![handle is hein.journals/lwcrtq6 and id is 1 raw text is: Law and Critique Vol.VI no.1 [1995]
TRAVELLING LAW: SEX, DRUGS AND MONTESQUIEU
by
VIKKI BELLS
[A]ll at once the young soul is devastated, torn loose, torn out - it itself
does not know what is happening. An urge, a pressure governs it, mas-
tering the soul like a command: the will and wish awaken to go away,
anywhere, at any cost: a violent, dangerous curiosity for an undiscovered
world flames up and flickers in all the senses. Better to die than live
here, so sounds the imperious and seductive voice. And this here this
at home is everything which it had loved until then! 1
Asked what she missed most during her captivity, Karyn joked: Eating
fish and chips.z
For Nietzsche, the separation of bound people, the sudden will to
free will of the one who had seemed to be chained forever to his corner,
his post is the beginning of the path to mature freedom.3 Here, travel
attempts the renunciation of home in the spirit of discovery. Such a
formulation betrays the association of knowledge and of true freedom with
travel, removal and isolation which has a long history in European
thought, an history traversed by lines of power and domination. In the
image of a post-colonial world, one might suggest that the tasks of the
explorer, the studies of the anthropologist, the desires of the traveller,
have altered - [o]ne no longer leaves home confident of finding some-
* Department of Sociology, Goldsmiths' College, University of London, New
Cross, London SE14 6NW UK. With thanks to Jatinder Barn with whom I
have discussed this article throughout. Thanks also to Peter Fitzpatrick for
his initial invitation and subsequent encouragement, and to my friend and col-
league Paul Gilroy for introducing Persian Letters to our teaching syllabus and
hence to my library. I retain sole responsibility for any inaccuracies arising
from the research and any mistakes in argumentation.
1 F. Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1878, 1984), 6. Thanks to Adam Gearey for helping me locate this refer-
ence.
2 The Mirror, 23.7.93, p.9.
3 Supra n.1, at 6-7.](ViewImageLocal?handle=hein.journals/lwcrtq6&div=1&collection=&method=preview&ext=.png&size=3)
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