Law and Critique Vol.VI no.2 [1995] LIVING ON: BORDERLINES -- LAW/HISTORY by WILLIAM P. MACNEtL* I. The Textual Twilight Zone This article 1 lives on, to paraphrase Derrida, a discursive borderline: that is, it explores a disciplinary frontier, patrols a textual boundary -- in this case, between the nominals of the parataxis "law/history'. Here, the punctuation of this paratactic construction literalises the figural limit be- tween law and history; for the virgule 2 of "law/history" both opens and occludes a gap, a space, a zone: a zone in which the nominals of the parataxis -- "law" and "history" -- are brought into a relationship of ad- jacency (and, hence, identity), but are, nonetheless, held in a state of dif- ferential tension. And it is this interplay between the binary of identity and difference which maps this zone; for these binary terms function as its co-ordinates, the intersection of which constitutes its nodal point, its point d'ancrage or, in a more explicitly Lacanian vein, its point de capiton. 8 But despite the navigational guidance which these co-ordinates provide, few (if any) mainstream jurists or historians -- or those hybrids, the legal historian -- have traversed this zone. For this is a zone of alterity, a zone * Faculty of Law, University of Hong Kong. 1 Versions of this article were delivered at a variety of venues: the 1993 Critical Legal Conference at New College, Oxford, as well as the Speakers' Programme of the Faculty of Law and the Department of Comparative Literature, Univer- sity of Hong Kong. My thanks to the respective organisers, particularly Ms. Suzanne Gibson (New College, Oxford) and Prof. Anthony Tatlow (University of Hong Kong). 2 For an analysis of the role of the virgule in post-modern thought, see Virgil Lokke, "The Naming of the Virgule in the Linguistic/Extralinguistic Binary", in G. Shapiro, ed., After the Future: Postmodern Times and Places (Albany, New York: State University of New York Press, 1990), 315-332. 3 Literally, "quilting point" around which meaning is stitched. See Jacques La- can, "The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious", Ecrits, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1977), 292-325.