Lacan and the Subject of Law

Lacan and the Subject of Law
Author: David Stanley Caudill
Publisher: Humanities Press International
Total Pages: 230
Release: 1997
Genre: Critical legal studies
ISBN:

Application of Lacan's theory to some concrete legal problems follows in the second part of the book with a series of studies including child abuse hysteria, land use debates, the critique of legal ideology; and religion in law and politics.

The Subject of Lacan

The Subject of Lacan
Author: Kareen Ror Malone
Publisher: SUNY Press
Total Pages: 408
Release: 2000-01-01
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 9780791446249

An accessible introduction to the psychoanalytic theories of Jacques Lacan, intended especially for American psychologists but useful to anyone interested in the work of this important thinker.

The Four Lacanian Discourses

The Four Lacanian Discourses
Author: Jeanne Lorraine Schroeder
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 206
Release: 2008-08-18
Genre: Law
ISBN: 1134039735

This book proposes a taxonomy of jurisprudence and legal practice, based on the discourse theory of Jacques Lacan. In the anglophone academy, the positivist jurisprudence of H.L.A. Hart provides the most influential account of law. But just as positivism ignores the practice of law by lawyers, even within the academy, the majority of professors are also not pursuing Hart's positivist project. Rather, they are engaged in policy-oriented scholarship - that tries to explain law in terms of society's collective goals - or in doctrinal legal scholarship - that does not try to describe what law is, or to supply justifications for it - but which examines the 'internal' logic of law. Lacan's discourse theory has the power to differentiate the various roles of the practicing lawyer and the legal scholar. It is also able to explain the striking lack of communication between diverse schools of legal scholarship and between legal academia and the legal profession. Although extremely influential in Europe and South America, Lacanian theory remains largely unexplored (in the English-speaking world) outside of the field of comparative literature. In taking up the jurisprudential ramifications of Lacan's work, The Four Lacanian Discourses thus constitutes an original contribution to current theoretical and practical understandings of law.

Lacan, Deleuze and World Politics

Lacan, Deleuze and World Politics
Author: Andreja Zevnik
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 245
Release: 2016-02-26
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 131727492X

This book aims to re-think the way in which the subject is inscribed in the modern political, and does so by exploring the potentiality of Lacano-Deleuzian theoretical framework. It concerns a different ontology and a non-dualist understanding of political and legal existence, by focusing on questions such as how to think alternative notions of political existence and what kind of political, social and legal order do these come to create. This investigation into political appearance of subjects through concepts of law, body and life is led and influenced by the thought of Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Lacan, as well as Alain Badiou, Antonio Negri and Slavoj Žižek. The book takes on various conceptualisations of life, explores the relationship between law and life and develops an alternative notion of legal and political existence in particular in the context of rights. On the back of Guantánamo’s legal and political discourses this work aims to show why and how the problems of world politics or the limitations of (human) rights discourse require an engagement with questions such as what it means to exist as a human being, what forms of life are politically recognised, which are not, and why this distinction. By pointing to a different ontology for thinking and understanding global politics and demonstrating how a trans-disciplinary and philosophical approaches can foster the debates in world politics, this book will be of interest to postgraduates and scholars working on critical normative ideas in international politics, critical security studies and critical legal studies.

Law, Psychoanalysis, Society

Law, Psychoanalysis, Society
Author: Maria Aristodemou
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 190
Release: 2014-06-27
Genre: Law
ISBN: 1134640382

'I swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth' we say in a court of law. 'In a court of law, the truth is precisely what we will not say', says Lacan. ‘If God is dead, everything is permitted’, writes Dostoyevsky. ‘If God is dead, everything is prohibited’, responds Lacan. ‘I think, therefore I am’, reasons Descartes. ‘I am where I do not think’, concludes Lacan. What are we to make of Lacan’s inversions of these mottos? And what are the implications for the legal system if we take them seriously? This book puts the legal subject on the couch and explores the incestuous relationship between law and desire, enjoyment and transgression, freedom and subjection, ethics and atheism. The process of analysis problematizes fundamental tenets of the legal system, leading the patient to rethink long-held beliefs: terms like ‘guilt’ and ‘innocence’, ‘truth’ and ‘lies’, ‘reason’ and ‘reality’, ‘freedom’ and ‘responsibility’, ‘cause’ and ‘punishment’, acquire new and surprising meanings. By the end of these sessions, the patient is left wondering, along with Freud her analyst, whether ‘it is not psychology that deserves the mockery but the procedure of judicial enquiry’. A unique study on the nexus of Law and Psychoanalysis, this book will interest students and scholars of both subjects, as well as general readers looking to explore this perverse and fascinating relationship.

Perversion

Perversion
Author: Stephanie S. Swales
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 282
Release: 2012-08-21
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 113632996X

Lacan's psychoanalytic take on what makes a pervert perverse is not the fact of habitually engaging in specific "abnormal" or transgressive sexual acts, but of occupying a particular structural position in relation to the Other. Perversion is one of Lacan's three main ontological diagnostic structures, structures that indicate fundamentally different ways of solving the problems of alienation, separation from the primary caregiver, and castration, or having limits set by the law on one's jouissance. The perverse subject has undergone alienation but disavowed castration, suffering from excessive jouissance and a core belief that the law and social norms are fraudulent at worst and weak at best. In Perversion, Stephanie Swales provides a close reading (a qualitative hermeneutic reading) of what Lacan said about perversion and its substructures (i.e., fetishism, voyeurism, exhibitionism, sadism, and masochism). Lacanian theory is carefully explained in accessible language, and perversion is elucidated in terms of its etiology, characteristics, symptoms, and fundamental fantasy. Referring to sex offenders as a sample, she offers clinicians a guide to making differential diagnoses between psychotic, neurotic, and perverse patients, and provides a treatment model for working with perversion versus neurosis. Two detailed qualitative clinical case studies are presented—one of a neurotic sex offender and the other of a perverse sex offender—highlighting crucial differences in the transference relation and subsequent treatment recommendations for both forensic and private practice contexts. Perversion offers a fresh psychoanalytic approach to the subject and will be of great interest to scholars and clinicians in the fields of psychoanalysis, psychology, forensic science, cultural studies, and philosophy.

The Lacanian Subject

The Lacanian Subject
Author: Bruce Fink
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 242
Release: 1995
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780691015897

Lacanian psychoanalyst Bruce Fink lucidly guides readers through the labyrinth of Lacanian theory to provide the most penetrating view of Lacan's work to date. Revealing in-depth knowledge of Lacan's theoretical and clinical work, Fink shines a light on Lacan's controversial notions about the Other, object a, the unconscious as structured like a language, alienation and separation, the paternal metaphor, jouissance, and sexual difference.

Law and the Postmodern Mind

Law and the Postmodern Mind
Author: Peter Goodrich
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Total Pages: 372
Release: 2009-12-22
Genre: Law
ISBN: 0472023101

David Gray Carlson and Peter Goodrich argue that the postmodern legal mind can be characterized as having shifted the focus of legal analysis away from the modernist understanding of law as a system that is unitary and separate from other aspects of culture and society. In exploring the various "other dimensions" of law, scholars have developed alternative species of legal analysis and recognized the existence of different forms of law. Carlson and Goodrich assert that the postmodern legal mind introduced a series of "minor jurisprudences" or partial forms of legal knowledge, which both compete with and subvert the modernist conception of a unitary system of law. In doing so scholars from a variety of disciplines pursue the implications of applying the insights of their disciplines to law. Carlson and Goodrich have assembled in this volume essays from some of our leading thinkers that address what is arguably one of the most fundamental of interdisciplinary encounters, that of psychoanalysis and law. While psychoanalytic interpretations of law are by no means a novelty within common law jurisprudence, the extent and possibilities of the terrain opened up by psychoanalysis have yet to be extensively addressed. The intentional subject and "reasonable man" of law are disassembled in psychoanalysis to reveal a chaotic and irrational libidinal subject, a sexual being, a body and its drives. The focus of the present collection of essays is upon desire as an inner law, upon love as an interior idiom of legality, and represents a signficant and at times surprising development of the psychoanalytic analysis of legality. These essays should appeal to scholars in law and in psychology. The contributors are Drucilla Cornell, Jacques Derrida, Peter Goodrich, Pierre Legendre, Alain Pottage, Michel Rosenfeld, Renata Salecl, Jeanne L. Schroeder, Anton Schutz, Henry Staten, and Slavoj Zizek. David Gray Carlson is Professor of Law, Benjamin Cardozo School of Law, Yeshiva University. Peter Goodrich is Professor of Law, University of London and University of California, Los Angeles.

Lacan and Deleuze

Lacan and Deleuze
Author: Bostjan Nedoh
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Total Pages: 240
Release: 2016-10-26
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1474408303

It is often said that Lacan is the most radical representative of structuralism, a thinker of negativity and alienation, whereas Deleuze is pictured as a great opponent of the structuralist project, a vitalist and a thinker of creative potentialities of desire. It seems the two cannot be further apart. This volume of 12 new essays breaks the myth of their foreignness (if not hostility) and places the two in a productive conversation. By taking on topics such as baroque, perversion, death drive, ontology/topology, face, linguistics and formalism the essays highlight key entry points for a discussion between Lacan's and Deleuze's respective thoughts. The proposed lines of investigation do not argue for a simple equation of their thoughts, but for a 'disjunctive synthesis', which acknowledges their differences, while insisting on their positive and mutually informed reading.