Melancholy of the Law

2020

2017

We have tried in this article to identify the unconscious mechanisms behind the legal discourse, whether it is the decision-making process by the judge, the substantiation of a court decision or a doctrinal opinion in the legal sciences. We have also tried to identify the unconscious processes that trigger the criminogenic behaviour and those that condition the positioning of the individual in relation to the law. Moreover, we have tried to show that the legal text is no stranger to the unconscious mechanisms of the person who creates it, his / her own traumas, suppressed desires or drives. Thus, we can firmly sustain that a court ruling or a legal opinion can never be clearly separated from the very unconscious of the person who "sets the law", and that the judge, who theoretically "sets the law", becomes the one who "makes the law".

Družboslovne razprave/, 2018

In the article, the author presents an interpretation of melancholy and its discourse through the perspective of Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction and “violence of writing”. In part one of the article, the ambivalent and contradictory conceptions of melancholy in the West are outlined in order to show the working of the logic of difference that makes any unified and universal definition impossible. Sigmund Freud first introduced a universal theory of melancholy in his essay “Mourning and Melancholia” (1917), while part two of the article analyses the inherent enigmas and contradictions in Freud’s psychoanalytical distinction between mourning and melancholy in the specific socio-historical context. The binary oppositions in support of Freud’s dichotomy are also exposed. In the conclusion, the author shows how Freud’s paradoxes are deconstructed in contemporary theories in the humanities and social sciences that address various social and political discourses. KEY WORDS: deconstruction, violence of writing, Mourning and Melancholia, loss, psychoanalysis

2018

In the article, the author presents an interpretation of melancholy and its discourse through the perspective of Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction and “violence of writing”. In part one of the article, the ambivalent and contradictory conceptions of melancholy in the West are outlined in order to show the working of the logic of Différance that makes any unified and universal definition impossible. Sigmund Freud first introduced a universal theory of melancholy in his essay “Mourning and Melancholia” (1917), while part two of the article analyses the inherent enigmas and contradictions in Freud’s psychoanalytical distinction between mourning and melancholy in the specific socio-historical context. The binary oppositions in support of Freud’s dichotomy are also exposed. In the conclusion, the author shows how Freud’s paradoxes are deconstructed in contemporary theories in the humanities and social sciences that address various social and political discourses.

The Oxford Handbook of Law and Humanities, 2019

This chapter attempts to tease out the most important implications for law and legal theo ry of Sigmund Freud's speculative essays on the origins of human society, and in particu lar his thesis that the first laws were created in response to the prehistoric murder of a primitive father whose power and authority they alternately preserve, displace, or trans form. Putting Freud's cultural writings in dialogue with later writings on law by Jacques Lacan, Mladen Dolar, and Pierre Legendre, the essays suggests that psychoanalysis al lows us to distinguish two fundamentally different registers of law, imaginary authority, and symbolic constraint, whose stakes it explores through readings of totemism, the group psychology, and the Mosaic law.

Law and literature's advance into affectivity brings with it an assumption that it may dispense with psychoanalysis and sublate the literary. This discussion engages with Greta Olson's recent survey of this development to the end of unearthing some insights into the relation between affectivity and narrative in law and literature as an interdisciplinary field. Further, the recent expositions on Spinoza by Slavoj Žižek and Aglaia Kiarina Kordela are considered in an attempt to disturb the Deleuzian misreading of Spinoza that underlies some significant assumptions of affect theory, particularly its rejection of psychoanalysis and subjectivity.

Zoon Politikon, 2021

This paper looks at mourning and melancholia, and their ethical implications through the work of Sigmund Freud and mostly Jacques Derrida. The attempt here is to read through Derrida's auto thanatological oeuvre through questions of fidelity, interminability, impossibility and ethics. In our perpetual struggle as scholars dealing with questions of meaning, existence, loss, life and death this paper tries to navigate the discursive traditions of looking at mourning and melancholia and what their radical potential is or can be where the mourning; melancholic; haunted; living subjects bear an impossible task unto the dead.

International Journal for the Semiotics of Law - Revue internationale de Sémiotique juridique

The article reconstructs the is/ought debate in legal theory through a phenomenological reading of the concept of normality. An analysis of Siniscalchi, Fuller and Manderson looks at the issue from the perspective of law and literature, and then applies Giambattista Vico’s rhetorical methodology within the contemporary debate. The question: “is Hume’s law really visible within Hume’s thought?” also paradoxically poses the figure of phantoms and fictions at the heart of the current theoretical debate on law. A history of the phantom placed at the centre of the history of Western institutions still remains to be written, but a comparison of very diverse and incongrous approaches such as the extended order of Hayek, the dogmatic anthropology of Legendre, the eunomics of Fuller and the new science of Vico shows how the mystery of consciousness and the mystery of institutions are inextricably entwined. It is impossible at the moment to draw a coherent doctrine from these conflicting pers...

2015

Against the dominant cultural script according to which law and emotion are incompatible, this essay brings into focus the reciprocal relation of law and emotion that forms in the eighteenth century and is foundational for the self-conception of the modern citizen around 1800. This reciprocity is enabled by the ›discovery‹ and valorization of emotion as an independent faculty, as we show with recourse to first the moral-sense-debate and then Rousseau and Herder. In the course of being theorized, emotion acquires an irreducible relevance for cognition, judgment, and subject formation—and thereby also for law, insofar as it is understood as normative knowledge and as guide for the actions of the subject. Just how fundamental the epistemological relevance of emotion is at the beginning of the nineteenth century is revealed not only by the emergence of the term Rechtsgefuhl, but also and above all by its systematic deployment on entirely different levels: such as in law, in politics, an...

PATHE: The Language and Philosophy of Emotions, 2019

In the 20th century (from Sigmund Freud to DSM-5), melancholy was approached as a personal, intimate, depressive affliction, and, consequently, melancholic patients were seen as lethargic, despondent, pensive patients, unable to emotionally experience the world around them. This paper approaches melancholy from a different perspective, putting an emphasis on the symbolic social oppression that the afflicted experience. To that end, it turns to its ancient Greek roots, where melancholic symptoms ranged from aggressive fits and dejected moods, to uncontrollable, puzzling laughter. Starting with a comparative analysis of Lars von Trier’s Melancholia and Pseudo-Hippocrates’s Letter to Damagetus, the paper sketches melancholy as the subject’s inability/ unwillingness to conform to social rules and expectations, and to appropriate the language of their culture. Both the inability and unwillingness to conform to the prescribed set of rules and conducts are explained as consequence of failure of the culturally specific system of signs (langage) to properly signify and interpellate the subject. It is in the Aristotelian notion of melancholy as the ability of some to be “out of order” (perittoí) and “out of themselves” (ekstatikoí) that the paper searches for a possible explanation of this failure.