During the twentieth century, the state founded on constitutional law was the form of organization that best ensured the participation of citizens in the construction of the legal discourse. This model also ensured the respect of a wide range of constitutionally guaranteed principles and values. In this model, the theory of law places the citizen in the role of observer: a form of epistemologically active subjectivity, always able to modify or intervene on legal reality, participating in the democratic game of law.
However, the crisis of state organization and twentieth-century models of sovereignty, the fragmentation of legal systems, and the advent of the ‘society of images’ have ended up relegating the recipient to a passive state. Just like a spectator at a theatre, the citizen today helplessly witnesses the evolution of law that increasingly resembles a grand mise-en-scène.
This brief essay reflects on the passage between these forms of subjectivity and on the future of a spectatorial law in which the legal discourse opens up to cultural contaminations and semantic and theoretical hybridizations.