Passions out of place: Law,incommensurability and resistance

Conclusion This has been an account of how an incommensurability between peoples is integral to the creation of identity in modernity and of how law assumes its modern, ambivalent being through embodying and mediating that incommensurability. A concluding point can be made by relating all this to the large and revelatory concern nowadays with the construction of Occidental identity in exclusion. This construction involves that which is acceptable or within the identity being created in its difference to that which is unfit and excluded. Looked at in reverse, if the excluded were to re-enter, as it were, then the identity would disintegrate. All of which, so the story continues, is a somewhat figurative way of discerning processes that remain internal to the identity. There is no without because the supposedly excluded is a fantastic projection of what is within, although it is repressed there. This projection is, however, attached to actuality, as we have seen. In ascribing what is excluded to the colonized, peasants and other incommensurables, not only must their difference to what is within be fabricated and asserted but also their similarity to what is within must be denied. The resistances of the colonized, which have just been described, succeeded because of organizational efficacies and juridical assertions which were the putative preserve of the Occident. Such a sameness of what should be different may locate a remote recess in a globalized Occidental identity, including its law, from which it could be seen as partial and precarious.The most enjoyable part of producing this paper was the discussion of a draft at a seminar organised by the Department of Legal Studies, La Trobe University, in September 1994.