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Louis E. Wolcher, "A Meditation on Wittgenstein's Lecture on Ethics", Law and Critique IX/1 (1998), 3-35: My interpretation of Wittgenstein's Lecture on Ethics can be summarised in three propositions: (1) Wittgenstein's remarks say nothing "about" Ethics. Instead, they manifest Wittgenstein's radical predisposition to withhold his Ethical approval from texts which canonise or demonise particular, and therefore contingent, states of affairs. These states of affairs and ethical texts are describable as facts, whereas Wittgenstein wants it to be known that his sense of the word "Ethics" is unsayable. (2) Although it does not make any sort of claim about the meaning of the word "Ethics", the lecture nonetheless does offer itself as an ethical deed. This deed comes out in Wittgenstein's closing expression of personal respect for the human tendency to use ethical language to express ethical judgments, even though he classifies as nonsense all of what people say about the Ethical. I compare Wittgenstein's philosophy of Ethics with his philosophy of mathematics to clarify this aspect of my interpretation. 3) To respect something is to judge it worthy of respect. But what does it mean to valorise a tendency without also valorising particular manifestations of the tendency? Wittgenstein's respect for the general human tendency to talk ethics is ethically questionable because it either seems to embrace, indiscriminately, some horrific particular manifestations of the human tendency to talk ethics, or else it comes across as a vapid gesture whereby Wittgenstein the man weakly tries to attach himself to the ethical impulse in humanity, while all the while remaining coldly aloof from what people actually do when they give in to the impulse. e-mail: wolcher@u.washington.edu

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

Julie Wallbank, "An Unlikely Match? Foucault and the Lone Mother", Law and Critique IX/1 (1998), 59-88: This article is concerned with evaluating the usefulness of Foucault's discourse theory in relation to the study of how lone mothers might make sense of and negotiate their lives within and through the network of power relations as disseminated through discourse. I argue that despite its strident critics, Foucauldian analysis is politically relevant and has utility for feminism in that it allows for small scale, in depth consideration of discourse, power relations and the subject. I consider some of the contemporary discourses surrounding one case in particular, that of Heidi Colwell, who had left her two year old daughter "home alone" whilst she went to work each day. I reveal the complexity and diversity of the relations between the lone mother and the discourses that constitute her. The latter part of the article examines the contemporary political significance of needs discourse and argues that the quantitative framework of needs interpretation is inadequate to address the needs of lone mothers. The article concludes by advocating for reform of social policy and family law so that the needs of lone mothers and their children are taken into consideration and responded to in a way that is more beneficial to women and their families. email: j.wallbank@la.ac.uk

Janice Richardson, "Jamming the Machines? "Woman" in the Work of Irigaray And Deleuze", Law and Critique IX/1 (1998), 89-115: This paper addresses the question: "What is at stake in the different approaches of Irigaray and Deleuze over the meaning of 'woman'"? It considers the relationship between theory and practice to examine how both view their theoretical interventions in terms of political struggle, which challenge traditional conceptions of "the political". Both have been influenced by the events of May '68 and the rejection of a model in which "theory" is to dictate "practice". This is mirrored by the way in which each re-evaluates "the body".

Maria Aristodemou, "Law and Desire in Measure for Measure", Law and Critique IX/1 (1998), 117-140: Measure for Measure is often referred to as a play about the concept of justice and its relationship to mercy. However, in contrast to early critics' concern with male definitions of power, kingship, politics and history, I aim to address the concepts of justice and mercy as they pertain to issues of sexuality, desire, marriage, the home and the mastered. By exposing and exploiting the rhetorical excess and ambiguities in the text, I rebut interpretations of the play as teaching that "law must be tempered with mercy" or that marriage represents a just distribution of the constant exchanges of bodies. I focus in particular on sexual transgression as a source of resistance and social instability giving rise to surveillance; law's policing of desire and the mutual dependence between desire and law; on the role of women as objects of exchange and on possible signs of female resistance in the text; and on contrasting images of marriage from securing self-fulfilment, to an approximation of justice, to another form of social control silencing men and women and guaranteeing hierarchical divisions. The play ends with multiple weddings, but the frequent equation of marriage with death hints at the possible end of desire and undermines the conclusions that either justice has been achieved or that it will last.

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