About | HeinOnline Law Journal Library | HeinOnline Law Journal Library | HeinOnline
LOG IN
LOG IN

15 L. & Critique 1 (2004)

handle is hein.journals/lwcrtq15 and id is 1 raw text is: JODI DEAN* ZIZEK ON LAW ABSTRACT. This essay outlines the theory of law in the work of Slavoj Zizek. Zizek proceeds from the premise that law is internally, constitutively divided. Law is split between the external social law and the obscene superego supplement. Superego is the necessary, unavoidable underside of the social laws that hold together the community. Nevertheless, law can serve potentially liberatory ends. It can work as a repository for aspirations for something better. Thus, the article argues that for Zizek what is beyond law inheres in law as a kind of faith. The advantage of Zizek's approach to law thus rests in the way it addresses the crime of law while holding onto the hope animating law. KEY WORDS: desire, hope, psychoanalysis, superego, violence, Zizek A few years ago, I interviewed Slavoj Zizek for the Abercrombie and Fitch catalogue. The catalogue is well known in the United States for selling clothes by featuring barely clad teenage bodies in highly charged homo- erotic photographs by Bruce Weber. It also runs interviews with academics, writers, musicians, and more or less alternative celebrities - if such a state- ment makes sense. Be that as it may, when I told Zizek that I would show him the interview in advance, he cheerily replied, Oh that's not necessary. Whatever I say, you can make me say the opposite! Zizek is not a legal theorist. Nor is he an analytically formal or tradi- tional philosopher. What Ernesto Laclau says of The Sublime Object of Ideology also applies to Zizek's work more generally: rather than a systematic structure in which an argument is developed according to a predetermined plan, Zizek provides a series of theoretical interventions which shed mutual light on each other, not in terms of the progression of the argument, but in terms of what we could call the reiteration of the latter in different discursive contexts.1 The strength of a given concep- tualisation manifests itself through repeated applications and expressions. * I wish to thank Peter Fitzpatrick for giving me the opportunity to present an early version of this paper in his workshop on the political at Birkbeck, School of Law, in November 2001. The critical encouragement I received there was invaluable. I am also indebted to Paul Passavant, Lee Quinby, and the outside reviewers for their thoughtful remarks on an earlier draft of this paper. 1 E. Laclau, preface to S. Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), xii. LA Law and Critique 15: 1-24, 2004. O © 2004 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

What Is HeinOnline?

HeinOnline is a subscription-based resource containing thousands of academic and legal journals from inception; complete coverage of government documents such as U.S. Statutes at Large, U.S. Code, Federal Register, Code of Federal Regulations, U.S. Reports, and much more. Documents are image-based, fully searchable PDFs with the authority of print combined with the accessibility of a user-friendly and powerful database. For more information, request a quote or trial for your organization below.



Short-term subscription options include 24 hours, 48 hours, or 1 week to HeinOnline.

Purchase Access

Contact us for annual subscription options:

Contact Us

Already a HeinOnline Subscriber?

Log In

profiles profiles most