Abstract
On Friday 4 May, 1984, while watching the Prime Minister of Quebec speaking on television, a disaffected young corporal in the Canadian army formed the idea of massacring the government of Quebec. Denis Lortie subsequently described this initial impulse in terms of a desire to attack the National Assembly and eliminate the ruling arti québequois, a party which had ‘done harm to the French language’. He would thus ‘destroy something which wanted to destroy the French language’. In various other formulations, Lortie expressed a wish to save the language by killing the government: ‘I will do some harm so as to do some good.’1
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Notes
Pierre Legendre, Le Crime du caporal Lortie: Traité sur le père, 1989, Paris: Fayard at 95.
Alain Pottage, ‘Crime and Culture: The Relevance of the Psychoanalytical’ (1992) 55 Modern Law Review 421
Marie-Jeanne Segers, ‘Actualité de la pensée de Pierre Legendre’ (1991) 27 Revue Interdisciplinaire d’Etudes juridiques 99
Anton Schütz, ‘Sons of Writ, Sons of Wrath: Pierre Legendre’s Critique of Rational Law-Giving’ (1995) 16 Cardozo Law Review 979.
On the some recent examples of the use of psychoanalysis in Anglo-American jurisprudence, see Alain Pottage, ‘Recreating Difference’ (1994) 5 Law and Critique 131
David Caudill, ‘Freud and Critical Legal Studies: Contours of a Radical Socio-Legal Psychoanalysis’ (1991) 66 Indiana Law Review 651
David Caudill, ‘Lacan and Law: Networking with the Big Other’ (1992) 1 Studies in Psychoanalytic Theory 25
David Caudill, Lacan and the Law, 1997, New Jersey: Humanities Press; and also Drucilla Cornell
‘What Takes Place in the Dark’, in Transformations, 1994, New York: Routledge.
The expression is taken from Julia Kristeva, In the Beginning was Love: Psychoanalysis and Faith, 1987, New York: Columbia University Press, at p. 35
Digest 1.3. 2. The passage continues: ‘Lex est omnium divinarum human-arumque rerum regina’ [law is the queen of all things divine and human] See the discussion in Legendre, L’lnestimable objet de la transmission, 1985, Paris: Fayard, at 137.
See Legendre, The Other Dimension of Law’, trans. Yifat Hachamovitch, in David Carlson and Peter Goodrich (eds), Psychoanalysis and Jurisprudence: Essays in Law and the Postmodern Mind, 1997, Ann Arbor: Michigan University Press.
Linda Mills, ‘On the Other Side of Silence: Affective Lawyering and Intimate Abuse’ (1996) 86 Cornell Law Review 814.
This question is lengthily and beautifully elaborated in Yifat Hachamovitch, ‘In emulation of the clouds: An essay on the obscure object of judgement’, in Costas Douzinas et al. (eds), Politics, Postmodernity and Critical Legal Studies, 1994, London: Routledge.
Digest 50.1.33, discussed in Legendre, Le Désir politique de Dieu. Etude sur les montages de l’Etat et du droit (1988) Paris: Fayard, at 371–6.
Tim Murphy, ‘Memorising Politics of Ancient History’ (1987) 50 Modern Law Review 677.
Legendre’s views on what he terms the twelfth-century revolution of the interpreters can be found in Les Enfants du texte: Etude sur la fonction parentale des Etats, 1992, Paris: Fayard. For other attempts to address this theme, see Alan Watson, The Civil Law Tradition, 1981, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press
Harold Berman, Law and Revolution: The Formation of the Western Legal Tradition, 1983, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press
Donald Kelley, ‘Gaius Noster: Substructures of Western Legal Thought’ (1979) 84 American Historical Review 619
Donald Kelley, The Human Measure: Social Thought in the Western Legal Tradition, 1990, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
This thesis is elaborated most famously in Jacques Lacan, ‘The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I’, in Ecrits: A Selection, 1977, London: Tavistock. For an elaboration of the mirror stage with respect to the formation of institutional identity, see Legendre, Dieu au mirroir. Etude sur l’institution des images, 1994, Paris: Fayard.
Thus David Caudill, ‘Lacan and Law’, 25: ‘If this study is anything — scholarly, scientific — at all, it is personal, implicatory. In trying to maintain a cautious distance from a theory — Lacan’s — postulating that such distance is an illusion, one fears to be only striking a pose.’ See also Peter Gabel, ‘The Phenomenology of Rights-Consciousness and the Pact of the Withdrawn Selves’ (1984) 62 Texas Law Review 1563.
For an analysis of another case in which a son kills his father (‘It is impossible to blow open the top of a man’s head, says the judge in Moloney, a case about a man who blows open the top of a man’s head, to unshell it, as it were, so as to examine his thinking like an oyster, or a watch-spring, or a nut’), see Yifat Hachamovitch, ‘The Dummy. An Essay on Malice Prepensed’, in Peter Rush, Shaun McVeigh and Alison Young (eds), Criminal Legal Doctrine, 1997, Aldershot: Dartmouth
Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo: Resemblances between the Psychic Life of Savages and Neurotics, 1939, Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Kenneth Setton, Christian Attitudes towards the Emperor in the Fourth Century, 1941, New York: Columbia Univesity Press, 196.
See particularly Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 1961, London: Hogarth.
Legendre, L’Amour du censeur. Essai sure l’ordre dogmatique, 1974, Paris: Seuil, at 14.
See Legendre, Paroles poétiques échappées du texte. Leçons sur la communication industrielle, 1982, Paris: Seuil, at 12
Legendre, L’Empire de la vérité, 1983, Paris: Fayard, at 26.
See Legendre, L’Inestimable objet de la transmission. Etude sur le principe généalogique en Occident, 1985, Paris: Fayard at 42
For an instructive account of Freud’s concept of double reading, see Sarah Kofman, The Childhood of Art. An Interpretation of Freud’s Aesthetics, 1988, New York: Columbia University Press, ch. 1.
Legendre, Les Enfants du texte. Etude sur la fonction parentale des Etats, 1992, Paris: Fayard, at 55.
See Legendre, ‘Le droit romain, modèle et langage: De la signification de l’Utrumque lus’, reprinted in Legendre, Ecrits juridiques du Moyen age occidental, 1985, London: Variorum.
On the role of the sovereign as ‘nursing father’, see Roger Coke, Elements of Power and Subjection or the Causes of all Humane, Christian and Legal Society, 1660, London: T. Newcomb, at 98
Peter Goodrich, Oedipus Lex: Psychoanalysis, History, Law, 1995, Berkeley: University of California Press, at 223–45.
Legendre, Jouir du pouvoir. Traité sur la bureaucratie patriote, 1976, Paris: Editions de Minuit, at 190.
Legendre, Désir politique de Dieu, at 225-6: ‘Note that one of the central constructions of civil law, that which, following Justinian’s terminology, we call the law of persons, literally derives from persona — referring initially to an actor’s mask — and allows me to translate the formula de iure personarum by “of the law of masks”. In all institutional systems the political subject is reproduced through masks. This translation also contributes to the rehabilitation of the problematic of the image at the heart of the legal order.’ For commentary on this point, see Peter Goodrich, ‘Law’s Emotional Body: Image and Aesthetic in the Work of Pierre Legendre’, in P. Goodrich, Languages of Laiv: From Logics of Memory to Nomadic Masks, 1990, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson.
Legendre, L’Inestimable objet de la transmission. Etude sur le principe généalogique en Occident, 1985, Paris: Fayard at 140.
For a technical account of the reception, see Legendre, La Pénétration du droit romain dans le droit canonique classique, 1964, Paris: Imprimerie Jouve.
P. Goodrich, Reading the Law, 1986, Oxford: Blackwell.
On the faith which attaches to instruments (that is to say to texts), see Legendre, Désir politique de Dieu, at 289-97; and also Legendre, ‘Expertise d’un texte’, in La Pyschanalyse, est-elle une histoire juive?, 1981, Paris: Seuil, at 93–113.
See François Hotman, Anti-Tribonian ou discours d’un grand et renommé iurisconsulte sur l’estude des loix, 1603 edn, Paris: Perrier, at 120
Legendre, Jouir du pouvoir, at 162. See also Jacques Lenoble and François Ost, Droit, mythe et raison, 1981, Bruxelles: Presse Universitaire de Saint Louis.
Legendre, Désir politique de Dieu, at 316. With respect to the philological views of Guillaume Budé, see De philologia, 1536, Paris: Vascosan, at 47 and 143
This Pauline distinction can be found taken up in Francis Bacon, The Elements of the Common Lawes of England (London: I. More, 1630) at A 2
See particularly Sir John Davies, A Discourse of Law and Lawyers (1615) in A.B. Grosart (ed.), Sir John Davies: Complete Works. Vol. II (London: private circulation, 1876) at 275–7.
John Selden, The Duello or Single Combat: From Antiquitie derived into this Kingdome of England (London: I. Helme, 1610) at 21–2.
Donald Kelley, The Human Measure: Social Thought in the Western Legal Tradition (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990) chapter 10.
Sir Robert Wiseman, The Law of Laws or the Excellency of the Civil Law above all Humane Laws whatsoever (London: Royston, 1664) at 70.
On the significance of subauditio and subintellectio, see Ian Maclean, Interpretation and Meaning in the Renaissance: The Case of Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992) at 166–75.
For an eloquent elaboration of this point, see Alain Pottage, ‘The Paternity of Law’, in Douzinas et al. (eds), Politics, Postmodernity and Critical Legal Studies, 1994, London: Routledge, especially at 148–50.
Jacques Lacan, Ecrits: A Selection, 1977, London: Tavistock, at 296
Legendre, Le Crime du caporal Lortie, at 27-33; see also, Pierre Legendre, ‘Analecta’, in Alexandra Papageorgiou-Legendre, Filiation. Fondement généalogique de la psychanalyse, 1990, Paris: Fayard.
Legendre, L’Inestimable objet de la transmission, at 172. See further, Alain Pottage, ‘A Unique and Different Subject of Law’ (1995) 16 Cardozo Law Review 1161
Sir John Fortescue, De laudibus legum Angliae, 1468, 1737 edn, London: Gosling, at 3.
Fortescue, De natura legis naturae, 1466, reprinted in The Works of Sir John Fortescue, 1869, London: private distribution, at 240 (portio est viscerum maternum).
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Goodrich, P. (1997). Introduction: Psychoanalysis and Law. In: Goodrich, P. (eds) Law and the Unconscious. Language, Discourse, Society. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-25974-8_1
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