3

The law, in all its positiveness, is wary of literature, of its expressions that are not only vague but soft. Law is certainly not literature, and this opposition has long been honoured institutionally in the conflict between the faculties of law and literature. The accuracy of what is said in positive law is constructed by opposing itself to the rectitude of the metaphorical image in poetic language. But is this opposition quite so Manichean? Beyond the quarrels between legal positivism and the comprehensive approach, the literary and the legal might be much more intertwined than they seem. There is perhaps something poetic about all things legal (the inventiveness of the law) and something legal about literature (the legality of language and the judicial chronicle as a theme...). Remembering this opens us up to thinking of the rationality of law as diluted rather than diluted by its connections with literature. Are we not driven again and again to live out the “imaginative forces of law” in order to achieve justice?