Hermes and Institutional Structures: An Essay on Dogmatic Communication

Abstract

The term ‘dogmatic’, having been deemed incompatible with modernity, has been banished; nevertheless, it is still used occasionally to describe either the religious vestiges of European textuality or certain totalitarian structures of discourse. Although it does not recognise the fecundity enjoyed by this term in the period preceding the twentieth century, and specifically its role in the emergence of a differentiated concept of law for each of a number of intertwined discourses (natural science, medicine, law, theology), the contemporary attitude does implicitly recognise that dogma harbours an obscure and compact phenomenon, which has to do with the power of speech and with the question of Reason or un-Reason in human communication.