Law's corpus delicti: the fantasmatic body of rights discourse

Law and Critique

Volumn 9, Issue 1, 1998, Pages 37-57

  Macneil, William ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF HONG KONG   (Hong Kong)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 54649083697     PISSN: 09578536     EISSN: 15728617     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1007/BF02699907     Document Type: Article

References (70)

1. J. Derrida, Positions , trld. A. Bass (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1981), 26.
2. J. Lacan, "The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious", in Ecrits: A Selection, trld. A. Sheridan (New York: Norton & Co., 1977), 292-325.
3. J. Lacan, "The Signification of the Phallus", ibid.
4. J. Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (London: Routledge, 1997),
5. and Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex (New York: Routledge, 1993).
6. S. Freud, "Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Group Psychology and Other Works", in The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trld. J. Strachey, collaboration A. Freud, assisted by A. Strachey and A. Tyson (London: Hogarth, 1959), 7-66.
7. J. Lacan, "The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience", supra, n.2.
8. Supra, n.3. See also J. Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. J.-A. Miller; trld. A. Sheridan (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1977);
9. J. Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book I: Freud's Paper on Technique, 1953-1954, trld. J. Forrester (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988);
10. J. Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book II: The Ego in Freud's Theory and Technique of Psycho-Analysis, 1954-1955, trld. S. Tomaselli (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
11. A. Kojeve, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit, assembled by R. Queasneau, ed. A. Bloom, trld. J.H. Nichols (New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1969).
12. G.W.F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind, trld. J.B. Baillie (London: Geo. Alien & Unwin, 1931).
13. Supra n.2.
14. Supra n.3.
15. J. Derrida, "The Purveyor of Truth", trld. A. Bass, in J. Muller and W. Richardson, The Purloined Poe: Lacan, Derrida and Psychoanalytic Reading (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1988), 173-212.
16. J. Flax, "Signifying the Father's Desire: Lacan in a Feminist's Gaze", in Criticism and Lacan: Essays and Dialogue on Language, Structure and the Unconscious, ed. P. Colm Hogan and L. Pandit (Athens, Ga.: U.Ga.Press, 1990), 109-122.
17. J. Flax, for example, writes in a highly satiric vein: "The notion of a 'phallus' as universal signifier calls upon the ineluctable equivalence of 'phallus' and 'penis' in ordinary language. Despite Lacan's claim that the 'phallus' exists purely upon a symbolic plane and that the relationship between the signifier and the signified is somewhat arbitrary, in the case of the 'phallus' this is clearly not true. ... Would we be persuaded by Lacan if he claimed that the mother lacks, say, 'a mouse'? Or that her desire is for the child to be the 'waxpaper'?" See Flax, "Signifying the Father's Desire: Lacan in a Feminist's Gaze", ibid., 116.
18. J. Mitchell, Psychoanalysis and Feminism (London: Alien Lane, 1974) and
19. Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the Ecole Freudienne, ed. J. Mitchell and J. Rose (London: Macmillan, 1982).
20. See, for example, supra, n.13; and N. Hartsock, "Rethinking Modernism: Minority v. Majority Theories", Cultural Critique 7 (1987). 187-206.
21. J. Grbich, "The Body in Legal Theory", in At the Boundaries of Law: Feminism and Legal Theory, ed. M. Fineman and N. Thomadsen (London: Routledge, 1991), 61-76.
22. S. Wright, "Patriarchal Feminism and the Law of the Father", Feminist Legal Studies 1/2 (1993), 115-140.
23. A. Young, Femininity in Dissent (London: Routledge, 1990);
24. and Imagining Crime: Textual Outlaws and Criminal Conversations (London: Sage, 1996).
25. J. Derrida, "Differance", in Margins of Philosophy, tria. A. Bass (Chicago: University Press, 1982), 1-28.
26. Consider, for example, Christine di Stefano who, in summarising Nancy Hartsock, writes: "Why is it, just at the moment in Western history when women have begun to speak for themselves and on behalf of their subjectivities, that the concept of the subject and the possibility of discovering/creating a liberating "truth" become suspect?". See C. di Stefano, "Dilemmas of Difference", in Feminism IPostmodernism, éd. L. Nicholson (London: Routledge, 1990), 75.
27. A further danger is of the move to disembodiment in postmodernity is that it merely reinstalls men's embodied experience, predicated as it is upon claims of "out-of-body" neutrality, objectivity, etc., will continue to define those of women.
28. J. Butler, "The Lesbian Phallus and the Morphological Imaginary", in Bodies that Matter: The Discursive Limits of "Sex", supra n.4.
29. Freud, supra n.5.
30. F. Jameson, The Prison-House of Language: A Critical Account of Structuralism and Russian Formalism (Princeton: University Press, 1972).
31. J. Derrida, Of Grammatology, trld. G. Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 158.
32. J.R. Searle, Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language (Cambridge: University Press, 1969).
33. J.L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Oxford: University Press, 1976).
34. Butler, supra n.4.
35. R. Jakobson, "Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasie Disturbances", Selected Writings, vol.2 (The Hague: Mouton, 1971), 239-259.
36. The right to privacy is, of course, the most controversial right in the American Bill of Rights, largely because it does not actually appear in the Constitution, but owes its existence, rather, to judicial gloss of the Fifth, Ninth and Fourteenth Amendments. The leading cases include: Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U.S. 479; Loving v. Virginia, 388 U.S. 1, 18 L.Ed. 2d 1010, 87 S.Ct. 1817; Roev. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973); Careyv. Population. Services International,
37. U.S. 678 (1977); Bowers v. Hardwick,478 U.S. 186, 92 L.Ed. 140, 106 S.Ct. 2841.
38. C.A. MacKinnon, Toward A Feminist Theory of the State (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989).
39. The long tradition of Natural Law thinking on rights is marked fay a profound universalising, hence disembodying, tendency. Natural Law's rival, Positivism, is curiously ad idem here. Whether in Hohfeld's binary schema, Kelsen's normative hierarchy or Hart's rule network, rights discourse is characterised, first and foremost as a system, a system in which the subject only figures as some disembodied agency. Finally, the contemporary formulation of liberalism -Ronald Dworkin's "rights thesis" -situates the individualistic, autonomous and disembodied subject of the classical liberalism of Kant and Mill at the very centre of the legal system which "takes rights seriously".
40. For the engagement of Lacan by legal theory, see D. Caudill, Lacan and the Subject of Law: Toward a Psychoanalytic Critical Legal Theory (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1997);
41. A. Pottage, "Crime and Culture: The Relevance of the Psychoanalytical", Modern Law Review 55/3 (1992), 421438;
42. A. Barron, "Citizenship and the Politics of Identity", in Closure and Critique: New Directions in Legal Theory, ed. A. Nome (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1993), 80-100;
43. and W. MacNeil, "Law/History - Living On: Borderlines", Law and Critique 6/2 (1995), 167-191.
44. J. Lacan, "The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience", supra n.2.
45. See S. Freud, "Civilisation and Its Discontents", in The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol.XXI (1927-31), supra n.5.
46. As do, for example, fantasies of castration which Laplanche and Pontalis link to sexual difference. See J. Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis, "Fantasy and the Origins of Sexuality", in Formations of Fantasy, ed. V. Burgin, J. Donald and C. Kaplan (London, 1986), 5-27.
47. This distinction is drawn by Sir Isaiah Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty (Oxford: University Press, 1969). Negative liberties take the form of freedoms which negate the power of the state, and hold the social at bay: privacy is the classic negative freedom. Positive liberties posit some social good or value which, in turn, enable freedom: the rights to food, housing and education are classic positive liberties. The latter assumes a state structure (and, thus, is compatible with social welfare systems of governance) while the former is hostile to the state (hence, best suited to laissez faire societies).
48. Supra n.6.
49. Ibid.
50. D. Kennedy, "The Structure of Blackstone's Commentaries", Buffalo Law Review 28 (1979), 205.
51. Berlin, supra n.38.
52. P. Williams, "Alchemical Notes: Reconstructing Ideals from Deconstructed Rights", Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review 22 (1997), 401-433.
53. K. Crenshaw, "Demarginalising the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics", University of Chicago Legal Forum 1 (1989), 139-67.
54. See D. Kennedy and P. Gabel, "Roll Over Beethoven", Stanford Law Review 36 (1984), 1-56.
55. E. Laclau and C. Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics (London: Verso Press, 1985).
56. L. Althusser, "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses", in Lenin and Philosophy, trld. B. Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), 127-188.
57. Supra n.2.
58. Ibid.
59. Ibid.; Lacan, Four Fundamentals of Psychoanalysis, supra n.7; and Lacan, The Seminar, Books I and II, supra n.7.
60. Supra n.2.
61. Ibid.; Lacan, Four Fundamentals of Psychoanalysis, supra n.7; and Lacan, The Seminar, Books I and II, supra n.7. Other significant contributions on fantasy in a post-Lacanian vein include: E. Cowie, "Fantasia", m/f 9 (1984), 71-105; R. Mocnik, "Ideology and Fantasy", in The Althusserian Legacy, éd. E.A Kaplan and M. Sprinker (London: Verso, 1993), 139-157;
62. K. Silverman, Male Subjectivity at the Margins (New York: Routledge, 1992). The classic Freudian account of fantasy is to be found in "A Child is Being Beaten", vol.17 and "Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood", vol. 11 of the Standard Edition, supra n.5.
63. See S. Zizek, For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor (London: Verso, 1991).
64. See not only Zizek, but S. Freud, "On the Psychical Mechanism of Hysterical Phenomenon", Standard Edition, 2; and "Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria", Standard Edition, 7, supra n.5. For a feminist critique of hysteria,
65. see S. Freud, In Dora's Case: Freud-Hysteria-Feminism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985).
66. K. Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy , Vol.1, trld. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling, ed. Frederick Engels (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1954-59);
67. see also S. Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989).
68. R. Salecl, "Why is Woman a Symptom of Rights", in The Spoils of Freedom: Psychoanalysis and Feminism After the Fall of Socialism (London: Routledge, 1994), 155 n.9.
69. S. Zizek, Enjoy Your Symptom! Jacques Lacan In Hollywood and Out (London: Koutledge, 1992).
70. For a practical application of this dictum, see W. MacNeil, "Enjoy Your Rights! Three Cases from the Postcolonial Commonwealth", Public Culture 9 (1997), 377-393.