A constant craving for fresh brains and a taste for decaffeinated neighbours

This article is a radical rethinking of public international law through the use of Lacanian psychoanalysis. Its central thesis is that while contemporary scholarship addresses what Lacan calls the symbolic and imaginary registers including law, politics, and ideology, it continues to ignore and repress the dimension of the real. The article illustrates this with a clinical example examined by Kris and discussed by Lacan. Imagining public international law as an indefatigable neurotic in search of ‘fresh brains’, the article shows why meeting her in the domains of law and politics is not enough to satiate her appetite. What continues to resist is the ‘extimate’, the inhuman element within the human that the subject hides so well from herself that it is excluded in the interior. A major instance of the extimate is the ‘caffeinated neighbour’, that is, the neighbour who is not in our image because her disturbing core has not been subtracted. The article argues that unless international law comes to terms with this inevitably ugly and obscene core, in oneself as well as in the neighbour, it cannot hope to achieve any meaningful changes. That the need to recognize the extimate is the ethical demand facing international law now; unless we address it, our symptoms will continue to grow and we will continue to crave fresh brains

To be or not to be a (dead) father

This article argues that Hamlet’s tragedy shows the idiosyncratic intervention of the law in the creation of human subjectivity, an intervention that relies on the agency of a (dead) father to regulate the subject’s desire. Hamlet’s tragedy, it suggests, is characteristically modern not because Hamlet unconsciously desired to do what Oedipus consciously did, but because of the added ingredient of Hamlet’s, and of the father’s, knowledge: Hamlet not only knows of the father’s death, he also knows that the father knows. In Hamlet the prior father, the father of Totem and Taboo, is reincarnated in the person of Claudius so the ‘progress’ from Oedipus to Hamlet, is from tragedy to obscenity. The Crown as phallus is called upon to conceal the obscenity but Hamlet, like any good analyst, plays and displays language to reveal the rotten crime at the heart of the State of Denmark and of the Law

Freedom in the free world: the extimate becomes the law

My article takes Robert Burt's piece as a starting point to highlight how a lacanian analysis of law differs from the one Robert Burt (rightly) rejected and from the alternative psychotherapeutic scenario Burt develops. I focus on what I consider to be the novel characteristics of a lacanian analysis, particularly its insistence on the castration of the human subject by language, a castration that problematizes our understanding of “freedom” and “free speech”, and, in turn, on Law's own castration. The gradual peeling away of the claims made on behalf of the subject by ego psychologists, enables us to arrive at what a lacanian analysis would ideally uncover, that is the subject's extimate core. I illustrate this with the film The Act of Killing, a documentary which displays not only the extimate core at the heart of the subject but the extimate as the Law itself. The encounter between law and psychoanalysis, I conclude, far from leading to mutual understanding, leads to the dissolution of the analysand's pretenses, and, in turn, to the withdrawal of psychoanalysis from the scene altogether

The Begum judgement on the couch

The article reviews the Supreme Court's decision on the Begum case from a psychoanalytic perspective; by lending our ear to the judgment with what Freud termed "evenly suspended attention", the analysis tries to excavate through the morass of legal niceties and subtleties surrounding the multiple grounds of appeal and cross-appeals through to its hidden core - the Secretary of State's decision to strip Shamina Begum of British citizenship. This core is not discussed, let alone decided upon by the Supreme Court, which resembles Freud's patient who 'practises the art of sheering off into intellectual discussion during their treatment, who speculate a great deal and often very wisely about their condition and in that way avoid doing anything to overcome it.

Public History and the study of Law: reviewing The Limehouse Golem (2017). Directed by Juan Carlos Medina [film]. 109 min. UK. Production: Lipsync Post, Number 9 Films.

This is an interdisciplinary discussion, looking at the use of popular history for the critical understanding of the reconstruction of crime and patriarchal hierarchy. By way of reviewing the recent movie The Limehouse Golem, it illustrates the significance of theoretically engaging with a period crime fiction movie. It is argued that this assessment is less relevant in terms of producing historical understanding; rather, what may be a fiction, reveals instead our own contemporary cultural fixations

Bare law between two lives; Cornelia Vismann and Jose Saramago on naming, filing and cancelling

The past few decades in legal and literary studies we have challenged the boundaries raised by the different concepts of law and literature espoused by a great variety of theorists. Law's traditionally assumed disciplinary autonomy has been challenged by those who have crossed the disciplinary threshold. They have done so in order to pursue interdisciplinary methods of research. On one hand, this volume focuses on the sublime and proposes that the ethical aspect involved in the legal sublime is to contain the arrogance of the law. The concept of the sublime has moved out of the strictly philosophical and literary fields and crossed the borders between disciplines, finding an application also in the juridical field. But on the other hand the volume draws attention to the "and" of interdisciplinary literary-legal studies. Law's disciplinary autonomy has been challenged by those who wish to pursue interdisciplinary methods of research. The volume offers new daring comparisons between philosophical fields and between apparently distant historical periods

Where God was, law will be? Kant avec Houellebecq

This paper explores how modern subjects have responded to the so-called death of God and what substitute objects they have tried to put in its place; these cures, or placebos as they turn out to be, have ranged from law, to reason, to work, to sex, to shopping, to love, and finally to literature. By examining Kant's legal philosophy alongside the work of Michel Houellebecq, the paper wonders whether formal law can fill the endemic lack in the subject and in the symbolic order, or whether, as Houellebecq insists, ‘the trouble is, it's just not enough to live according to the rules’. What are the consequences of this ‘ideational decline’, better known in contemporary parlance as ‘depression’, for law, for literature, and especially for the discourse we have come to know as ‘law and literature’? One consequence, I suggest, is the treatment of literature as the fantasy object that will fulfil law; such an approach, I suggest, is detrimental to law, to literature, and to `law & literature’. That the ethical response is to acknowledge the lack in each subject and in each discipline, and cease expecting the other (subject or discipline) to make up for one’s lack