicity: it aims at (even if it necessarily fails to achieve) completeness, unity, consistency, and stability. Since the compilation of the Justinian Corpus Iuris Civilis in sixth-century ce Rome, these goals have been attached to the idea of a written code, and a written code has in turn been seen as the essence of the law. The commitment to codification has been particularly strong in the civil law tradition that traces its origins to the Corpus Iuris Civilis, but common law, too, is predicated on the notion of a legal code, though one that takes the form not of a single authoritative text but of a historical accretion of decisions in individual cases.