Winter 2003
Volume 29, Number 2

Distrust Quotations in Latin
by Peter Goodrich

The history of Latin is also the history of the ignorance of Latin. For much of the history of the West, Latin was a synonym for reason (ratio studiorum), for culture (latinitas), and for law (ratio scripta).

See Also

Gyan Prakash: The Modern Nation's Return in the Archaic (Spring 1997)

Judith Butler: Sovereign Performatives in the Contemporary Scene of Utterance (Winter 1997)

Caroline Bynum: Why All the Fuss about the Body? A Medievalist's Perspective (Fall 1995)

To be literate was to be competent in Latin, and it was Latin that distinguished laity from literati, peasantry from nobility and gentility, the unlearned--imperiti--from the professions. Clearly the class of those who did not know Latin was always much larger than that of those who had studied it and greater still by no mean measure, as Waquet's recent study suggests, than that of those who were competent to read it. Latin was the great divide; it was the mark of legitimacy, the harbinger of divinity, legality, and scientific truth. Latin gave western metaphysics its form, and it was as such first and foremost a sign rather than a competence, an emblem of culture rather than an explicit practice of knowing. The first avenue to explore in addressing the question of the significance of the "exhaustion" or malaise of Latin is thus political. What hierarchy did Latin shore up, and what liberation comes or is coming in the wake of its seeming desuetude? Inversely, what is lost with the decay of Latin as a living pedagogic form? At some point in the future will there be, as history suggests, another Renaissance, another humanism or a return to the classics? Secondly, what is the effect of the loss of Latin upon the discourse of the public sphere? Insofar as law represents the last instance of veridical discourse within the contemporary public sphere--it is at least the most serious form of social self-reflection--what does the decline of Latin mean for the validity of laws?

Peter Goodrich is professor of Law at Cardozo Law School in New York. His books include Legal Discourse: Studies in Rhetoric, Linguistics and Legal Analysis (1989); Languages of Law: From Logics of Memory to Nomadic Masks (1990); Oedipus Lex: Psychoanalysis, History, Law (1995), and Law in the Courts of Love: Literature and Other Minor Jurisprudences (1996). He is currently at work on a book entitled Laws of Friendship.

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