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Christopher Stanley, "Antigone Within the Walls of House", International Journal for the Semiotics of Law / Revue Internationale de Sémiotique Juridique Vol. X no.30 (1997), 231-259: This essay is part of a project in which I am working toward the 'grounding' of a cultural politics of difference on an ethics of alterity (respect). This is a violence involved here operative at a number of levels. Principally, I am interested in utilising transgression as a strategy to interrupt the tyranny of repressive representation (law and society) in a move toward a non-violent configuration of justice in community. In this essay I argue for the relation between the political and the ethical to be implicated in this resistant strategy whilst maintaining awareness of the making of 'work' of justice and community. In utilising the figure of 'Antigone' mourning beyond the city wall of the polis and the art-installation 'House' , I am able to argue that mourning is a significant move in the articulation of this strategy in the sense of being a communal act of notifying the absence of presence and the closure of return. Mourning 'Before the Law' in the non-coercive act of remembrance for the silenced and in the recognition of the lack between selves in the sharing of difference (being in common as being in-difference) involves a compearance Before the Law (the tyranny of singular judgements premised on universal norms - the injustice of the Law of the polis) and that this 'sharing of voices' on a space Before the Law (the heterotopia, the benign space of proximity) signifies a politics of transgression grounded on an ethics of difference.



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