Weeds in the Gardens of Justice? The Survival of Hyperpositivism in Polish Legal Culture as a Symptom/Sinthome
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Rafał Mańko
Rafał Mańko is a research analyst at the European Parliament in Brussels. Previously, he worked as a lawyer linguist at the Court of Justice of the EU in Luxembourg. His fields of academic interest include Europeanisation of private law, legal culture and the impact of the Socialist Legal Tradition upon post-socialist law. He is currently completing a PhD thesis on legal survivals of the socialist period in Poland at the Centre for the Study of European Contract Law, Universiteit van Amsterdam.
Abstract
After 1989, the Polish legal elites have embraced a transformation discourse, presenting modern Polish legal history as a circular journey from Europe to the dystopia of “Communism” and back. As a consequence, links with the state-socialist past have been repressed from the collective consciousness of the legal community and presented as post-Soviet “weeds” in the Polish gardens of justice. However, the repressed weeds return in the form of symptoms – legal survivals, which lawyers tend to ignore or conceal because they subvert the dominant ideological narrative. In this paper, I focus on metanormative survivals of the Socialist Legal Tradition in Poland which can all be brought under the umbrella term of “hyperpositivism.” This concept denotes an extreme version of classical legal positivism, mixed with elements of orthodox Marxism-Leninism, in the form created in the Soviet Union in the 1930s and exported to Central European countries after World War II. Owing to the persistence of legal survivals of Actually Existing Socialism in Polish legal culture, the paper argues for their reappraisal by resorting to a metaphorical reconceptualisation on the basis of selected mappings from the source domain of Lacanian psychoanalysis.
About the author
Rafał Mańko is a research analyst at the European Parliament in Brussels. Previously, he worked as a lawyer linguist at the Court of Justice of the EU in Luxembourg. His fields of academic interest include Europeanisation of private law, legal culture and the impact of the Socialist Legal Tradition upon post-socialist law. He is currently completing a PhD thesis on legal survivals of the socialist period in Poland at the Centre for the Study of European Contract Law, Universiteit van Amsterdam.
©[2013] by Walter de Gruyter Berlin Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Masthead
- Focus: Genealogies of Laws and Justices
- Modifying the Past: Nietzschean Approaches to History
- Weeds in the Gardens of Justice? The Survival of Hyperpositivism in Polish Legal Culture as a Symptom/Sinthome
- Metamorphosis of the Ideals and the Actuals: Blasphemy Laws in Pakistan and the Transplantation of Justice in British India
- The Churchyard in Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White: Issues of Madness and Illegitimacy
- The Gothic Picturesque Garden and the Historical Sense
- Sovereignty, Faith and the Fall
- Sovereignty Forever: The Boundaries of Western Medieval and Modern Thought in a Quasi-Symptomatic Reading of Schmitt's Definition of Sovereignty
- Gollum's Sacredness and the Geopolitics of the Self: Reframing Tolkien's Normative World
- Culture, Language and Environmental Rights: The Anthropocentrism of English
- Finding The Guilty One: Media Sensationalism, Defendant's Performance, and Jury Equity
- Book Review
- Book Review
- Book Review
Articles in the same Issue
- Masthead
- Focus: Genealogies of Laws and Justices
- Modifying the Past: Nietzschean Approaches to History
- Weeds in the Gardens of Justice? The Survival of Hyperpositivism in Polish Legal Culture as a Symptom/Sinthome
- Metamorphosis of the Ideals and the Actuals: Blasphemy Laws in Pakistan and the Transplantation of Justice in British India
- The Churchyard in Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White: Issues of Madness and Illegitimacy
- The Gothic Picturesque Garden and the Historical Sense
- Sovereignty, Faith and the Fall
- Sovereignty Forever: The Boundaries of Western Medieval and Modern Thought in a Quasi-Symptomatic Reading of Schmitt's Definition of Sovereignty
- Gollum's Sacredness and the Geopolitics of the Self: Reframing Tolkien's Normative World
- Culture, Language and Environmental Rights: The Anthropocentrism of English
- Finding The Guilty One: Media Sensationalism, Defendant's Performance, and Jury Equity
- Book Review
- Book Review
- Book Review
