As part of the series introducing newly appointed colleagues at the Institute of Social Sciences, Aleksandar Vukadinović, a Junior Research Assistant at the Centre for Legal Research, delivered a lecture entitled “The ‘Death of the Legislator’ as a Challenge to Legal Interpretation”.
Starting from the premise that modern human history, and European history in particular, has been marked by profound social, political, economic, technological, value-based, and legal upheavals, the lecturer emphasized the importance of the “sphere of thought”, or more precisely the “sphere of meaning”, as the key domain in which the causes of these transformations should be sought. The past century of European intellectual history, as he noted, may be understood as a history of a crisis of meaning, values, and significance, often described as a history of nihilism.
This crisis was symbolically presented through metaphors of the “death” of fundamental categories and concepts that had long constituted the foundation of human self-understanding, but which, over the past two centuries, have been subjected to radical re-examination, critique, and rejection without the emergence of an adequate alternative. In this context, reference was made to Friedrich Nietzsche’s proclamation of the “death of God”, Michel Foucault’s notion of the “death of man”, Roland Barthes’s concept of the “death of the author”, and Jacques Derrida’s reflections on the “death of meaning and significance”.
Proceeding from the view that the philosophy of law and theories of legal interpretation are not isolated disciplines but rather specialized branches of philosophy and hermeneutics, the lecture sought, through the introduction of the metaphor of the “death of the legislator”, to transpose these problems into the field of law. Through a historical analysis of the relativization of the philosophical foundations of legal interpretive theory, including concepts concerning the relationship between text and reality, the lecture demonstrated how these issues affect the practical application of law and may generate political consequences for the legal order, reshaping understandings of the separation of powers and the subject of sovereignty.
During the lecture, three typologies of interpretive theory were outlined: the relationship between text and reality, the interpreter’s capacity to grasp the meaning of the text, and the ethical relationship toward the text, its author, and its meaning. The logocentric approach to interpretation is based on unconditional trust in the author of the text, belief in the authority, coherence, and non-contradictory nature of the author’s intentions, and confidence in the possibility of knowing the true meaning of the text, that is, the Logos expressed within it.
By contrast, the text-centered approach isolates the text from its author, assigning meaning to context and the interpreter’s preconceptions. In this case, the act of grasping meaning becomes an act of self-understanding, and interpretation cannot claim truth, although the text itself, as a totality of signs, is possible only if it is preceded by a totality of meaning. The interpreter-centered approach goes a step further, proceeding from the assumption that the interpreter arbitrarily introduces meaning into the text, whereby, instead of a singular Logos, there exists only a play of infinite interpretive possibilities.
In contrast to the dominant contemporary theories of legal interpretation, which are characterized by distrust toward the legislator as a source of meaning, the lecture defended the position of interpretative realism. According to this approach, the interpreter is obliged to uncover the meaning embedded in the text by its author, that is, the legislator, thereby reopening the question of authority, meaning, and the limits of legal interpretation in contemporary law.
