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Deborah
Charles Publications
Law and Critique
Volume VIII no.2, Autumn 1997
SPECIAL ISSUE: "STAGING THE LAW"
Elena Loizidou, "A Phantasmatic Moment: The Defence of In-Sanity",
Law and Critique VIII/2 (1997), 115-140: The article problematises
the defence of insanity. It re-visits and re-examines debates criticising
the defence and it re-visits and re-examines how the defence defines the
criminally insane. In its re-visitation it opens up the space to read the
defence as a linguistic construction that frames the criminally insane offender.
It reads the framing or the invention of the criminally insane as a process
where criminal law or rather the language of criminal law abstracts the
actions of the insane defender and relocates them into the empty category
of the defective mind. This process is read as a misappropriation of the
generic term of justice for it displaces it to the space of justice as law.
In its conclusion it attempts to re-think this movement, this re-location
and its possibilities; in other words it attempts to imagine how the actions
of the criminally insane could be read by law otherwise, as potentialities
of the accused's subjectivity, as a movement towards an ethical dimension
of law. e-mail address: e.loizidou@lancaster.ac.uk
Angus McDonald, "The New Beauty of a Sum of Possibilities",
Law and Critique VIII/2 (1997), 141-159: This paper argues for the
continuing significance of the critique of urbanism advanced by the
Situationist International. The city, or more abstractly, the urban,
is located as the site of a struggle between coerced order and anarchy,
exemplified in five brief investigations. The opinion of the Scottish enlightenment
figure, Lord Kames, that the city is an evil, is contrasted with
the view of Roland Barthes that the city be considered as poetic,
ludic and erotic. The analysis of Venice and Thomas More's Amaurot,
capital city of Utopia, advanced by Lewis Mumford is employed to
clarify an idealism and a materialism of the city. The Situationist critique
of the city, particularly the work of Guy Debord, is identified as
establishing the concepts of the quotidian or everyday life, the urban,
and psychogeography, as developments out of the project of surrealism.
What the Situationists struggled against was a city of domestication, pacification
and suburbanisation, exemplified in the language of Athenian tragedy by
the fate of the Furies, the Eumenides in the Oresteia,
who surrender their passion to the order of law, thereby stabilising the
community identity. The vitality of the Situationist perspective is proposed,
against efforts to consign it to history.
"Staging the Law"
Paul Raffield, "The Separate Art Worlds of Dreamland and Drunkenness:
Elizabethan Revels at the Inns Of Court", Law and Critique VIII/2
(1997), 163-188: This paper examines the conflicting interests of Apollo
and Dionysis, as represented by the extraordinary Inns' of Court Christmas
Revels, held at the Inner Temple in 1561 and at Gray's Inn in 1594.
During these prolonged periods of fasting, the Revellers create a microcosmic
Utopian State, in which the primitive life-force of Dionysus is tempered
by the ordered dreamland of Apollo. Destructive natural forces are
contained and repressed by the imposition of laws. Gerard Legh's The
Accedens of Armory and William Dugdale's Origines Juridiciales
provide the source material for the Inner Temple Revels, and Gesta Grayorum
is an anonymous account of the Gray's Inn Revels. Nietzsche's The Birth
of Tragedy provides the theoretical background to the comparison made
in this paper between the Apollonian world of pictures and the mystical
cheer of Dionysus. The arcane rules governing feasting and the Revels attempt
to resolve the conflict between order and freedom: the compelling
rights and duties of the individual citizen on the one hand, and the interests
of the State on the other. The Revels provide striking visual images of
virtue and honour. These images are symbols not only of the law's power
and fairness, but also of the patriarchy which the law seeks to uphold,
and of the unchanging certainties which that patriarchy represents.
Ian Ward, "A Kingdom for a Stage, Princes to Act: Shakespeare and
the Art of Government", Law and Critique VIII/2 (1997), 189-213:
This article attempts to reveal the insights which can be gained from an
interdisciplinary study of law, literature and history. It takes a series
of Shakespeare's plays and suggests the extent to which their study can
illustrate, not just our understanding of constitutional thought in Shakespeare's
time, but also the textuality of our present constitutional order. In particular,
it suggests that the way in which Shakespeare addresses the art of government,
and its description on the stage, reveals a more ready recognition that
government is ultimately a matter of art and theatre. The first part of
the essay addresses contemporary understandings of government as a form
of art. The second part then introduces a number of Shakespeare's magistrates
and monarchs. The third part suggests that extent to which the acceptance
of government as art and theatre effects a rewriting of Shakespeare's constitution.
Finally, the conclusion emphasises the degree to which a better appreciation
of Shakespeare's constitution, as art, can inform us as to the aesthetic
nature of our present constitutional order.
David Seymour, "Letter From Shylock. Reflections on my Case (Authorship
attributed to Shylock "the Jew"", Law and Critique
VIII/2 (1997), 215-222: This paper consists of a correspondence written
by Shylock to his friend Tubal following his court appearance against Antonio,
the Merchant of Venice. In this invaluable document, Shylock reflects
on the events that led to the trial and the trial's outcome. Discussing
such matters as the relationship of law and morality, justice
and love, society and community, Shylock demonstrates
an astute grasp of the issues involved and his acknowledgement of the role
he himself played in his own downfall. Written at the dawn of modernity,
this letter offers an unique insight into the emergence and potentiality
of the specifically modern phenomenon of anti-Semitism.
Christos Tsaitouridis, "Leviathan - Moby Dick: The Physics of The
State", Law and Critique VIII/2 (1997), 223-243: This paper
attempts a comparative reading of a political treatise and a novel which
share similar textual characteristics and a "mighty theme": the
whale, Leviathan and its relationship to man. In Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan
and Herman Melville's Moby Dick the title of the book exceeds both
the more "literal" subtitle and the text; also it implies a structural
bond between the name and the body. The primacy of the body
(symbolised by the almighty Leviathan) over the soul and the spirit is the
main principle of the authors' dramatic and powerful critique of Metaphysics.
The positivities of space and the present are juxtaposed to
the eschatology of Christianity. Leviathan also subverts the traditional
hierarchy of means and ends in political theory, thus becoming the
foundation of a radical critique of representation in law. The leviathanian
legality is utterly corporeal and therefore it can be comprehended
by the axioms of what we could call Physics of the State, for which law
and force are in principle indistinguishable. Hobbes presents the law
as an order of means, an exteriority, as his insistence on the "artificiality"
of the legal order suggests.
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.
This issue is available to individuals
ordering directly for £5.95 (incl. surface postage) and to institutions
for £19.95. For an order form, click on individuals
or institutions
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