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Adam Gearey, "'Mad and Delirious Words': Feminist
Theory and Critical Legal Studies in the work of Peter Goodrich", Feminist
Legal Studies VI/1 (1998), 121-133: This paper attempts to locate Oedipus
Lex and The Courts of Love within Goodrich's oeuvre to date,
and to argue that feminist critical theory is essential to Goodrich's attempt
to create a genealogy of the common law. This genealogy is both backward
and forward looking: it recovers a memory of a different understanding of
law, and invents a different fate for the legal subject and the future of
the institution. It draws on a form of psychoanalysis that is influenced
by continental thought, in particular that of Luce Irigaray and Pierre Legendre,
and concentrates on a nexus of concerns that focus on the image and the
figure of the female as opening a critical space in law's history and traditions.
This is a scholarship that reveals what was lost or buried deep in the constitution
of legal modernity; the 'minor jurisdictions' exemplified by the Courts
of Love. At stake is an alternative form of legal discourse that recognises
that human relationships have to be founded on an ethics of difference that
recornises the eroticised, gendered body as much as the immortal soul. e-mail:
A.D.Gearey@ukc.ac.uk
Adam Gearey, "Finnegans Wake and the Law of Love.
The Aporia of Eros and Agape", Law and Critique
VIII/2 (1997), 245-267: Finnegans Wake can be read as an engagement
with the roots of the Western legal tradition and the refiguring of the
law of love given in the Gospel. The Wake presents the law
as an aporia between Eros and Agape, an irresolvable
contradiction between the bodily and the spiritual, the word and the text.
Finnegans Wake is a testimony to the female messiah whose coming
is a celebration of a law which is linked to the mother and the daughter
rather than the father and the son. Thinking the aporetic law of love opens
Christianity to an alterity that challenges the conventional
construction of the theological/legal tradition which follows St.Thomas
Aquinas and develops new possibilities for contemporary endeavours to
invent an ethic of alterity. e-mail: A.D.Gearey@ukc.ac.uk
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