Discourse on the methods of private international law (legal forms of inter-altarity).

Summary It is striking that the political debate in Western democracies, now polarized around identity, whether collective or individual, tends to borrow legal terms and, with them, new forms of dogma. In this respect, the law is increasingly called upon in a defensive capacity, to produce a discourse legitimizing the exclusion of otherness. To return, today, to the methods of private international law, is thus part of the questioning that all the social and human sciences must carry out on the modes of reception of the difference of cultures, practices or forms of life. Deeply involved in the processes of transformation that are referred to under the now very controversial label of globalization, private international law lends itself in particular to a questioning of the vision of the world that it carries. While the various legal concepts that are specifically related to its disciplinary field migrate to the political arena, in the service of a defensive or offensive cause, protector of threatened values or promoter of enlightenment, insular or of openness, depending on the case, it is crossed in return by the oppositions that clash around the place of foreignness within the national society (Editor's summary).