The Castrated Trustee: Jouissance and Breach of Trust

As a highly prolific legal mechanism that both predated and subsequently found form amid the development of Anglo-American capitalist societies, the modern-day trust operates across manifold private, commercial, domestic and international spheres. As a consequence of their complex legal, economic and political significance that informs, for example, the worlds of global corporate finance as well as public pensions, trusts play a remarkably important role in helping shape the wider socio-cultural domain of Anglo-American jurisdictions and beyond. Yet trusts remain under- or ill-considered juridical sites in terms of continuing critical-legal dialogues, and especially the dialogue between equity and psychoanalysis. This article will explore how the trust mirrors or recreates in an external juridical form the internal regulation of desire and enjoyment that occurs within the psychic space of the subject-as-trustee. In particular, via duties and obligations a trustee holds on behalf of the subject-as-beneficiary, and the resultant breach that is said to occur when such duties and obligations are not met. Using two key formulations this article will aim to assess the trustee as castrated by means of a (re)interpretation and (re)imagination of some fundamental and formal aspects of breach of trust from the perspective of psychoanalysis. The first formulation relates to the continuous force of unconscious desire (the death drive) that pushes the subject-as-trustee ever onwards towards the thing (das Ding) and surplus enjoyment (jouissance), thus producing an (inevitable) affective paradox or trap in which the trustee finds themselves caught. The second, albeit intimately connected with the first, relates to the internal regulatory or prohibitive psychical mechanisms that prevent or seek to prevent the subject-as-trustee from pushing past the limit on enjoyment imposed by the pleasure principle. To be exact, a limit that has been consciously and deliberately recreated in the trust mechanism, and by extension the so-called “onerous” duties of the subject-as-trustee, as a means of preventing a breach of trust

Why Trust Out-groups? The Role of Punishment Under Uncertainty

We conducted a hidden-effort trust game, in which we assigned subjects to one of two groups. The groups, which were formed through two different group formation processes, included a “social” group that required sharing and exchange among its members, and a “non-social” group that did not. Once assigned, subjects participated in the game with members from both groups, either with or without the opportunity to punish a trustee who may have defected on them. We found that for investors in the non-social group, the opportunity to punish a trustee worked to promote trust, but only when the trustee was a member of the other group. For the social group, the opportunity to punish had no effect on the investors’ trust decisions, regardless of the trustee\u27s group. We provide a theoretical framework to explain this asymmetric effect of punishment on trust. Our results suggest that groups with identities founded in sharing and exchange—a feature of globalized societies—may find it less necessary to engage in costly punishment. As a result, they may enjoy gains in economic efficiency

Trustee Fundraising Dialogue

Summary of a 2009 BC Library Conference session dedicated to exploring what BC public libraries are doing to fundraise, and how library trustees are helping

In re Raggio Family Trust, 136 Nev. Ad. Op. 21 (Apr. 9, 2020)

The Court determined that neither the language in the trust instrument nor NRS 163.4175 requires the trustee to consider the beneficiary’s other assets before making distributions from the trust

Off the Script: Leading-Edge Technology on the RWU Campus

Alumnus, parent and trustee Tim Baxter ’83 – president of Samsung Electronics America – chats with President Farish about this fall’s Samsung/RWU partnership

volume 78, no. 1, January 1978

And, in 284th Place, Greg Owens Turning workers on : the Strategy of Job Enrichment New Trustees Named The man behind Berberian Hall New Dormitory Proposed Christmas Tree Lighting Alumni appointed to Trustee Committees Class New

Futility

We stood in bread lines. We slept on trustee mattresses, drank trustee powdered milk, ate trustee canned corn--beef, wore trustee shoes and clothing, lived in trustee houses, burned trustee coal. We existed. We are today\u27s young men and women. We were yesterday\u27s children. We carry the scorch of the depression. Our parents knew what they were fighting. We knew only what we heard in the muted conversations of our parents, the look on our father\u27s face when he came home from tramping the streets all day looking for a job or just sitting on the Court House steps