Lacan, Deleuze and World Politics

Rethinking the Ontology of the Political Subject

Andreja Zevnik

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138192713
• eBook ISBN: 9781317274919
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Politik

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.

1 Law and life

The creation of the political and legal subject

Law is an ordering principle that governs all forms of social exchange in the world, including all forms of existence, representation and communication. The law, which I am to speak about in this work, is thus more than just the juridical and normative institution; it is, as the opening statement suggests, an underlying logic which orders life in a community, forms of social exchange and the birth of modern political and legal subjectivities. This opening chapter explains how law, as such, is inscribed in particular forms of existence – its subjects – and how such inscriptions have an impact on their life as legal and political beings. Beginning with the Oedipal idea of law (which is arguably still dominant in the existing systems, hierarchies and representations of law as legal fiction) the aim is to show why the relationship between law and life is important, how the two frame the socio-political field and determine the scope of the subject’s actions, and finally, why it is difficult to break the existing law–life relationship. Towards the end, by moving into the realms of legal subjectivity where legal logic of paternity is loosened, I allude to different forms of legal and politics subject-hood. Thus what is at stake is on the one hand an outline of the interwoven nature of law and life as it is taking place in the so-called paternal law; yet on the other hand, as discussed towards the end, central becomes a move towards a different relationship between law and life and thus a different idea of the ‘being of law’.

This intervention is driven by psychoanalytic literature, in particular its core concept of the Oedipal law, the structure of which, as Sigmund Freud would argue, commonly corresponds to the modern law or to the law of modernity that was instituted with a move from the medieval times towards modern science, the modern scientific subject¹ and capitalist liberal societies.² Psychoanalytic law is distinct from positive or even natural law, though it underpins both. Thus the law in question is a logic, which in the first place creates or shapes forms of existence – e.g. why the ‘subject’ or any other form of existence is understood the way it is understood, and how law limits and shapes their desire.

These two questions are pertinent for the understanding of ‘what is to come’ – the final part of the chapter where other ways of thinking law or legality, other than the logic of paternity upon which current positive law is built, are discussed. In other words, what is at stake is the relationship between the law, society and forms of existence; and within this, in particular, how it is not that society creates and moulds life in accordance with its social and legal principles, but rather that a particular embodiment of being (a form of existence) is characteristic of a particular society. The subject as a category is then characteristic of a postmodern paternal and Oedipal social ordering.

The psychoanalytical origins of modern legal authority

How does law order society and where does law get its legitimacy? As Pierre Legendre, French psychoanalyst and legal theorist, explains: ‘the idea of law depends on the idea that our societies make themselves out of their own notion of life’.³ Alain Supiot in his book Homo Juridicus: On the Anthropological Function of the Law undertakes an anthropological study of the origins of modern western law.⁴ He argues that the study of western law has to acknowledge three major elements shaping the character of this law:⁵ first, the existing idea of law as enigma with dogmatic or mythical origins is a typically western idea; second, the notion that the human body is the site on which the law should be inscribed was one of the breaking points between the Jewish and the Christian tradition (particularly in relation to the question of circumcision, the law had to be inscribed on the body by physically making a mark on it, the body had to be visibly marked to qualify as ‘fully belonging’ to a particular community or an idea); and, third, the western mind has always been fascinated by the thought that the literal incarnation of the law could lead to a form of revelation. In other words, invoking the mytho-Christian origins of western law, it has always been hoped that law will reveal itself in something more than just a pure letter of law.⁶ As Supiot acknowledges, a pure letter of law is not powerful enough to facilitate and impose the authority of existing and future laws; it relies on a mythical foundation, the ultimate prohibition or threat of punishment from which it gains legitimacy.⁷

The psychoanalytic engagement with law explores these three aspects; and in particular the mythical foundations of law and law’s relation to the body.⁸ There are at least two ways in which legal myth institutionalises the life of individuals (by limiting and determining forms of existence). First, a particular idea of law relates to a particular notion of ‘life’ (or form of existence e.g. the subject), which is instituted in a legal system as a result of a particular idea of law. However, the characteristics of a system that derives from this particular interpretation of life and law are not set in stone. Any change in the understanding of life, or in psychoanalytical terms, in the subject’s unconscious and its relation to the self, the other and the authority (or the law) is transformed at the level of the symbolic order which consequently influences the political, the social, the content and the logic of the law. In other words, forms of existence (or life) and social and political structures are inherently linked. The collapse of this bond disintegrates a (paternal) social bond, which could lead into a collapse of the symbolic order, and from that, to the collapse of the normative, political and legal order we know today. Legendre conducted a study of legal texts by Glossators from the medieval times onwards to trace the origins of the modern paternal structure of law and the limitations and prohibitions it imposes on forms of existence that eventually become fully recognised by law. In his work, he explicitly writes that ‘the principle of paternity is essential to the symbolic survival of Western culture’.⁹ For psychoanalysis then, one can speculate that the character of modern western culture is a product of paternal/Oedipal logic.

Second, ‘psychoanalytic law’ is most importantly the law of a superego.¹⁰ As such, psychoanalytic law rather than constituting or directly influencing the substance of positive law represents the basis, or the underlying logic of law. In other words, superego gives positive law – a system and an institution of rules and obligations according to which societies live – its legitimacy, it sets its framework and enables both the compliance and the transgression of law. Thus, the superego has a double role: it provides unconscious orientation for the law, or the spirit of the logic in which laws should be made; and acts as its reverse – the other – side, for which law cannot account, and which is outside the principles of positive law. Thus, the superego embodies the source of authority that the subject internalises once it becomes part of a society. In Legendre’s thought, that source of authority is associated with the figure of the ‘imaginary father’ (origins of the idea of the Name-of-the-Father) that entered the discursive and legal practice of the western juridical order through medieval legal writings and the official institution of legal interpretations or a legal interpreter – a judge or a sovereign. On a psychoanalytical level, in contrast, ‘the father’ became part of the subject’s unconscious in the moment of child’s separation from the ‘mother’; in the moment when the prohibition of incest – and from that the Oedipus complex – intervenes as one of primordial social prohibition. I return to how Oedipal law functions as an ordering logic of law and legal subjectivity later on.

From the above discussion two most important aspects are the relationship between law and form of existence (the body), and the paternal or Oedipal idea of law in the context of authority and the institution.¹¹

Law and the body

Jacques Lacan in his Seminar XX addresses the subject of law in a provocative yet very incisive way. He writes: ‘I won’t leave this bed today, and I will remind the jurist that law basically talks about what I am going to talk to you about – jouissance’.¹² Lacan’s statement indicated that, ultimately, law relates to individuals by means of jouissance; and it does so in two distinct ways. First, law limits desire or ‘socialises desire’ in ways which correspond to the limits of social norms within a particular community. Second, law makes a ‘mark’ on the body at the moment of its entrance into society; that mark (in some cultures law leaves a physical trace on the body with rituals such as e.g. circumcision) binds the body to a particular understanding of legal norms and rituals and to particular ways of enjoyment. In such a way, law intervenes twice. First, it determines the character and the limits of one’s existence, and second it marks the body as a sign of possession, almost like saying ‘this body now belongs to me, and the body has to obey the rules I set’.

Such a way of marking the body is not particular to law; language, as Lacan reminds us, signifies its subjects in a similar way. Language makes a mark on the body by introducing and imposing linguistic structures onto it.¹³ These structures determine what can and what cannot be expressed, they form representations and expressions. Ultimately, that which appears in the realm of the symbolic order is always expressed in a way fitting to the framework of the linguistic rules. There are things that remain in the inexpressible or that go beyond the language and representation. Often the ‘inexpressible’ (the non-representable) is also excluded for a reason; as its presence can disrupt the existing system of social conventions and linguistic rules. The same logic applies to law. Law imposes a particular order. However, there is always something that escapes the law or that goes beyond the law. That is, the other side of law, which has a potential to facilitate changes in law, or even by the mere fact that it exists, indicates that law is made in one way, but it could equally be made in another. There is nothing natural or material that predetermines the existing structure of law.

Both language and law make a mark on the body and determine its social context, e.g. acceptable ways of behaviour, conduct and enjoyment into which a particular body is socialised. Law and language determine a way in which the subject – a particular form of existence characteristic to a particular paternal structure of order – sees the social, and equally ways in which it relates to the social. In other words, law and language capture, almost imprison, being into a form of existence common to particular social norms, making a subject a product of a particular expression of being, and that expression is conditioned upon the existing symbolic order of paternal/Oedipal law. Ultimately, there are various different representations or images of being ‘out there’ yet only those that fit the logics of the symbolic order are eventually materialised and ‘brought into’ political existence. A force that determines forms of political existence and that enables their coexistence and reproduction is precisely law. To put it differently, law determines which forms of existence – which subjects – count and which can be ignored or forgotten. It sets conditions upon which some subjects are included in law or community while others (not-full subjects) remain outside.

There is no one way of understanding how law gets manifested on one’s body. One explanation derives from the nexus between psychoanalytic and anthropological studies of medieval legal writings. These writings offer a set of very intriguing observations on how the body should behave, but perhaps the most interesting observation is made again by Legendre. He explains how a medieval notion of ‘repressed sexuality’, manifested through the prohibition or the limitation of the enjoyment rather than the sexual intercourse, gets internalised in the individual’s psyche, and in turn frames a particular modern understanding of law.¹⁴ This observation bears more value than is perhaps at first apparent. Jouissance, recalling Lacan’s definition of law introduced at the beginning of this section, again emerges as a central force determining the limits of law. In the context of medieval legal writings, the law does not punish the practice or the conduct of sexual intercourse; instead it sanctions the jouissance one receives from the act. What is sanctioned is thus not the act itself, and not even the object involved in the act, but the experience of enjoyment or joui...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1. Law and life: the creation of the political and legal subject
• 2. Ontology of life and the limit of thought
• 3. Appearance in the world I: Guantánamo and logics of bodily-becomings
• 4. Appearing in the world II: Guantánamo and expressions of the self
• 5. Images of law in Guantánamo: from a legal case to a new idea of law
• 6. An image of new ontology for world politics and the political subject
• Conclusion: Subject, ontology and world politics
• Bibliography
• Index Names
• Index Notions