His master's voice: H.L.A. Hart and Lacanian discourse theory

Law and Critique

Volumn 18, Issue 1, 2007, Pages 117-142

  Schroeder, Jeanne L ^a  

^a YESHIVA UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

Discourse; H.L.A. Hart; Lacan; Master slave dialectic; Morality; Objet petit a; Positivism

Indexed keywords

EID: 34248363269     PISSN: 09578536     EISSN: 15728617     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1007/s10978-006-9005-z     Document Type: Article

References (127)

1. Hart was born in 1907 and died in 1992 while Lacan was born in 1901 and died in 1981.
2. N. Lacey, A Life of H.L.A. Hart: The Nightmare and the Noble Dream (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).
3. I explore this in J Schroeder, 'Beautiful Dreamer' (book review of Lacey, supra n. 2), University of Colorado Law Review 77 (2006), 803-830.
4. E. Roudinesco, Jacques Lacan: Outline of a Life, History of a System of Thought (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997).
5. Lacey, supra n. 2, at 3-4.
6. See, for example, A. Sokal and J. Bricmont, Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science (New York: Picador, 1998).
7. H. Hart, 'American Jurisprudence Through English Eyes: The Nightmare and the Noble Dream', Georgia Law Review 5 (1977), 969-989.
8. J. Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book III: The. Psychoses 1955-56 (New York: W.W. Norton Company, 1993), 86 (hereinafter, 'Lacan, Seminar III').
9. J. Schroeder, The Triumph of Venus: The Erotics of the Market (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 203.
10. H. Hart, 'Positivism and the Separation of Law and Morals', Harvard Law Review 71 (1958), 593-629, at 618.
11. J. Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959-1960, J.-A. Miller, ed., D. Porter, trans. (1986).
12. J. Schroeder, The Four Discourses of Law: Or, Turning Law Inside-Out (work in process, 2006).
13. Lacey, supra n. 2, at 288.
14. Schroeder, supra n. 8, at 45-47.
15. See J. Schroeder, 'Unnatural Rights: Hegel and Intellectual Property', University of Miami Law Review 60 (2006), 453-503.
16. H. Hart, The Concept of Law (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994, 2nd edn), 147.
17. J. Schroeder, 'The Lacanomics of Apples and Oranges: A Speculative Analysis of the Economic Concept of Commensurability', Yale Journal of Law Humanities 15 (2003), 347-393, at 362-364, 69.
18. Lon Fuller disparages Hart's claims to description on at the grounds that Hart himself conflates the descriptive and the normative and that his description is wrong. L. Fuller, 'Positivism and Fidelity to Law - A Reply to Professor Hart', Harvard Law Review 71 (1958), 630-672, at 631-632.
19. Hart, supra n. 9, at 594.
20. J. Coleman, Markets, Morals and the Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 11.
21. Hart, supra n. 9, at 594.
22. Ibid., at 598.
23. Hart, supra n. 15, at 7-8.
24. Hart, supra n. 9, at 598.
25. Ibid. As West describes the Martian position:If we 'fuse' law and morality, if we fuse the 'is' of the positive law with the 'ought' of moral ideals, we will not be able to criticize what is by reference to what ought to be. If we think erroneously that law and justice - that which is posited and that which ought to be - are one, we will not be able to identify, much less rectify, those laws that are unjust.R. West, Three Positivisms', Boston University Law Review 78 (1998), 791-812, at 793.
26. Hart, supra n. 9, at 618.
27. Ibid., at 620.
28. Ibid., at 602.
29. Hart, supra n. 9, at 602-603.
30. Hart, supra n. 15, at 10, 20-24. See also Hart, supra n. 9, at 603.
31. Hart, supra n. 15, at 28.
32. Ibid., at 11-12.
33. Hart asserts a distinction between 'being obliged' and 'being obligated' to do something. Ibid., at v, 66, 83-85.1 doubt whether the two expressions have different connotations. Nevertheless, Hart's distinction between must and should is valid.
34. Ibid., at 7.
35. I explain my reasoning in Schroeder, supra n. 3.
36. Schroeder, supra n. 11.
37. Lacey, supra n. 2, at 337.
38. Hart, supra n. 15, at 81.
39. Ibid., at 81.
40. Ibid., at 83.
41. Ibid., at 84, 90.
42. Ibid., at 84-85.
43. Ibid., at 85.
44. ibid.
45. Hart, supra n. 15, at 117. As Peter Fitzpatrick argues, this passage is inexplicable given that Hart says that 'the internal aspect of rules [is] 'distinctive... of human thought, speech and action'. P. Fitzpartick, The Mythology of Modern Law (London: Routledge, 1992), 200. Accordingly, when Hart calls people lacking an internal perspective 'sheeplike' he is not merely resorting to cliche. By his own definition, they are not fully human.
46. Hart, supra n. 15, at 94-97.
47. Ibid., at 94.
48. See J. Schroeder, The Four Discourses of Law: A Lacanian Analysis of Legal Practice and Scholarship', Texas Law Review 79 (2002), 15-98 (hereinafter, Schroeder, The Four Discourses').
49. Schroeder, supra n. 11, and J. Schroeder, The Stumbling Block: Freedom, Rationality, and Legal Scholarship', William Mary Law Review 44 (2002), 263-374 (hereinafter, Schroeder, The Stumbling Block').
50. B. Fink, The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 130. J. Lacan, Le Séminaire de Jacques Lacan, Livre XVII: L'envers de la psychanalyse (Paris: Editions de Seuil, 1991), 20, 90-91. (I work with a draft of Russell Grigg's English translation. At his request, citations are to the French edition).
51. '[W]e no longer know it now except in a considerable modified form.' Lacan, supra n. 48 at 203.
52. See also B. Fink and M. Bracher, 'On the Psychological and Social Functions of Language: Lacan's Theory of the Four Discourses', in Lacanian Theory of Discourse: Subject, Structure, and Society (New York: New York University Press, 1994) (hereinafter, Theory of Discourse'), 107-128, at 117.
53. Fink, supra n. 48, at 131, Roudinesco, supra n. 5, at 346.
54. Fink, supra n. 48, at 130.
55. Ibid., at 131 (citations omitted).
56. R. Salecl, 'Deference to the Great Other: The Discourse of Education', in 'Theory of Discourse', supra n. 49, 163-175, at 163.
57. See also Lacan, supra n. 48, at 48.
58. Ibid., at 20-21. "The slave knows lots of things, but what he knows even better still is what the master wants, even if the latter does not know it...' Ibid., at 34.
59. Ibid., at 24.
60. Salecl, supra n. 53, at 163.
61. Hart, supra n. 15, at 114-117.
62. I explicate the relationship of the master-slave dialectic to Hegel's theory of recognition in Schroeder, supra n. 8, at 58-64.
63. G. Hegel, Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977, 5th edn) (1952), 112-113.
64. Ibid., at 113.
65. Ibid.
66. Ibid., at 115.
67. J. Lacan, Écrits: A Selection (New York: W.W. Norton Company, 1977), 149.
68. W. Richardson, 'Lacan and the Subject of Psychoanalysis', in Interpreting Lacan: Psychiatry and the Humanities 6, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), 51-74, at 54 (quoting Lacan, supra n. 63). As Richardson explains. The meaning of this chain does not "consist" in any one of these elements but rather "insists" in the whole, where the "whole" may be taken to be the entire interlude as described, ...' Ibid., at 55.
69. B. Fink, Lacan to the Letter: Reading Lacan Closely (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 80.
70. Richardson, supra n. 64 at 54.
71. Lacan, supra n. 63, at 154.
72. For an account of the retroactive establishment of determinate meaning, see B. Fink, 'Reading "The Instance of the Letter in the Unconscious'", in Fink, supra n. 65, 63-105.
73. Although we experience it in this way, 'the Real is not a hard external kernel which resists symbolization, but the product of a deadlock in the process of symbolization'. S. Zizek, The Indivisible Remainder: An Essay on Schelling and Related Matters (London: Verso, 1996), 110 (hereinafter, Zizek, The Indivisible Remainder').
74. As explained by Zizek: '[I]n order for the series of signifiers to signify something (to have a determinate meaning), there must be a signifier (a "something") that stands for "nothing", ... whose very presence stands for the absence of meaning.' S. Zizek, The Abyss of Freedom (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1997), 39 (hereinafter, Zizek, 'Abyss of Freedom').
75. See also S. Zizek, Enjoy Your Symptom!: Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out (New York: Routledge, 1992), 102-103 (hereinafter, Zizek, 'Enjoy Your Symptom').
76. Fink, supra n. 48, at 75.
77. C. Dickens, Oliver Twist (New York London: W.W. Norton Co., 1993), 347.
78. W. Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act V, Scene 5.
79. As Zizek says There is thus no reason to be dismissive of the discourse of the Master ... [as] "authoritarian repression": the Master's gesture is the founding gesture of every social link.' S. Zizek, 'Four Discourses, Four Subjects', in Sic 2: Cogito and the Unconscious (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), 74-113, at 77.
80. See Schroeder, supra n. 8, at 246-249, 254.
81. See, for example, Bracher, supra n. 49, at 112.
82. Ibid., at 111-112; Zizek, Enjoy Your Symptom, supra n. 70, at 103.
83. Bracher, supra n. 49, at 112.
84. (Emphasis added) Schroeder, 'The Stumbling Block', supra n. 47, at 334.
85. Ibid.
86. 'With object a, Lacan felt he had made his most significant contribution to psychoanalysis.' Fink, supra n. 48, at 83.
87. Schroeder, The Four Discourses', supra n. 47, at 36.
88. See Zizek, 'Abyss of Freedom', supra n. 70, at 79.
89. S. Zizek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology (London: Verso, 1999), 107.
90. S. Zizek, The Plague of Fantasies (London: Verso, 1997), 81.
91. J. Schroeder and D. Carlson, 'The Essence of Right and the Appearance of Wrong: Metaphor and Metonymy in Law', Cardozo Law Review 24 (2003), 2481-2516.
92. Schroeder, The Four Discourses', supra n. 47, at 34.
93. Hart, supra n. 15, at 123.
94. 'Put shortly, the reason [for this open texture] because we are men, not gods.' Ibid.
95. Ibid.
96. Ibid., at 250-251.
97. B. Leiter, 'Beyond the Hart/Dworkin Debate: The Methodology Problem in Jurisprudence', Amercan Journal of Jurisprudence 48 (2003), 17-51, at 25.
98. B. Leiter, 'Legal Realism, Hard Positivism, and the Limits of Conceptual Analysis', in Hart's Postscript: Essays on the Postscript to the Concept of Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 355-370, at 356-359.
99. Lacan, supra n. 8, at 86.
100. The real is the sense that there is something on the other side of the boundaries to the symbolic and the imaginary. S. Zizek, Tarrying With the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994), 35-39 (hereinafter, Zizek, 'Tarrying With the Negative');
101. J.-A. Miller, 'Microscopia: An Introduction to the Reading of Television', in J. Lacan, Television: A Challenge to the Psychoanalytic Establishment (New York: W.W. Norton Company, 1990), xi-xxxi, at xxiv. The real is established only retroactively by the erection of the boundaries at the moment of the creation of the imaginary and the symbolic. We posit the existence of the 'lost' real by examining what seems to be clues, traces, stains left in the symbolic by its retreat. Zizek, 'Tarrying With the Negative', at 36-37.
102. Lacan makes this statement, specifically, about Woman (the feminine) who Lacan notoriously says does not exist and is not wholly within the symbolic order. J. Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XX: Encore, On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge 1972-1973 (New York: W.W. Norton Company, 1998), 73. As I explain elsewhere (J. Schroeder, 'Right is the Symptom of Law's Trauma' (unpublished manuscript 2004).
103. J. Schroeder and D. Carlson, 'Does God Exist?: Hegel and Things', The Journal of Culture and the Unconscious IV/1 (2005), 1-12) this can be generalized to the 'real'.
104. Ibid., at 118.
105. Fink, supra n. 48, at 132.
106. Lacan, supra n. 48, at 119;
107. Zizek, supra n. 74, at 78. It is called the university's discourse not because it should be spoken in universities, but because it is spoken there.
108. Fink, supra n. 48, at 132.
109. Bracher, supra n. 49, at 115;
110. Zizek, supra n. 74, at 78-79.
111. Fink, supra n. 48, at 8.
112. See also Lacan, supra n. 48, at 11
113. and Zizek, supra n. 74, at 78.
114. Schroeder, The Stumbling Block', supra n. 47, at 348.
115. Schroeder, The Four Discourses', supra n. 47, at 65.
116. Ibid.
117. Schroeder, The Four Discourses', supra n. 47, at 74-75.
118. Lacan's proposition that 'man's desire is the desire of the Other' specifically refers to hysteria, but hysteria is the characteristic human condition. See S. Zizek, 'The Indivisible Remainder', supra n. 69, at 167. The phrase is intentionally ambiguous: the subject desires the Other, desires to be desired by the Other and her desire is imposed upon her by the Other.
119. Zizek, 'Abyss of Freedom', supra n. 70, at 79.
120. See also, Lacan, supra n. 63, at 312.
121. Fink, Subject, supra n. 48, at 173. This can be expressed as 'the Big Other does not exist'.
122. Lacan, supra n. 48, at 74;
123. see also J.-A. Miller, 'Extimité', in Theory of Discourse', supra n. 49, 74-87,at 81.
124. Schroeder, The Stumbling Block', supra n. 47, at 337-338.
125. Schroeder, The Four Discourses', supra n. 47, at 75-76.
126. Ibid., at 83.
127. Ibid., at 76. For this reason, although the hysteric's discourse is critical, it also has a conservative element.