Prof. Dr. Dr. Pierre Legrand – The Third Space

One constitutes oneself as a comparatist by rejecting the fixity of conceptually homogenized understandings and by marking a third location that is neither one nor the other but, disputing the territories of both, something else besides. For the comparatist-at-law, the third space is distinguishable from the laws being compared (it is neither outside or astride those laws) while not being reducible to a composite of the pre-existing laws. In the third space, there takes place a re-articulation projecting meaning beyond any signification obtaining in the situated laws. As it displaces them, the third space can properly be regarded as effectuating an othering of those laws. The third space introduces another other to the comparison-at-law (when it comes to comparison, one plus one makes three). Indeed, emerging beyond any antecedent information, beyond any ”either/or” or ”both/and” scenario, the third space offers a space of contestation and transaction disrupting each law’s assumed totalization, a translational space where meanings are dismantled or deconstructed, but also acts as a powerful site of reconstitution and meaning productivity. In the third space, new knowledge is fabricated. It is crucial, therefore, not to think of the third space as a dialectical arrangement à la Hegel, which would be much too strongly predicated on ideal temporal sequencing and on the no less ideal unfolding of the thesis/antithesis/synthesis scheme — which would mark the termination of a process. Instead, what we have in the third space — through the thirding of legal knowledge — is the unfolding of an interminable heterothesis.