[HOME] [BOOKS] [ORDERING] [JOURNALS] [ABSTRACTS] [LINKS] [SPECIAL OFFERS]

William MacNeil, "Law's Corpus Delicti: The Fantasmatic Body of Rights Discourse", Law and Critique IX/1 (1998), 37-57: This article poses the question "where is the body of rights?". So the project here is very different from, for example, critical legal, feminist or race theorists who would ask "whose body lies behind rights?". For this article eschews their determinate answers (of either the white, bourgeois patriarch or of commands, rules, norms) in favour of an indeterminacy which would locate the body of rights discourse as everywhere and nowhere, tracing each position but coming to rest over neither. This doubleness informs, and indeed enables the claims of rights discourse to be in everybody generally but nobody in particular. How this rhetorical contradiction is sustained - as everywhere and nowhere, as well as different and identical, even present and absent - will be explained in terms of the Lacanian formula for fantasy. This formula provides, this article argues, a blueprint to the "legal unconscious", mapping its cadastres, fixing its boundaries. But more than that, this formula may provide a new direction out of the current impasses which afflict rights discourse (is it a symptom or solution to the ills which afflict the body politic?), enabling critique to reclaim it as its own. This article concludes by arguing for such a reclamation, one which avoids the deadend of modernity: of both the fetishistic espousal of rights by liberalism or their sceptical denial by critical legal studies et. al. Where then the fantasmatic body of rights - which this article calls Law's corpus delicti - leads jurisprudence is towards a postmodern theory of rights. e-mail: WMACNEIL@hkucc.hku.hk

[HOME] [BOOKS] [ORDERING] [JOURNALS] [ABSTRACTS] [LINKS] [SPECIAL OFFERS]