(Language, Discourse, Society) Peter Goodrich (Eds.) - Law and The Unconscious - A Legendre Reader-Palgrave Macmillan UK (1997)

LAW AND THE UNCONSCIOUS
LAW AND THE UNCONSCIOUS

Law and the
Unconscious
A Legendre Reader
Edited by Peter Goodrich
Translated by Peter Goodrich

with Alain Pottage and Anton Schlitz
palgrave
macmillan
First published in Great Britain 1997 by
MACMILLAN PRESS LTD
Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and London
Companies and representatives throughout the world
This book is published in Macmillan's Language, Discourse,

Sociely series
Editors: Stephen Heath, Colin MacCabe and Denise Riley
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978-1-349-25976-2 ISBN 978-1-349-25974-8 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-25974-8
First published in the United States of America 1997 by

ST. MARTIN'S PRESS, INC.,
Scholarly and Reference Division,
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010
ISBN 978-0-312-21023-6
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Law and the unconscious : a Legendre reader I edited by Peter Goodrich
; translated by Peter Goodrich with Alain Pottage and Anton Schutz.
p. em.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-312-21023-6
I. Law-Philosophy. 2. Law-Psychology. 3. Psychoanalysis.
I. Goodrich, Peter, 1954--
K346.L39 1997
340'.1-dc21 97-24051
CIP
Translations © Peter Goodrich 1997
Selection and editorial matter © Peter Goodrich 1997
Preface© Pierre Legendre 1997
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1997 978-0-333-62994-9
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country of origin.
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 I
06 05 04 03 02 01 ()() 99 98 97
LANGUAGE, DISCOURSE, SOCIETY
Editors: Stephen Heath, Colin MacCabe and Denise Riley
Selected titles
Curtis C. Breight
SURVEILLANCE, MILITARISM AND DRAMA IN THE
ELIZABETHAN ERA
Peter Gidal
UNDERSTANDING BECKETT
A Study of Monologue and Gesture in the Works of Samuel Beckett
Alan Hunt
GOVERNANCE OF THE CONSUMING PASSIONS
A History of Sumptuary Law
Ian Hunter, David Saunders and Dugald Williamson

ON PORNOGRAPHY
Literature, Sexuality and Obscenity Law
Angela Moorjani
THE AESTHETICS OF LOSS AND LESSNESS
Arjuna Parakrama
DE-HEGEMONIZING LANGUAGE STANDARDS
Learning from (Post) Colonial Englishes about English
Raymond Tallis
NOT SAUSSURE
A Critique of Post-Saussurean Literary Theory
Geoffrey Ward
STATUTES OF LIBERTY
The New York School of Poets
Contents
List of Plates ix
Acknowledgements xi
Preface for English-speaking Readers Pierre Legendre xiii
Introduction: Psychoanalysis and Law Peter Goodrich 1
1 The Dance of Law 37
2 Parenthesis: The Text without Subject 67
3 Protocol of the Love Letter 72
4 Parenthesis: To Fascinate 95
5 The Masters of Law: A Study of the Dogmatic
Function 98
6 Parenthesis: In Praise of Calligraphy 134
7 Hermes and Institutional Structures: An Essay on
Dogmatic Communication 137
8 The Judge amongst the Interpreters: Psychoanalysis
and Legal Judgment 164
9 Introduction to the Theory of the Image: Narcissus
and the Other in the Mirror 211
Bibliography of Principal Works by Pierre Legendre 255
An Abbreviated Glossary Peter Goodrich 257
Index 263
vii
List of Plates
1. The Favourite Comic Dance, print from the library of the Paris
Opera, filed under the rubric 'Circus'.
2. Michel Denard in Giselle, performed at the Paris Opera, 1972.
3. Feminine divinity in the pose of a dance. Bronze statue from
Tibet, Guimet museum.
4. The Arms of Borromeo Arese, from V. Spreti, Encyclopedia Storico-
Nobiliare Italiana, II, 1929, Milan, p. 144.
S. Love Letters, Stanley Spencer, 1950.
6. Twelfth-century fragment from Placentinus, Summa institu-
tionum.
7. Miniature taken from a collection titled CIementines, with a
marginal commentary by Jean d' Andree, 1476, Venice, folio 1.
8. The King of Kings governs the King (Rex Regum Reges Regit),
emblem extracted from J. Bornitius, Emblematum Ethico-
Politicorum, 1664, Heidelberg, no. 13.
9. God works through words and signs (Verba et Signis Efficax Deux).
Emblem extracted from J. Bornitius, Emblematum Ethico-
Poiiticorum, 1664, Heidelberg, no. 1.
10. The Spyglass (La lunette d'approche) by Rene Magritte.
11. Zurburan, The Holy Face, 1658.
ix
Acknowledgements
The essays and extracts translated and published here are drawn
from the following sources:
Chapter 1 is extracted from La Passion d'elre un autre. Etude pour la
danse, 1978, Paris: Editions du Seuil. Chapter 3 is extracted from
Paroles poetiques echapees du lexte. Lefons sur la communication indus-
trielle, 1982, Paris: Editions du Seuil. Chapter 5 is a translation of an
article which first appeared in (1983) 38 Annales: Ecol1omies-Societis-
Civilisations 507. Chapters 2 and 4 are extracted from L'Empire de la
verite. Introduction aux espaces dogmatiques industriels, 1983, Paris:
Librairie Artheme Fayard. Chapters 6 and 8 are taken from Les
Enjants du texte. Etude sur la jonctiol1 parentale des Etats, 1992, Paris:
Librairie Artheme Fayard. Chapter 7 is a translation of an article
that originally appeared in Lucien Sfez (ed.), Dictionllaire critique de
la communicatioll, 1993, Paris: PUF. Chapter 9 is extracted from Dieu
au mirroir. Etude sur i'institution des images, 1994, Paris: Librairie
Artheme Fayard.
We would like to thank the publishers of those works for kindly grant-
ing permission to translate the extracts contained in this volume.
Translating and editing this Reader has been an extraordinarily long-

term project. Many have suffered its longueurs and some have
denied its very possibility or have departed the stage. In such a con-
text, my thanks are due especially to Pierre Legendre for his patience
and his support of this essentially quixotic undertaking. Thanks
also to Anton Schutz for his inexhaustible advice, his labyrinthine
erudition and for appreciating the poetry of inaccuracy. Thanks
finally to Linda Mills for supporting the images and for believing
in a silence that lingers beyond words.
P.G.
xi
Preface to English Readers
The defining feature of the texts presented here, in an erudite trans-

lation, to an English-speaking public, lies in the idea of a normative
junction. It is a function peculiar to society, but one which is subject
to the geographical and historical hazards of dissemination and is
in consequence culturally marked.
The normative function is an essential support of sociality, of what
Aristotle terms 'speaking being', and yet it has still not been defined.
Nor, analogously, has the civilisation of civil law - the strategic
instrument of Western power - been studied in anything approach-
ing a critical manner.
Today, for numerous reasons, the debts, the forgetting, censure
and incoherence, upon which the fortunes of the 'Social and Beha-
vioural Sciences' were built have fallen due. They can be seen now
as nihilistic discourses turned towards no greater value than that
of managerial efficiency and the de facto denial of the most delicate,
the most fragile and the most representative element of the con-
stitution of human societies: the intimate relation which ties the
phenomenon of the institution to the problematic of speech. An
ultra-modem form of ignorance has taken the place of the totali-
tarianisms of our century. My work should be considered, first and
above all else, as an argued protest against the threat which today
weighs so heavily on thought.
The substance of institutions has to be reinvested with Significance.
Only in this way is it possible to perceive the necessity, for the West
(by which I mean the historical space of the West European tradi-
tion), of recollecting the essentially anthropological question of what,
here and now, constitutes law for us. Only then will we be able to
understand that the Western creation, or art of a normative world,
its invention of the montages of law and of State, constitutes but
one of a proliferation of reponses, constructed by diverse cultures,
to the human condition. We also, at the same time, will have seized
upon and opened up a new field of research. More precisely, our
task is that of opening an abandoned domain to interrogation. It is
that of the domain which the Roman jurists evoked by means of the
formula vitam illstituere - to institute life.
xiii
xiv Law and the Unconscious
In terms of a structural logic, which is to say in terms of the order

which presides over the fabrication or structuration of speaking
beings, to institute life meanS the following: to bind or to combine
three distinct but indissociable registers, to know the biological, the
social and the subjective (inclusive of its unconscious dimensions)
orders which consitute the human. The ability to combine these
three registers is definitive of the normative function.
My work has begun to delineate this field, and the texts pres-
ented here survey its contours. After the development of both phys-
ical and social anthropology, the time has come to reflect upon the
universalisation of the occidental. We need to conceive a dogmatic
anthropology, one destined to study, by means of the most rigorous
method, the raison d'etre of what we call culture or civilisation,
namely the play of axiomatic constructions from which the linguistic
support of being is elaborated. The phenomenon of dogmatics is
a necessary one in that the human being is predicated upon mean-
ing and can neither live nor reproduce without the legitimation of
speech. Because this perspective forces us to reformulate the mode
of our inquiry into the domination of civilisation by science and
technology it also challenges our idea of law and of society.
I am well aware of the obstacles that stand in the way of gaining
acceptance for this approach to dogmatics, no matter how inevit-
able it may be for the contemporary spirit, or at least for that part of
it that still wishes to think. We must agree to turn Western thought
in upon itself. Only then will it be possible to observe it not as
progressive and well developed, but simply as one amongst the
many attempts to confront the enigma why are there laws? Faced
with that question, which carries with it the antique discourse of
Oedipus, occidental thought is not superior to that of those cul-
tures that ultra-modernity regards as outmoded or of low status.
The concept of the dogmatic reintroduces the enigma of tragedy as
an unchanging question at the heart of the historical deployment
of institutional systems; and so also at the heart of the montages of
State and of law, and thus closer, one might say, to the atomic level
which, in the bowels of the legal system, constitutes the problem-
atic of kinship.
The nuclear metaphor alludes both to the power locked in the
institutional nucleus of cultures - the genealogical nucleus - and to
the devastating effects of its disintegration or thoughtless manipula-
tion. What is at issue in legislation and in legal decisions relating to
human reproduction has been uncovered by psychoanalysis: it is a
Preface for English-speaking Readers xv
question of the stakes of Reason. To understand the radical character

of this stake is a matter of escaping from the sway both of techno-
scientific propaganda and of sociological predications which have
been applied in such a way as to sever civil law from persons, and
equally, by virtue of an ideology of regulation, to separate law from
the classical inquiry into the Reason of laws. The problematisation
which I propose consists in developing the conceptual means by
which to apprehend the drive of the normative function: the life
and death of the human as subject, that is to say, her Reason or
un-Reason. It is in this sense that the vitam instituere of the Romans
delineates the unchanging horizon of insitutional montages.
The process of instituting Reason takes place by means of a pre-
cise logic, one that is easily identifiable in the study of the norm-
ative systems that share the globe; it is the stage of development
that was discovered by Freud in his study of the Oedipal structure
of the unconscious subject. This was to form the backbone of the
psychoanalytic case method, namely the question of the Father for
both the sexes. Taking my cue from a dramatic formula of Antonin
Artaud's, I shall say that this question is that of the 'forum of sep-
arations'; or again, when it is denied, it becomes 'the principal cause
of suffocation'. Two questions remain. How, from the perspective
of a dogmatic anthropology, is one to address the normative func-
tion from this point of view? And secondly, how is one to translate
this approach into a social and legal language?
If the reader can accept this change of scene, they will find in the
work presented here ample material for reflection, as well as the
outline of a method or means of access to certain essential ques-
tions. The first step to be taken is that of allowing that the normat-
ive function draws its human characteristics from an ensemble of
acts of representation. Furthermore, these representations would be
inconceivable if one had not first taken account of the unconscious
foundations of subjective life, that is to say, finally, of the nature of
language. The dogmatic submerges us in the symbolic universe, the
universe which separates things from images, the universe of mean-
ing, of meanings whose roots are unconscious. The notions of fiction,
of montage and of absolute object will become familiar on this basis,
at the same time as certain larger concepts become available as
reference points or landmarks: the Third as it affects both society
and the subject, Reference, the totemic nature of States, Interdiction.
It should be noted finally that in so far as my work also en-
gages with a return towards certain peculiarly Western normative
xvi Law and the Unconscious
constructions, I attach extraordinary importance to the history of the

religious and legal, as well as the philosophical, texts of the Euro-
pean tradition. From our contemporary perspective, the Middle Ages
designate the principal point of entry, the decisive moment from
which the machinery of modernism developed. The shock wave of
the medieval revolution of the interpreters (of the eleventh to thir-
teenth centuries) has not yet exhausted it effects. It constitutes a
major fact of modernity, and it is one that can be understood more
easily by lawyers within the common law traditions than by those
in codified traditions and most notoriously those in France.
My thanks finally to the expert hands which crafted the pres-
ent translations. The successful completion of the project required
scholars of inexhaustible learning who were also free spirits. lowe
a great debt to Peter Goodrich, who initiated the project and under-
took the work of translation, as also to Alain Pottage, who briefly
assisted in the task of transcription into English. My thanks also to
Anton Schutz for his disparate concerns and advice. The event of
this translation gave me the opportunity to retrace the path that
leads from Paris to London and which a long time ago I had taken
across the English Channel. It leads now, as it did then, to the
country most favoured by casuists, as also to that territory of fire
where the quarrel of universals was born, and where industrialisa-
tion first took flight. This book bears witness to that history and to
my dogged efforts to think it through.
Pierre Legendre
Paris
Introduction:
Psychoanalysis and Law
Peter Goodrich
PROLOGUE
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
Parti que'bequois, a party which had 'done harm to the French lan-
guage'. 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: '1 will do
some harm so as to do some good.'1
Sometime earlier, at the end of April, Lortie had applied for leave
from his base in Ottawa. Claiming that he wanted to see his wife,
he had tried to negotiate a leave of three days from his immediate
superior, Sergeant Chenier. His request was refused and Lortie sub-
sequently admitted that during the course of his application being
refused, something strange had happened: he had seen the face of
his father standing opposite him in the guise of Sergeant Chenier.
Lortie, however, was granted one day's leave, for Monday, 7
May. On Saturday, 5 May he conducted an inventory of the arsenal
at the base and checked out his exercise gear, including his rifle, his
gas mask and a first aid kit. On Sunday, 6 May he drove to Quebec,
checked into a motel and reconnoitred the Citadel, looking for a
1. Pierre Legendre, Le Crime du caporal Lortie: Traiti sur Ie pere, 1989, Paris:
Fayard at 95. For critical commentary on this work and on the case of
Lortie, see Alain Pottage, 'Crime and Culture: The Relevance of the
Psychoanalytical' (1992) 55 Modern Law Review 421; Marie-Jeanne Segers,
'Actualite de la pensee de Pierre Legendre' (1991) 27 Revue Inter-
disciplinaire d'Etudes juridiques 99. The best introduction to Legendre's
work as a whole is Anton Schiltz, 'Sons of Writ, Sons of Wrath: Pierre
Legendre's Critique of Rational Law-Giving' (1995) 16 Cardozo Law
Review 979.
1
2 Law and the Unconscious
place to kill and to be killed. On Monday, 7 May he visited the

National Assembly building with a tour group and then purchased
a dicta phone and three cassettes. Sometime later that day, Lortie
recorded three separate messages on these tapes announcing his
murderous plans and his own imminent death to his wife, the
military chaplain and a radio show host, M. Arthur.
On the morning of Tuesday, 8 May 1984, on the day which 'I
knew internally was my lowest point, the day of my death? Lortie
put on his full military uniform and equipment, including his
revolver and his automatic rifle. Immaculately dressed, shoes pol-
ished, uniform pressed and identity card in place he left the motel
to do battle. He posted the cassette to his wife. He then drove to the
radio station and delivered the tape intended for M. Arthur. He
went next to the Citadel and waited in the car, listening to the radio
and expecting his tape to be played. The interruption of the regular
broadcast by the playing of his tape was to be the signal for his
attack to begin. The tape was not played. Lortie panicked and left
his car. He first fired some shots at the entrance to the Citadel and
then ran towards the National Assembly building situated next to
the Citadel. Lortie entered the Assembly by a side door. First, he
destroyed a red emergency telephone which was used for internal
security purposes, and then fired at the receptionist while shouting
at her to leave. Lortie then ran down the corridors of the Assembly
building firing at anyone who crossed his path. He killed three
people and injured eight, before arriving at the Chamber of Dep-
uties - the Blue Room. As it happened, on the day he had chosen for
his attempt to 'kill the government of Quebec', the Assembly was
not in session and the Chamber was empty. Lortie went and sat
down in the President's chair from where he fired a volley of shots
directly in front of him at a dock, and then let off some further
rounds to his left and his right directed at the empty benches where
the representatives would have sat.
Lortie was persuaded by a Sergeant-at-Arms to give up his
weapons and was subsequently arrested without being killed. When
asked by the Sergeant-at-Arms why he had acted as he had, Lortie
responded, 'I cannot tell you. It was not my heart but my head.'
While waiting in the police station Lortie had another vision in
which he saw the face of an old man who mysteriously managed
2. Legendre, Lortie, at 89.

Introduction: Psychoanalysis and Law 3
to make him understand that he would be pardoned for all his

transgressions.
Subsequently Lortie was tried, and during the course of interroga-
tion and direct examination a variety of incidental responses throw
a certain further light upon his crime. Lortie came from a family of
six. His father had been an alcoholic, violently abusive of his mother
and of the children. The father also had an incestuous relationship
with Lortie's eldest sister. He had been in prison on several occa-
sion and abandoned the family while Lortie was still quite young.
At one point the children had even banded together and hidden a
number of weapons in the house, vowing to kill the father the next
time he became violent towards them. In replying to questions as
to why he had committed the crime, Lortie at one point talked of
losing a battle 'against an inner negativity', a battle against a terri-
fying fear that he would become his father. Even more remarkably,
he stated sometime after being arrested that 'the government of
Quebec had the face of my father'. Elsewhere, Lortie spoke of his
crime in the following terms: 'I felt capable of destroying this
authority, my strength was boundless.'3
A few final details need mentioning. In the tape which he sent to
his wife, Lortie declared his love for her ('my heart is yours, my
head is elsewhere'4) and announced his intention to kill and to be
killed. In relation both to the murders and his own annihilation,
Lortie stated that he did not know why he would carry out these
acts, he simply knew that he must do them, that they were imper-
atives. It should be noted also that this internal imperative to
immolate himself and to sacrifice others was mirrored in an external
form. In addition to the tape recordings of his intentions, the bulk
of the events of 8 May were recorded on security cameras in the
Assembly building and were played back to Lortie both before and
during the trial. He found watching these images both terrifying
and so intolerable that at one point he fled the dock in tears and
hammered his head on the walls of his cell. He acknowledged at
one juncture that 'I had to see them, it was the decision which I had
to take, I had to pass through ...' At another point he responded by
saying: 'You know that I cannot say that it is not me, it is me.'s

The double negative represents what, with only a minor injustice,

might be termed an unconscious self-identification, the attribution
of an external or corporeal cause for which the subject has yet to
take responsibility.
The above sketch of Corporal Lortie's crime does scant justice to
the detail of the case, nor does it attempt to reconstruct the political
and biographical contexts in which the events took place. The crime
is treated by the French psychoanalyst and jurist Pierre Legendre as
an exemplary one and becomes the focus of a study of the function
or structural place of the father, and of authority, or more technic-
ally 'legitimacy', in psychoanalysis and in law. The Lortie case in
this sense provides both a striking introduction to Legendre's work
and an avenue for the exploration of the relation of the legal con-
struction of an institutional order to the familial constitution of the
individual subject. Certainly in the case of Lortie it seems fairly
clear that the boundaries between law and family, public and private,
sociality and intimacy are hardly distinct. They were, rather, inter-
twined, transgressed and blurred throughout the narrative of the
murder and during the course of its various reconstructions.
The extensive and expanding work of Pierre Legendre has been
concerned precisely with that interrelation of the unconscious and
the legal and has resolutely applied a Freudian model of analysis to
the history and the theory of law. His project can be depicted most
directly in legal historical terms as that of recovering a repressed
poetics of law: using a startlingly varied corpus of Latin texts,
Legendre elaborates a theory of the subject's erotic attachment to
power and a corresponding aesthetics of submission to law. Ques-
tions of law are always also questions of subjective attachment;
they imply or address a series of institutional subjects and can never
be fully accounted for without attending to personal questions of
motive and desire, fantasm and truth. It is this fundamentally sub-
jective and so, in some measure, unconscious basis to the most
objective of social practices which the case of Lortie so graphically
illustrates and to which Legendre's philosophical project is so acutely
attentive. The case of Lortie will therefore be used throughout the
ensuing elaboration of the connections and disparities that form
the shared space of the disciplines of psychoanalysis and law. At
a more immediate level of persons rather than disciplines, the con-
tribution of psychoanalysis to law can be phrased more simply as
being that of the recognition of the unconscious in the practice and
interpretation of law. 6 In the hope of avoiding too didactic an account

of a project that is at times delirious, at times poetic and on occasion
closer to the mediaeval arts than to the conventions of contempor-
ary jurisprudence/ the ensuing reconstructions will be grouped
around specific themes.
First, and most strikingly, psychoanalysis has long been per-
ceived as too threatening or too personal a form of knowledge to
be addressed directly in the study of law. Study of the unconscious,
or acknowledgement of the emotions, of the body and of its re-
pressions or hidden domains of desire have not figured greatly in
modern theories of positive law. For the discipline of law, psy-
choanalysis has remained a dark continent or 'China within'.s It
threatens to disrupt the complacent truths of modernist jurispru-
dence and so also to question the rationality of legal practice by
finally addressing the unconscious of institutions, and correlatively
the repetitions and repressions, the drives and desires of the au-
thors and interpreters of law, as well as of its subjects. It is thus
perhaps unsurprising that although law is primarily concerned to
judge the discourses and the actions of natural and corporate sub-
jects, it has studiously avoided the most radical of contemporary
theories of the subject. In the first instance, the work of a psycho-
analytic jurisprudence is thus to introduce the question of emotion
and the domain of subjectivity into the analysis of the institution
and specifically of its law.
6. 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 Stud-
ies: 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 Psyclloanalytic Tlleory 25; David Caudill,
Lacan and tile Law, 1997, New Jersey: Humanities Press; and also Drucilla
Cornell, 'What Takes Place in the Dark', in Transformations, 1994, New
York: Routledge.
7. On 'heavy semantics' and 'signifier-centred textual strategy', see Anton
Schutz, 'Sons of Writ, Sons of Wrath', at 990-1: arguing that 'Legendre
... views what is generally called explanation as merely some kind
of side-effect of a suspect, questionable, and ambiguous enterprise ...
For Legendre, arguments are measured by their weight rather than by
their epistemological credentials or propositional consistency.'
8. The expression is taken from Julia Kristeva, In the Beginning was Love:
Psychoanalysis and Faith, 1987, New York: Columbia University Press, at
p. 35 'is psychoanalysis perhaps also our China within?'.
The introduction of a psychoanalytic perspective into the ana-

lysis of law and of what Legendre terms its 'capture of the subject'
involves the elaboration of a critical methodology for reading law.
In Freudian terms it involves a 'double reading', an acknowledge-
ment of a relation between conscious and unconscious dimensions
of the human subjects and so also of the texts of law. At the level
of jurisprudence or the theoretical analysis of law, this means a
reading of the institution of law 'as if' it were a subject and so
driven to reproduce itself. Thus at the level of method, Legendre
has consistently used psychoanalysis to develop a radical theory of
law as a social subject ceaselessly labouring to create subjects. In
these terms psychoanalytical jurisprudence is, in the first instance,
a theory of law which seeks to understand the legal order as the
structural mechanism or social form of reproduction of subjects.
Law, for Legendre, is intrinsic to the formation of the individual
subject, and law is both historically and theoretically at the centre
of the symbolic order in relation to which individual identity is
formed. Where Lacan referred to the unconscious as being struc-
tured like a language, Legendre adds that the unconscious acts like
a lawyer.
The second theme, which Legendre reiterates in varying con-
texts, concerns the specific familial form of subjectivity, whether
the subject is an institution acting 'as if' it were a natural subject
or an individual. If the unconscious, for Legendre, is a jurist, then
its legalism should be understood in a dual sense. First, law deter-
mines the space of intimacy or of subjectivity, it dictates in advance
the familial places, the roles and relationships, the 'familial fates'
into which the subject is born. In a second and more theoretical
guise, Law in the sense of the foundational social principle of
authority is intrinsic to the symbolic dimension of social relations,
and forms the context or 'mirror' within which identity is constructed
in the institution. What is most striking about Legendre's project
of rethinking law from a psychoanalytic perspective is thus much
less a question of the utility of psychoanalysis in explaining features
of the subjectivity of law than it is an instance of reinscribing law
in our understanding of the subject. In this sense the case of Lortie
is far more than an instance of the utility of psychoanalysis in the
explanation of the unconscious causes of a subject's actions. The
case of Lortie is rather a vivid and, precisely because it is perverse,
an exemplary site for playing out or, more simply, for understand-
ing the legal categories which constitute the subject.
To borrow a Roman law maxim, of which Legendre is fond, law's

function is 'to institute life' [vitam instituereJ9 and in so doing its
domain of application is coextensive with the substantive domain
addressed by psychoanalysis. What psychoanalysis provides is a
method of listening to and interpreting both individual biography
and institutional history; it allows us access to what Legendre,
mimicking Freud, terms the 'other dimension of law', namely its
other scene or unconscious. 10 In practical terms, psychoanalysis thus
allows us to address the most complex and critical of institutional
questions, those which relate to the subjectivity of legal practice
and to what has recently been termed the affectivity of lawY A
psychoanalytic jurisprudence could be said to address the subject-
ive enigma - the delirium - of institutions, and to ask the most
simple and unanswerable of questions: what is it that leads a sub-
ject to love the social representation, the living image or emblem of
law? Equally, what causes a subject to submit to the institution and
to follow the law? Why is it Lortie that is mad and not the govern-
ment of Quebec?12
The answer to such questions can only be equivocal or contin-
gent. The institution which acts' as if it were a person is not neces-
sarily free of those delirious, violent or poetic states which we term
passion, madness or love. What is principally at issue is the ability
of the subject to recognise its identity or place, its role within the
familial order of institutions or of household government. Whether
institutional or individual, madness is most immediately manifest
in a a failure to recognise where, when and to whom a subject is
entitled to speak. The law in this context is simply the manifesta-
tion of power as a structure, and madness is the failure to observe
9. 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'Inestimable objet de la transmission,
1985, Paris: Fayard, at 137.
10. See Legendre, 'The Other Dimension of Law', trans. Yifat
Hachamovitch, in David Carlson and Peter Goodrich (eds), Psycho-
analysis and Jurisprudence: Essays in Law and the Postmodern Mind, 1997,
Ann Arbor: Michigan University Press.
11. Linda Mills, 'On the Other Side of Silence: Affective Lawyering and
Intimate Abuse' (1996) 86 Cornell Law Review 814.
12.. 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, Postmod-
ernity and Critical Legal Studies, 1994, London: Routledge.
the space and the images or faces of that power. Returning to the
case of Corporal Lortie and his psychotic endeavour to erase the
social fantasm of paternity, a government with the face of his
father, the legal categories that institute subjectivity, the function,
and here the failure, of law are peculiarly clear. Lortie's transgression
emerged initially out of a desire to destroy an evil father, the social
image or fantasm of paternity, the President of Quebec. This desire
was expressed initially in terms of a drive to prevent the destruc-
tion of the national language. While this allusion to language might
seem incidental, it can also be taken as the most fundamental of
references to structure and to law.
The third theme to be addressed relates to the particular form in
which the institution not only acts as if it were a subject but also
acts as if it had a body and so also, in Freudian terms, an uncon-
scious. Since Lacan, psychoanalysis has constantly emphasised the
importance of the fact that we are inhabitants of language. To the
observation that language is the inescapable symbolic structure into
which each subject is born, Legendre adds that in the West we are
the inhabitants of a very specific material form or body of language,
the text or written reason of law. The reference to language, and so
indirectly to texts and to their Western manifestation as written
law, thus refers us to the foundational structure, the symbolic form
and sCriptural identity of Western institutions. The question of law
is a question of structure and for Legendre this means that it is a
question of a Text, of a Book or books which set out the specific
social places of legitimate authOrity. It is the text that establishes
our social identity and institutional place, it is the text that provides
us with our jurisdiction or right of speech, it is the text in which we
are born and in which we die, or in classical legal terms, Rome - a
Text, a system of law - is our common homeland (Roma communis
Ilostra patria est).u
The structural Text, or, in one etymology, the terror and the ter-
ritory of the Western institution, has been that of Roman law and
specifically of the Corpus Iuris Civilis, which was received into the
Western tradition in the late twelfth century. It was through the
reception of this vast corpus of texts, according to Legendre and to
13. Digest 50.1.33, discussed in Legendre, Le Desir politique de Dieu. Etude

sur les montages de l'Etat et du droit (1988) Paris: Fayard, at 371-6. See
also, on this issue, Tim Murphy, 'Memorising Politics of Ancient
History' (1987) 50 Modern Law Review 677.
others, that the Western institution took on the historical and essen-
tially juristic form that we inherit to this day.14 The reception of
Roman law was a complicated inheritance from the two Romes,
that of the papacy and of canon law, and that of Justinian and the
transmission of a predominantly imperial law. 1s The systematisa-
tion of these two textual systems through the categories of classical
Rome legal science constituted what Legendre refers to as the
twelfth-century interpretative revolution. The reception of Roman
law provided a textual method of social organisation and of insti-
tutional action. It also set out the basic substantive categories of
social structure and of subjective life. Most notable amongst these
was the principle of authority that attaches to the power of the
father.
A fourth thematic homology between law and psychoanalysis
lies precisely in the complex notion of the 'paternity of law'. Cor-
poral Lortie's numerous references to father figures, who variously
command, refuse, absolve and haunt, invoke not only a modern
Freudian image of authority but also a classical legal reference.
Roman law had attributed an absolute power, a power over life and
death, to the head of the family, the paterfamilias. The private law
right of the father of the household mirrored the comparable public
law power of the emperor, the living voice of the law, whose very
whim was legislation and whose 'pleasure1l6 had the force of law.
The power of the emperor in its turn mirrored that of the divine
father, of whose will the sovereign was no more than the mouthpiece
14. 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: Substruc-
tures of Western Legal Thought' (1979) 84 American Historical Review
619; and more recently Donald Kelley, The Human Measure: Social
Thought in the Western Legal Tradition, 1990, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press.
15. A maxim from Gratian transmits the essential point: Duo sunt genera
christianorum - there are two genres of Christianity, that of the West
and that of the East, that of the papacy and canon law and that of
Justinian and Roman law. See generally Legendre, Desir politique, at
289-318.
16. The classical maxim was quod principi placuit legis habet potestatem (what
pleases the prince has the force of law).
or tongue. To legislate or speak the law was to take up a position

in relation to a complex textually defined order of precedence and
of the names of the law. In substantive terms, it was to find a place
and role, an identity and image, within the inscribed or textual
order of power. To state the law was literally to speak 'in the name
of the father', whether that father was God, the emperor, the sov-
ereign, the people, or the head of the family. To take up the textu-
ally, and so also legally defined position of the father is to adopt
an image or role, to speak 'as the law'. It is this prior definition of
the law of the Father, this abstract textual demarcation of the sites
of legitimate social speech, that Lortie inadvertently recognised
in explaining his parricidal intentions in terms of a desire (and cor-
responding power) to destroy 'this authority', namely a place, origin
or source, rather than a mere person or vicarious legal office-holder.
It was, in short, an image which Lortie desired to destroy, it was
the fantasm of paternity that constituted his 'inner negativity' and
which his crime was gauged to expunge. The image has a crucial
role in Legendre's theory of law as in psychoanalytic interpretation
more generally. The image, or in Roman legal terms, the imago was
the social form of representation of the principle of authority, of
Father, sovereign or Law. At the level of the institution, the image
of authority, the effigy of social power or representation of collect-
ive belonging is an object not only of fear but also of fascination
and of love. The image presents the absolute to the subject of law
and so constitutes law as that discourse which can interpret, which
is to say mediate or speak between the divine and so unknowable
space of authority and the mundane instance of secular law. The
image, whether of the social father or of the familial authority, fixes
the law within the individual subject as an ideal object of venera-
tion or of love. The image is in this sense the mechanism of sub-
jective submission to social authority. At the level of the individual
the image also plays a crucial role in the construction of the identity
of the subject as a subject of law. The image is here the means by
which the subject is differentiated from itself and so acquires an
identity. It is through the image, it is through seeing herself in the
mirror, that the subject first comes to recognise a unity and separa-
tion that allows her entry into the social. 17
17. This thesis is elaborated most famously in Jacques Lacan, 'The Mirror
Stage as Formative of the I', in EerUs: A Selection, 1977, London:
Tavistock. For an elaboration of the mirror stage with respect to the
formation of institutional identity, see Legendre, Dieu au /nirroir. Etude
sur ['institution des images, 1994, Paris: Fayard.
Illtroduction: Psychoanalysis and Law 11
In the case of Lortie, the image had a crucial role to play at the
level both of the social and of the individual. At the level of the
social it was precisely the image, or the social face of authority,
which Lortie attempted to erase from the text of the living. The
image or face of the father appears throughout Lortie's narrative
and its interpretations. More specifically, Lortie desired to take up
the place of the father but misrecognised that place as being that of
his own father rather than as the abstract instance of the principle
of authority. Lortie desired to take on the role of the father, but
feared becoming his own father. In short, he confused two distinct
places or functions of the image. In social terms the image repres-
ents or more technically figures the desirability of the textual order
and its hierarchy of authoritative places, its authors and authorities
(auctor et auctoritas). The image passes on the unsayable dimension
of that power, and as an image it can move between realms, as also
between public and private, institutionality and intimacy. It is thus
not altogether surprising that when Lortie viewed his own image,
his own representation and acts, on a video, he was able, at least to
some degree, to identify with himself and proclaim, 'I cannot say
that it is not me, it is me: His virtual presence in the images relayed
by the video was more real for him as a mechanism of identification
than the hyper-real experience of killing that he had just under-
gone. In more technical terms, Lortie could no longer deny or 'split
off from' the inner negativity that was for him represented by the
figure of the bad father whom he did not wish to become.
A fifth and final observation can again return us to the case of
Lortie and its peculiarly exemplary place in Legendre'S account of
the relationship of psychoanalysis to law. Whatever the structural
relation or homology between psychoanalysis and law, and what-
ever significance is to be given to what Legendre coins 'the insist-
ence of the law in the unconscious', the case of Lortie allows us to
advert to another point of confluence. Both psychoanalysis and law
address cases and so, in terms of method, both are forms of casu-
istry. In a sense, the most profound though not necessarily the most
acceptable connection between the two diSciplines is precisely the
most obvious, namely their common history of casuistry and their
analogous attempts to provide a normative resolution to individual
cases of conflict or dispute. The casuistic tradition, in other words,
dates back to the mediaeval reception of Roman and canon law and
it entailed the reception and elaboration of a complex apparatus of
questions of conscience or problems of ethics alongside the compar-
ably normative questions of law. What is significant is that these
various disputed questions (quaestiones disputatae) spanned the dis-

ciplines of moral theology and law and addressed cases of conscience
and of law, questions of ethics and of legal judgment, in precisely
similar terms. They alike belonged to the 'institution of life', to the
social expression of difference, to the realm of things known and
judged. In cruder terms, what is obvious is that the individual case
or 'cause of action' faces the law, whether it is that of conscience or
of the state, whether spiritual or secular, with the individual, with
a subject of decision that is necessarily intimate and implicatory.18
The case requires a judgment that will address the subject, that will
come face to face with the other, and so also with the unconscious,
while equally bringing the unconscious face to face with its own
law. It is in the historically complex theatre of the case and of the
art of casuistry that Legendre finds a space within which to address
the insistence of the law in the unconscious.
QUESTIONS OF METHOD: THE DOUBLE READING
The case of Lortie, the case of a son who desires to kill his father
and who acts out that desire by endeavouring to kill the social face
or effigy of his father, the government of Quebec, raises a peculiarly
Freudian problem for legal analysis. 19 In Freudian terms, the Oed-
ipal desire of the son to kill the father lies at the basis of all law, and
it is this unconscious principle of authority which is lengthily elab-
orated in Totem and Taboo. 20 Freud's myth of the law's origin takes
18. 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.
19. 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 nun, 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, ch. 2. The case reference is to R v Moloney [1985) AC 905.
20. Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo: Resemblances between the Psychic Life
of Savages and Neurotics, 1939, Harmondsworth: Penguin.
as its starting point the murder of the primordial father, who has
monopolised the females of the tribe, by his sons. Overcome with
guilt and remorse the sons then legislate against murder and thus
inaugurate ethics and law. Both domains are governed by the
memory of the absent father, by an image or totem that represents
and reminds the sons of their parricidal past. Law, in the form of
a totemic figure, a sovereign or social image of power, takes the
place of the murdered mythical father and becomes the object of
social desire.
One way of interpreting Freud's mythical presentation of the
totemic character of law is simply to say that the authority of law
is inextricably bound to its mythical origins and to the symbolic
forms which represent that myth in the contemporary public sphere.
At the level of the social, law is necessarily predicated upon an
absent source of authority which, in its most direct form, is vari-
ously represented as God, nature, reason, sovereign or king. The
symbolic order, in other words, rests upon an unsayable or immut-
able yet invisible source of law, which can only be represented or
symbolised in the various figures of the power of law. 21 The sym-
bolism of law, in classical terms the social figure of a leader or
communal father, masks or screens a truth which cannot be directly
stated or shown: 'since an emperor cannot be present to all persons,
it is necessary to set up the statue of the Emperor in law courts,
marketplaces, public assemblies and theaters - in every place, in
fact, in which an official acts, the imperial effigy must be present,
so that the Emperor may thus confirm what takes place, for the
Emperor is only a human being and he cannot be everywhere.'22
The space of the social is marked in advance by law. The uncon-
scious of the institution here takes the form of a plastic and textual
imaginary, while the power of law becomes that of an endless array
of dignities, roles, and textual figures which bear the delegated
authority of an absent source. Curiously, institutional desire is
prompted by a lack, the legal subject is not and cannot be the one
who the dignity or role represents. The institution is only ever an
image of its absent reason or cause. Similarly, at the level of the
legal subject or individual, Freudian analysis, and, one might add,
21. Legendre, Desir politique, at 266, citing Justinian, Novels 98, 2, 2 (post
Dellm communis omnibus pater).
22. Kenneth Setton, Christian Attitudes towards the Emperor in the Fourth
Century, 1941, New York: Columbia Univesity Press, 196.
the history of law, alike suggest a comparably hidden basis or

unconscious source of action in the drives or desires of the libidinal
subject.23
In the first instance, the problem raised by psychoanlaysis, in rela-
tion both to the institution and to the individual, is that although
it is evident that law addresses a vast array of issues, which diversely
imply myth and the unconscious structure of social life, law has
lost the tools for addressing such issues. The effacement of legal his-
tory and of the plural historical forms of legal knowledge, however,
is only one aspect of the problem. At the level of the diSciplines,
the repression of the history of law as a social and philosophical
form of life is symptomatic of a more pervasive legal 'will to ignor-
ance', which is expressed most directly in the lawyer's denial of
the relevance of affectivity to judgment or desire to law. In dis-
ciplinary terms, that denial is replicated in an even stronger form
in the jurisprudential repression of psychoanalysis and the will-
ingness of the legal academy to act as if the discoveries of Freud
and the writings of Lacan and Legendre had either never happened
or, if sufficiently rigorously ignored, would go away. Despite the
essentially symbolic and heavily interpretative nature of legal regu-
lation it is somehow easier or less threatening to the 'graveyards'24
that pass themselves off as legal academies to ignore the other scene
or unconscious of law. 25 The supposed science of law is deemed
capable of dealing with the logic of legal rule as a pure surface
amenable to an exclusively rational interpretation. It is this refusal
to think about the irrational or simply subjective dimensions of law,
this refusal to consider the symbolic significance of law, that leads
Legendre to castigate roundly an 'imbecility at the basis of law',
and a comparable practical stupidity, in terms of which 'lawyers
do not even aspire to think', but simply circulate texts and other
emblems of social power. 26
23. See particularly Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 1961, London:
Hogarth.
24. Legendre, L'Amour du censeur. Essai sure I'ordre dogmatique, 1974, Paris:
Seuil, at 14.
25. See Legendre, Paroles poetiques echnppees du texte. Le~ons sur In commun-
ication industrielle, 1982, Paris: Seuil, at 12, referring to 'the indolent
pedagogues ... who doubtless hope that the discoveries of Freud and
Lacan will disappear from circulation'. For further discussion of the
'dark' continent of psychoanalysis, see Legendre, Amour du censeur, at
8-9, 17-23.
26. Legendre, L'Empire de la verite, 1983, Paris: Fayard, at 26.
In the context of such a lack of thought, and more broadly in

view of the repressive functions of law, psychoanalysis is both
obviously relevant and obviously threatening to the discipline or
'science' of legal studies. The first project of Legendre's work has
thus been simply to insist upon the relevance of psychoanalysis to
legal studies, and indeed to any intelligent consideration of the
general significance of the legal institution and practice of law. In
this respect it is apposite to invoke the earlier and parallel his-
tory of the denial of psychoanalysis by Freud's contemporaries
and institutional critics. Psychoanalysis threatened to rupture the
dogmatic order of knowledges and it continues to threaten the
complacency - the 'ignorance', 'indolence' and 'lack of culture' - of
the disciplines. At the level of the disciplines, Legendre argues, the
heretical or simply disruptive theoretical task of psychoanalysis is
to listen to the repressed histories and abandoned or forgotten know-
ledges of the scholastic tradition as it has been inherited in the west
through medieval law: 'where, in our day, can we find the heirs
of the medieval jurists?'27 Who today, in other words, reworks the
dogmatic discourse on the governance of the soul, on the fantasm,
on faith, fascination, authority or censure? Where does contemporary
jurisprudence account for the most prominent function of law, that
of engendering subjective belief in authority? Psychoanalysis, in
other words, disturbs the masks, the distances and the political com-
promises of the modern academic disciplines. It does so through its
pervasive reference to the spectre of sexuality, to the figure of the
desiring subject and so also of the role of Eros, Christian caritas, or
love in any living form of truth and equally in any plausible account
of law within what is still an essentially Christian culture.28
At the level of institutions and so of the social history of law,
Legendre'S insistent recourse to psychoanalysis offers what he terms
a 'counter-dogmatics' or radical re-reading of the legal tradition. 29 At
the level of the institution, as also at that of the individual, law masks
conflict and represses dispute. The theatre of legal reason exists to
27. Legendre, Amour du censeur, at 17.

28. See Sigmund Freud, 'Resistances to Psychoanalysis', arguing that
'Psychoanalysis reveals the weaknesses of the [social] system and
recommends that they be abandoned ... For having formulated these
critiques psychoanalysis the enemy of civilisation has been banned as
a public danger', cited and discussed in Legendre, Amour du censeur,
at 22.
29. Legendre, Amour du censeur, at 16-17.
cover over the violence and the madness of power, its function is
to make believe that law is reason and to hide the fact that law is
also power, and in more technical terms, that the authorship of law
is cognate with its authority. In short, the classical 'theatre of Justice
and of Truth' (Theatrum veritatis et iustitiae)30 conceals another his-
tory, a latent history or positive unconscious of the legal tradition
which contains law's failures, its lapses, its shattered dreams, as
also it harbours its desires, its enjoyments, its reverie of a compre-
hensive system and perfect order of rational rule. In other words,
there is no single or merely internal history of law; there are rather
plural histories of various laws, of different jurisdictions and chang-
ing institutional forms. It is, therefore, the function of a psychoana-
lytic account of law to provide symptomatic readings of the history
of the legal institution and to attend to the desires that underpin
law, to listen to the narrative of the lawyer's love of power and to
the latent poetry of the legal text. Legendre's work starts out, in other
words, from the fact that the history of the Western legal tradition
is a history of dogmatic reason and of the institutional forms of life
which dogma inscribed as law. What is at issue in law's institution
of life is not only a question of legal logic, it is also a matter of faith,
of love, and of the poetry of the soul. In the latter, less rationalistic
terms, it is Legendre's argument that the legal institution deserves
to be taken seriously, to be interpreted in the same way as other
dreams; in short, it deserves what Freud termed a double reading,
one attentive to both its manifest and its latent meanings. 31
The other dimension of the Western legal tradition to which psy-
choanalysis directs our attention is that of what Legendre terms the
'non-legal scene of law'.32 It is the history of the symbolic materials
that were used to fabricate a discourse of life and of death, and to
institute an art of law which could address the subjective needs
and desires of the institutional subject. The specific problem to be
addressed initially is that of the way in which law creates not simply
30. See Legendre, L'Inestimable objet de la transmission. Etude sur Ie principe

genealogique en Occident, 1985, Paris: Fayard at 42, citing the treatise of
the same title by Jean-Baptiste de Luca (1614- 83). See also Digest
50.17.207 'res judicata pro veritate accipitur' (the judgement of a case is
received into the place of truth).
31. 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.
32. Legendre, Capora/ Lortie, at 69.
a system of rules but an aesthetic, a culture or form of life. It is in

this regard that psychoanalysis attempts to listen not to the appar-
ent logic of legal rule, but rather to the figures of its texts and the
erotics of its practices, of its theatre and its rites. The classical
notion of an art of law is thus to be recuperated and interpreted
quite literally, so that the legal scholar can begin to address directly
the significance of the symbols, emblems, rituals, icons and diverse
other signs through which a legal tradition establishes a culture
and embeds itself in its subjects.
THE AESTHETICS OF LAW AND THE LOVE OF POWER
From a psychoanalytic perspective, the most striking feature of law

is its desire to establish and promulgate order. In classical legal
terms, this desire for order was expressed in a variety of ways, but
can be addressed most directly through recognising the funda-
mentally aesthetic character of institutional attachment: 'the power
of institutions is a product of their use of images.... to train the
subject aesthetically. It was for this reason that the classical tradi-
tion marked out a pre-theoretical space and time of rhetoric, a time
which is well reflected in a maxim such as: "Nothing is more beau-
tiful than order" (Nihil pulchrius ordine),.33 The first lesson of the
aesthetics of law is that to capture the subject for the institution
involves a delicate and complicated play of attraction and of threat,
and needs to be understood in the psychoanalytic terms of desire.
Aesthetics teaches us that the institution of the subject requires the
inscription of an image of the social as an object of love. More para-
doxically perhaps, the subject must come to desire its submission to
power, the subject must love the signs of power, the emblems of an
authority which cannot be physically present everywhere and so
must appear most usually in fantasmatic or imagistic forms.
The aesthetics of law addresses the cultural desire of legal insti-
tutions as well as the mechanisms by means of which they attach
themselves to their subjects. In this respect, the aesthetics of law
returns legal analysis to some of the most radical and least studied
33. Legendre, Les Enfants du texte. Etude sur la fonction parentale des Etats,
1992, Paris: Fayard, at 55. To teach respect for order and through that
respect, belief in and love for authority, was a very common glossatorial
theme.
dimensions of the legal tradition. The history of the mediaeval legal

tradition was a history of a dual law, of utrumque iUS,34 meaning
that human law was only ever a pale reflection of divine law and
of a spiritual governance of secular powers. The beauty of order
was a divine beauty and its rule addressed both earth and heaven,
polity and spirituality. The legal construction of life was thus in the
first instance a spiritual endeavour because culture was a matter of
ghostly or unseen powers and in its canonical definition 'consisted
in the observation of omens and the interrogation of the course of
the stars'.35 What is significant in such a broad (and in this instance
negative) definition of culture is a recognition of the plurality of cul-
tural spaces and so of the forms of knowledge and of the diversity
of objects of law's regulation. Even within the common law tradi-
tion, the role of the sovereign was early on defined explicitly as that
of a 'nursing father' and in consequence tutelage of the soul and
governance of lifestyle or 'care of the self' was recognised as being
as much an issue of law as the more obvious and less interesting
regulations of municipal intercourse. 36 The institution is established
so as to create subjects, it is also to be understood literally as a
nursery that becomes a parent to children: 'a mother that nour-
ishes not those who want but those who follow her rule; such an
allegiance already supposes an apprenticeship, the entry into the
imaginary space of the institution whose subjects are infants ... The
centralised organisation works towards the production of infants.137
The institution has as its goal the mad project of creating human
subjects. It is through law, and specifically through the law, through
the Roman categories of persons, things and actions, that the social
subject acquires an identity and the power to act. Each subject is
born twice, once to nature and once to law. And yet that creation
34. See Legendre, 'Le droit romain, modele et langage: De la signification

de l'Utrumque Ius', reprinted in Legendre, Ecrits juridiques du Moyen
age occidental, 1985, London: Variorum.
35. Gratian, Decretals, Cause 26, Question 2, Canon 9; discussed in
Legendre, Amour du censeur, at 263.
36. On the role of the sovereign as 'nursing father', see Roger Coke, Ele-
ments of Power and Subjection or tlie Causes of all Humane, Cliristian and
Legal Society, 1660, London: T. Newcomb, at 98. See generally Peter
Goodrich, Oedipus Lex: Psychoanalysis, History, Law, 1995, Berkeley:
University of California Press, at 223-45.
37. Legendre, louir du pouvoir. Traite sur la bureaucratie patriote, 1976, Paris:
Editions de Minuit, at 190.
of persons which is subsumed under the ius personarum or, as

Legendre adapts it, the law of masks,38 is not simply a matter of
legal rules, it is also a more profound and complicated governance
of drives and desires. The institution has to reproduce itself at the
most fundamental of levels, it has to attach itself to the uncon-
scious, it has to enter into the space of desire and reproduce 'an
excess or beyond of that which is said ... '39 The role of law in the
institutional production or 'fabrication' of subjects has to be under-
stood historically not simply in terms of a secular law of succession,
but also in terms of the transmission of a much more ineffable
principle of authority or belief in power: 'the great ravings of power,
those which make the body walk with the soul, that is to say those
which mobilise the unconscious towards death, can only be stated
poetically, because power is organised fictively, and most particu-
larly according to the fiction of the all-powerful. Power is absolutely
mad because, following the christian discourse of the all-powerful,
power makes everything out of nothing.,40
The madness of power, the delirium of institutions, the paternity
of law over its infantilised subjects, is a function not of reason but
of an art of law (ars iuris) which captures subjectivity. The institu-
tion and more specifically the law enters the subject not through
rules but through language and through images. The image of power
- of the law-giver or sovereign, of God, emperor, legislature or
even something as unconscious as the 'rule of recognition' or 'basic
norm' - is a point of transition between the public sphere and the
private space of subjectivity. The structure of that entry of law into
38. Legendre, Desir politique de Dieu, at 225-6: 'Note that one of the cen-
tral constructions of civil law, that which, following Justinian's ter-
minology, 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 institu-
tional 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 Aes-
thetic in the Work of Pierre Legendre', in P. Goodrich, Languages of
Law: From Logics of Memory to Nomadic Masks, 1990, London: Weidenfeld
and Nicolson.
39. Legendre, L'Inestimable objet de la transmission. Etude sur Ie principe
genealogique en Occident, 1985, Paris: Fayard at 140.
40. Legendre, Paroles poetiques, at 212.
the subject is a structure of love, or in Augustine's terms it is structura

caritatis. The social image of power has to become an object of desire
whereby, in one of Legendre's most famous phrases, the subject can
come to 'love the censor' or to enjoy power. The law must have an
author and that author must be an object of love, a father, a name,
an image that represents both the sanctity and the madness - the
violence - of power. The social father or law-giver is one who speaks
'in the name of' the principle of authority, who judges in the name
of the law, who effaces himself so as to allow the text to speak, or
in more classical terms 'judgement is received in the space of truth'.41
What is crucial is that it is by virtue of position, by virtue of speak-
ing from the emblematic place of truth, that law transmits its mes-
sage or passes on its form.
The structure of political desire replicates that of faith in God and
demands a comparable and unthinking love. Political love is dir-
ected towards the images of a power that is never present in a
body but only ever represented emblematically and vicariously by
the delegates of its absolute yet invisible source. The sovereign may
embody the law, and classically both the sovereign and the judi-
ciary were thought somehow to incorporate the law, either by carry-
ing its spirit in their breast or by giving it birth in their speech, but
they nevertheless were only ever representatives of a source of law
in whose name they spoke. The authority of law was an abstract
one which could only ever be mediated by its secular represent-
atives, so much so that the medievals adopted the maxim that only
where the body was absent could authority be present (absens corpore,
praesens auctoritate). The consequence of the absence of any physical
or indeed temporal source of law, and it is legitimate to observe
that even in contemporary terms, the state, the government or the
sovereign legislature has no extant or natural form, the object of
desire was always an impossible one. The subject, in other words,
can love the emblems of power, the icons of law, the images or
effigies of social authority, but that love is necessarily directed
through the image to an invisible source: 'If jurists deny that they
create the Law by means of which the administration maintains its
legitimacy, and declare themselves to be no more than its transmit-
ters, if they are simply the bearers of the most authentic of all poss-
ible meanings, the author of this dictation ... is someone invisible.,42
41. Digest 50. 17. 207 (Res judicata pro veritate accipitur).
42. Legendre, louir du pouvoir, at 62.
THE POETIC RIGHTS OF THE TEXT
The double reading which psychoanalysis suggests as the appropri-

ate method for understanding the subjective force of institutional
attachments is none the less a reading. Although, following the
maxim ut pictura scriptura (painting as prose), the Western tradition
is well aware of the various non-scriptural expressions of inscrip-
tion or writing, it is still the case that the principal historical form
of power has been the body or books of written law. The abstract
principle of power which the institution represents is not a subject
and it cannot be referred to any specific unconscious or any indi-
vidual body. The unconscious of the institution necessarily refers to
a structure, and more precisely to language. The specific institu-
tional form of that language is writing:
In other words if institutions are both speechless and delirious,

silent and raving, reasoning and persecuting, this cannot be in
the same sense as the discourses of schizophrenia or paranoia,
such as they are treated by the psychiatry of mental states. The
madness of institutions is real, but it is not an ordinary madness:
it is a sacred madness ... The system of Law necessarily passes
through this point of delirium: the Reason of the Text declares
itself in the same instance as the delirious questions and mythic
fabrications of national institutions are formulated. 43
The structural form of the Western institution is that of written

reason or written law. The two great textual systems of the West
are those of divine and human law and they are expressed in com-
plex codified written forms. The institution may not have a phys-
ical presence but it has a body, a corpus of writing and of law. In
a formulation which Legendre borrows from Isidore of Seville, the
word law is cognate with reading because law is written: lex a
legel1do vocata est, quia scripta est (law comes from the word to read,
because it is written).44 At the foundation of the Western legal tra-
dition lie various monumental writings, codes of divine and human
law, which found the Western institution and establish the struc-
tural and fundamentally symbolic forms of social life. The insistence
43. Legendre, Jouir du pouvoir, at 59; and see further the discussion of the
same point in Legendre, Desir politique de Dieu, at 289-92.
44. Legendre, Desir politique de Dieu, at 297, citing Isidore.
of the law in the unconscious of the Western institution is the insist-

ence of a hierarchical tradition of great texts or, to borrow Legendre's
phrase, the insistence of a Text without a subject. The textual sys-
tem in question dates back to the earliest sacral codifications of
Roman law, but has its major expression in Justinian's Corpus Iuris
Civilis and the dogmatic tradition that developed around the recep-
tion of that vast compilation of law in the twelfth and thirteenth
centuries. 45
To understand the textual tradition of law, the classical heritage
of ratio scripta or written reason, and the aesthetic and casuistic
rules that developed around its interpretation, as the unconscious
of the Western institution again requires a double reading. The
principal methodological contribution of psychoanalysis to law lies
in the demand that the textual tradition, the books and other writ-
ings of law, be treated as symptoms of a fundamentally political
desire. The textual system of law inscribes the specific form of the
Western polity or institution of life and has in consequence to be
understood, to be read and interpreted, according to the hierarchy
of meanings which the system establishes. The Text establishes in
a ritual form the order of texts which will constitute both the power
and the meanings of social life. For this monumental task to be
possible, it is necessary to understand the textual system sympto-
matically and to interpret the 'work of the text' in a psychoanalytic-
ally informed manner.
The Text of law is first a sign of sociality, a vast emblem of the
possibility of collective being, a mirror which reflects the transcend-
ental properties of a culture, namely that culture - dignitas or ius
- does not die. The initial or founding moment of the textual tradi-
tion is necessarily obscure, let us say unconscious, because the Text
must detach itself from the discourse of municipal institutions and
transcribe itself within the delirium or space of truth. Such is to say
that the first task of the textual tradition is to screen the absence of
any tangible source of authority or law. The text must have access
to the space of truth, the space occupied by God or nation or some
other icon of social belief. However much a secularised tradition
45. For a technical account of the reception, see Legendre, La Penetration

du droit romain dans Ie droit canonique classique, 1964, Paris: Imprimerie
Jouve. For an introductory analysis of the significance of the tex-
tual and interpretative techniques developed by the Romano-canonic
glossatorial tradition, see P. Goodrich, Reading the Law, 1986, Oxford:
Blackwell.
may wish to read the textual tradition more geometrico, in terms of

the beauty of order and the logic of rules, it must first presuppose the
phenomenon of the text and a faith which binds us to law.46 In the
first instance the text does not explain so much as it implies a series
of foundational symbols of social life: the Text (as symbolic system)
establishes the subject's relation to death just as much as it places
her in relation to the institution of life.
The twelfth-century reception of Roman law inherited a notion
of the Text of law as being the most divine of knowledges: to be
learned in the law was the most sacred of things (res sacratissima civilis
sapientia).47 Two connotations of that sanctity of the Text and of the
hierarchical order of textuality deserve specific elaboration. The
written character of law and the relation of that writing to a hidden
divine source served to detach legal textuality from the mundane
legibility of secular speech. That the law was written implied a
fatality or destiny to the social which could neither be changed nor
disobeyed. That the law was written implied that human life was
already inscribed and accounted within the Text, and such a fatality
could only be understood and lived, it could not be rewritten but
only trusted and believed. The discourse of law was thus referable
to the space of truth; what was fundamental to society, namely the
truth, was written. It was a discourse of foundations, an inaugural
speech, an expression of the order of things, of the various signs
and other enigmas of the divine and of its control over life and
death. The aesthetic of law and the dependence of law upon a
fictitious space of origin or truth is a necessary feature of establish-
ing the externality of the authority in whose name the legislator or
judge can speak the law. The guarantee of law is a fiction of truth,
an image which establishes the unspeakable power of judgment
and inscribes it in the fantasmatic space of its subjects.
The legal concept of Text and of textual system was initially
mystical and required comparably initiate forms of reading and
interpretation. In a surprisingly literal sense, the Text was the body
of the social, it was in one etymology the terror and territory of the
social, the space and conceptual geography that a culture inhabited.
46. On the faith which attaches to instruments (that is to say to texts), see
Legendre, Desir politique de Dieu, at 289-97; and also Legendre, 'Expert-
ise d'un texte', in La Pyschanalyse, est-elle une histoire juive?, 1981, Paris:
Seuil, at 93-113.
47. Digest 50.13.155. For discussion, see Legendre, L'Empire de la verite, at
51-5.
What was necessary to law was first a belief in the Text, a faith in
instruments, and not a mere understanding or secular use. The
textual system represented the signs or augurs of things divine, the
arcana iuris which addressed matters of life and death, and in con-
sequence was to be approached mystagogically, through signs,
through images and an emblematic speech. In its deepest sub-
strate, the Text was a figure of truth, it was an opaque sign, a dark
letter, an incomprehensible writing. Such a view of the textual
unconscious may seem bizarre, but it needs to be remembered that
such a notion of the symbolic power of law, as well as of its opacity
or indeterminacy, is not lacking modern representations. What
psychoanalysis suggests is that modern law needs to recollect the
incomprehensibility or irrationality of the Text and of the law: 'it is
impossible to approach Roman law without reinstating what I call
the rights of incomprehension and the sense of enigma' by means
of which it was transmitted. 48
The enigma or symbolic character of the Text relates to the
foundational quality of law as the means by which a culture insti-
tutes life. For law to take hold of the subject, for the subject to
become attached to law, it is necessary that the textual culture of
the institution be capable of becoming an object of fear and of love,
just as its Text would literally be guarded and venerated, both as
manuscript and as meaning, by the mystagogues of the legal tradi-
tion. 49 A system of law, in other words, is not simply a logic of rules
or empire of reason, it is also a figure of attachment, a fiction or
theatre of subjective meanings and affectivities. The desire of the
lawyer to order the texts of law more geometrico, or in the manner
of a geometry, already displays an aesthetic or artistic inclination.50
It takes only a small further step to understand that beneath that
mask of order or screen of precision lie many other dimensions of
attachment to Image, Text and Law. It is necessary to bind the
48. Legendre, L'Empire de la verite, at 132.

49. See Fran~ois Hotman, Anti-Tribonian ou discours d'un grand et renomme
iurisconsulte sur l'estude des loix, 1603 edn, Paris: Perrier, at 120 (dis-
cussing the text of the Corpus iuris civilis) 'guarded like a precious and
sacred relic, only rarely being shown, at night, surrounded by candles
and torches ... thus did the ancient mystagogues show their sacral
law to the faithful'.
50. Legendre, louir du pouvoir, at 162. See also Jacques Lenoble and Fran~ois
Ost, Droit, my tile et raison, 1981, Bruxelles: Presse Universitaire de Saint
Louis.
unconscious of the subject to the order of texts or to the culture that

the Text represents. Such is the exercise or jurisdiction of power
over the imagination and to understand that power, to understand
law, it is necessary, therefore, to acknowledge its symbolic function
and its poetic qualities, its latent meanings, its texts.
To establish the necessary bond between subject and law, the
legal order depends not simply upon fear of law's violence but
much more generally upon a structure of political love. The prim-
ary form of that bond, or vinculum, is constructed through the
textuality of law. In several early works, Legendre is at pains to
indicate that this exercise of power over the social subject is never
simply a matter of a surface structure of communication. It is a
matter of the aesthetics and poetics by means of which law estab-
lishes an unthinking adherence, a fantasmatic authority, an uncon-
scious bonding of the soul. It is this delirious or mythical dimension
to the circulation and dissemination of legal texts that positivistic
theories of law have lost and so too have denied themselves the
possibility of comprehending the social reality of law. That reality
is a symbolic one and includes not simply submission to known
rules and apparent and comprehended authorities but also a much
more mystical apprehension of social structure and of Law as the
Western form of fate spelled out in nature or in the living bodies or
speaking signs of political and legal authority.51 The right to incom-
prehension or to poetry which Legendre elaborates, is in essence a
right to interpretation in the strongest of senses, a right to love and
to a life of the soul which understands that the meaning of written
reason or of Text is both secular and spiritual, of the surface and
of the soul: 'the reproduction of institutions takes place through a
discourse of fiction concerned with the internal structure or space
of the imaginary ... The discourse of fiction is in this sense a logic
of commentary and it extends so as to deploy the various signs
around which the fantasmatic body of the subject is elaborated.,52
The structure of subjective identification with the institution
depends upon the manipulation of the subject around the imagin-
ary sites of the text. It requires a rethinking of the text in terms of a
latent poetics which takes hold of the subject and institutes its soul
51. The various classical formulae for the legislator: lex animata, lex loquens,
viva vox iuris, and indeed the notion that the words law, reading and
delirium are closely connected (Ioi, lire, de/ire), see Legendre, Desir
politique de Dieu, at 267 and 293.
52. Legendre, Paroles poetiques, at 137; see also 53-5, 57-66.
through an unconscious desire or unspeakable symbolism of law. It

requires that we understand a certain madness or poetry of the text,
a meaning that lies beyond the prosaic or dead letter of the law, one
that inhabits a domain of living law, of the theatre of justice and the
judgment of truth. It is here that we can refer to what the mediaeval
jurists termed officium poetae, the poetic function, which was to say
what could not be said other than through poetry, through meta-
phor and figures of speech which have elsewhere been termed the
lover at work in discourse. 53 The text, in other words, is an initiate
or sacral form of knowledge, it is the discourse of the ima-
ginary other, it is a letter which falls from the sky, a poetic mask
and so also an object of love. It is with that love or structura carita tis,
that Legendre begins: 'What is exquisite in the discovery of a manu-
script is precisely that one does not understand. The letter arrives,
addressed and received, yet unreadable. The discovery of a manu-
script is a poetic event, an event of writing. An unknown writing
plays on the imagination like a painting ... it is an illegible letter
addressed to the subject who would desire it.,54
The psychoanalytic jurists' reference to the poetry of the text
and more strongly to the function of poetry in the institution of
law finds ample expression within the history of the Western legal
tradition. The text was always to be understood as containing a
hidden meaning or poetic core and it was this fantasm, or beyond
of the word, that the Christian legal tradition taught lawyers to
address. It was to this latent meaning of the text, this' other world of
interpretation', that the power of writing was addressed. There was
both 'that which was written and something else that was there,
something more. It was this something more that Justinian evoked
in Novel 146 under the formula non solis litteris adhaerare, meaning
literally to adhere not only to the letters.'55 The letter of the law was
never self-sufficient and the mediaeval tradition was at great pains
to emphaSise that methods of legal commentary and interpretation
53. On the officium poetae, see also Placentinus, 'Sermo de legihus', the text
of which is reproduced in Herman Kantorowicz, 'The Poetical Ser-
mon of a Mediaeval Jurist. Placentinus and his "Sermo de Legihus'"
(1938) 2 Tournai of the Warburg and Courtauld Institute 22; and P.
Goodrich, 'Translating Legendre: The Poetical Sermon of a Contempor-
ary Jurist' (1995) 16 Cardozo Law Review 963. The reference to Barthes is
to A Lover's Discourse: Fragments, 1979, London: Jonathan Cape, at 158.
55. Legendre, Desir politique de Dieu, at 295.
depended upon a complex of rhetorical and extrinsic techniques of

construction and evaluation of the text. For the glossatorial tradi-
tion the text was only ever a more or less complex sign of what
Bude termed 'the spirit of Latinity', an inter-linear meaning, a spir-
itual or anagogic sense which the words both harboured and veiled.
It was thus possible for the lawyers of the reception both to believe
in the absolute reason of written law and to adhere to the maxim
that writing is not the substance of law (scriptura non est substantia
iegis).S6 In a language that in many respects comes close to that of
psychoanalysis, the interpreter of the law was subject to a series of
protocols which emphasised in detail the plurality and the power
of textual meaning.
I shall avert to the most standard of traditional protocols of legal
reading, namely that it is not the letter but the spirit that deter-
mines the meaning of law. The text is composed of dead letters
(litera mortua)/7 the rule is no more than a 'mute judge', a sleeping
form/ s requiring the interposition or anima legis of jurist or judge.
What is significant is not that the law is an unconscious text, a
symptom, intensity or spirit, but rather that the meaning of law is
internal to its living body, its viva vox iuris, lex loquens, its image,
interpreter or legislator. In classical terms it is spelled out by refer-
ence to something beyond words: 'to know the law is not to know
the words of the law, but its force and power.,59 In a Renaissance
56. Legendre, Desir politique de Dieu, at 316. With respect to the philolo-
gical views of Guillaume Bude, see De philologia, 1536, Paris: Vascosan,
at 47 and 143, discussing literarum studium and the spirit of Latinity.
57. 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 a: 'for if it be true that silent leges inter anna, it is also as true, that
your majesty is in a double respect the life of our lawes: once, be-
cause without your authority they are but litera mortua, and againe,
because you are the life of our peace, without which lawes are put
to silence ... '
58. 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. In a different context, see John
Selden, The Duello or Single Combat: From Antiquitie derived into this
Kingdome of England (London: 1. Helme, 1610) at 21-2. For commen-
tary, see Donald Kelley, The Human Measure: Social Thought in the
Western Legal Tradition (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
1990) chapter 10.
59. Digest 1.3.17 (Celsus) Scire leges non hoc est verba earum tenere, sed
vim ac potestatem.
formulation we are similarly told that 'no words, forms, niceties, or

propriety of language is of any regard in the Civil Law, in compar-
ison to truth, faithfulness and integrity. For verba menti, 11011 verbis
servire debet; words are made as instruments to serve and express
the mind, and not to command it.'60 Truth, in other words, might
be captured by writing, but it could only be discovered by an inter-
pretation that went beyond the words and participated in the deli-
rium of the text. In Sir Edward Coke's formulation, 'in reading it is
not the words but the truth which ought to be loved (ill lectiol1e 11011
verba sed veritas est amanda)'.61 In short, the jurist requires the reader
or subject of law to love, and in doing so refers to a latent meaning
or power, namely the capacity of the text to elicit subjective adher-
ence, a faith or caritas that belongs not only to the secular letter of
the law, but also refers to the space of the divine. Beyond the letter
or between the lines, the text embodies a passion, truth or spirit
that belongs to the time of structure and to the inaugural space of
reference and of Law. It was for this reason that Renaissance law-
yers understood that legal meaning could only properly be found
in the soul or heard beside or beneath or beyond the text, subauditio
or subintellectio as an intuition, image or unconscious form. 62
DOGMATICS AND DOMESTICITY
In its most radical reading, Legendre'S analysis of the legal struc-

ture of social life suggests that the function of the lawyer is most
frequently an unconscious one. In the long term, it has not been the
role of the lawyer to think or to write, but rather to represent, to
speak 'in the name' of the law, to be an instrument of the text or the
voice of an authority or paternity exterior to him. Thus the lawyer
counts for nothing in the epiphany of law: 'The enclosure of law is
60. Sir Robert Wiseman, The Law of Laws or the Excellency of the Civil Law
above all Humane Laws whatsoever (London: Royston, 1664) at 70.
61. Sir Edward Coke, Reports (London: Rivington, 1777 edn) at Part III fol
C 7b.
62. On the significance of subauditio and subintel/ectio, see Ian Maclean,
Interpretation and Meaning in the Renaissance: The Case of Law (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992) at 166-75. The great advoc-
ate of traditio - the unwritten institutional wisdom of tradition - in
the common law tradition was Sir Thomas More. For discussion of his
apologetic and polemical works, see Goodrich, Languages of Law, at
72-82.
a space of silence, it harbours nothing more than a set of highly

valuable techniques and the protocols of their application. The State
depends upon its jurists, precisely because they silence themselves.'63
The lawyer is by tradition a messenger through whom someone
else will speak; he is the tool by means of which a greater authority,
be it God, nature, reason or sovereign, will write the law. In this
sense, the oracular role of the jurist is not to speak but to be spoken
through, and so to provide access to the unconscious space or
immobile time within which authority and law, reason and power
are one. 64 In Legendre's terms, it is the principal symbolic function
of law precisely to maintain or keep open the blank space of the
social unconscious against which a culture can maintain its myths
and preserve its relation to poetry, art and justice, fate or Law. The
lawyer deals unwittingly with Law, and yet the role of the lawyer
is intrinsic to the maintenance of the symbolic structures of social
life. In Lacan's terms there has to be an ignorance that puts truth to
work. 65
The place of truth or discourse of fate to which Law refers is
understood by Legendre in a classical Freudian sense. Law functions
to 'capture' the subject, to generate a submission to authority, and to
instigate a love of political power, in the specific form of the Western
institution. In one sense this means that the lawyer unconsciously
elaborates a dogmatics, a discourse of axiomatic social categories
within which the subject finds her place in relation to the extant order
of power. This, in Legendre'S terms, is the discourse of genealogy, of
the transmission of power across the generations. It establishes the
subject's familial fate 66 and provides him or her with a preordained
place and role, and in the last instance an identity, within the order
of social life: 'The fundamental axis of Roman law is the idea of the
Father as the institutional formulation of the principle of Reason. It
is the idea of God itself, as that in which we believe.'67 The system
64. 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.
65. Jacques Lacan, Ecrits: A Selection, 1977, London: Tavistock, at 296: 'Truth
is nothing other than that which knowledge can apprehend as know-
ledge only by setting its ignorance to work:
66. Legendre, Le Crime du caporal Lortie, at 27-33; see also, Pierre Legendre,
,Analecta', in Alexandra Papageorgiou-Legendre, Filiation. Fondement
genealogique de la psych analyse, 1990, Paris: Fayard.
67. Legendre, Desir po/itique de Dieu, at 265.
of Roman law is a familial one and it is precisely the common link

provided by the juridical principle of the family that binds the subject
to the institution. In this sense, the social construction of the subject
is to be understood as an intrinsically legal enterprise, because the
categories of lineage or of family place are the fundamental categor-
ies of law.
At the level of the social, the classical order of interpretation and
of law descended in a hierarchical fashion from the divine father
and author of all laws. The concealed origin of law was screened by
the juridical image or figure of an ancestral or first source, which
was repeated throughout the social order of reason, text and law.
Each subsequent authority imitated the inaugural sovereignty of
the author of law, so that, for instance, Justinian described his own
sovereignty as being that of one who was, 'after God, the common
father of everyone' within the Empire.68 The principle of authority
took the form of a legal designation of paternal power and its repet-
itive imitation in the order of institutional offices, dignities or roles.
The genealogical principles of succession which governed this 'ines-
timable object of transmission' legitimated authority by reference to
the hierarchical order by means of which the power to found and
interpret laws descended from its original and Pontifical source.69
The Freudian construction of the social in terms of a family gov-
erned by a series of paternal sources of law is, for Legendre, the
founding metaphor of western institutions: 'My theory is that the
State is the story of a family, in the Freudian sense ... of brothers
who are in love with their parents and at war with each other.,70 The
crucial link between the institution and the subject thus takes the
form of the social construction of the family and is expressed most
specifically in the legal definition of the place and power of the
father within the domestic family: 'Power within the family derives
from a very precise order of political legitimacy. The function of the
father in Roman law could not have developed if it were not bound
to power within the city ... Paternity, in the full Roman sense of the
status of the paterfamilias [head of the household], is not separable
from the political characteristics expressed by the concept of citizen
68. Novels 98, 2, 2 'post Deus communis omnibus pater'. See also Legendre,
Desir politique de Dieu, at 267.
69. Code 1, 14, 12: 'potestas condendi leges et interpretandi'. Discussed in
Legendre, Desir politique de Dieu, at 111.
(civis).'71 The power of the father is not self-founding, it is legally

instituted and belongs within an order of names that descend from an
absolute Father, be that God, the People, or the Republic or America.
It is within the family that blood and love, law and pleasure are
most directly mixed and contained. It is for this reason that psy-
choanalysis has such a crucial role to play in the development of a
concept of the legal construction or 'fabrication' of the subject, and
it is for this reason that an analysis of law cannot escape addressing
either the role of the father in the institution or the role of the
institution in the father. Both systems of power, public and private,
are bound to a common lineage, kinship or filiation, whereby the
subject, the legally instituted persona, is constructed and bound to
the absolute, to the principles of a power that transcends mortality
and that survives across the generations. At its most basic, the subject
is born into an order of precedence, which the glossa tors termed a
law of the living (vivendi leges): 'defined as the general order of life,
organised for humanity in terms of a familial communication with
God ... one which, according to Rufinus, takes place by reference
to the vertiginous rules of a genealogical ceremony, one which
celebrates the order of a God who is Father of the family, and who
institutes the places of his celestial family (celestis familie officinas).t72
The celestial Father is explicitly the model or prototype (pater
prototypus) of all lesser forms of paternity and by the same token
the mundane family replicates the spiritual order or hierarchy of
family places. The domestic family structure, in other words, is the
pOint of entry into the symbolic, and the places and roles which the
family deSignates imply a law which attaches itself to the most
intimate or private spaces of subjective life, a law that embeds itself
within the affective structure of the individual, a law that belongs
to what Freudian jargon terms the unconscious.
71. 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, at 1198: (developing the concepts of admiration and
personality) 'the most basic role of law as moral or cultural tutor is
in notifying each subject of this condition of individuation and lim-
itation ... This imposes a juridical art; that of being maieutic tutor,
cultivating the uniqueness of the subject within its juridical genre ...
What seems most unthinkable is the very notion of a liberating or
fulfilling juridical personality.'
72. Legendre, L'Inestimable objet de la transmission, at 248.
What is crucial to Legendre's analysis of the subject is the recog-

nition that the individual is born into law and is an individual only
by virtue of law. Within the Christian tradition the image of God
comes from inside, and the maxim that '1 am in the father and the
father is in me' refers directly to the unbroken chain of paternal
authorities whereby tradition captures the subject in the very mo-
ment of its institution as a subject. In Roman law a corresponding
principle defined father and son as being the same person (pater et
filius easdem esse personaf3 and ordained the submission of the child
to the person into whom they were born. The father was to be
obeyed in the same sense as the law was to be venerated for being
what the tradition poetically termed the image of the substance of
the father?4 The structures of familial life, the early demarcation of
domestic roles and subjective places belong to the internal history
of law, a history of the soul and of its marking by law. What law
institutes, in other words, is not simply an exterior limit or subjec-
tion, but equally an interior emotional structure which will bind
the subject through fear and through love, through fascination
and through fealty, to the theatre of justice and truth. However
much jurists may seek to deny it, there is an affective dimension
to the institution without which the ritual of judgment and of inter-
pretation of laws would be of minimal consequence if not simply
impossible.
POSTFACE
It is Legendre's argument that in the same sense that precedent

inscribes a prior law or judgment that allows subsequent cases to
be treated normatively by reference to the repetition of authorit-
ative rules, so the psyche is also marked by and finds its place or
persona within a previously ordered domain of familial authority.
The internal principle or inscription of authority also helps explain
the coincidence of power and love, of normativity and desire. The
institutional structure of submission is infantile, the subject loves
the law like a child loves its parents. The filial nature of political
desire or love of law is a constant theme within the legal tradition
73. Code 6, 26, 11i discussed in Legendre, L'lnestimable objet de la transmis-

sion, at 171-3.
74. (paternae imago substantiae); see Legendre, Desir politique de Dieu, at 242.
and like any falling in love it implies an unconscious or a beyond

of desire that exceeds the individual and so places the subject in a
relation with legality. In one early common law formulation: 'To
fear God is the effect of the law ... This fear is as a son's fear for
his father ... this fear is promoted by the law.'75 As the case of
Lortie earlier suggested, the filial fear of law is most immediately a
response to the power of the father and is only latterly a respect or
love for the exterior images, rituals or ceremonies, by means of
which the social principle of paternity is inscribed?6 The exterior
forms of law are explicitly fictions in which the institution acts as
if it were a subject, a father, and equally as if its subjects were its
children.
The first task of a psychoanalytic theory of law was spelled out
by Legendre in one of his first works in terms of 'the need to
reinscribe the link between the structures that surface during the
course of psychoanalysis and the institutions which are material-
ised in legal discourse ... in both cases there is but one text, which
solemnises conflict, excludes alternative interpretations and meth-
odically follows the path of its subject.' The two discourses develop
in parallel and it is the task of legal theory to move from one to the
other and so to elaborate the mechanisms that tie the subject to its
social place: 'we do not yet know how to pass from one domain to
the other, from the drama of analysis in which the patient develops
his or her own spoken text to the juridical simulation in which,
under the mask of writing, the Law speaks .. .177
Legendre's proposal for relating or reconciling the two founda-
tional levels of legal socialisation is to suggest a systematic corres-
pondence between the two orders. In Legendre's analysis the legal
structure mimics the psychic structure for the simple historical
reason that the scholastic categories which were elaborated to gov-
ern the soul (regimen animarum) were to a very considerable extent
coincident with the dogmatic categories of social regulation. The
lesson of genealogy is precisely that both subject and law descend
from the same system of names, the same dogmatic order of categor-
ies and classifications, from the same familial structure of meaning:
'the most private, the most intimate, that which is at the heart of
75. Sir John Fortescue, De laudibus legum Angliae, 1468, 1737 edn, London:
Gosling, at 3.
76. Thus Gratian, Decretals, c. 16, q.3, c. 17: 'venerandae romanae leges'
(the laws of Rome must be venerated).
77. Legendre, L'Amour du censeur, at 249.
the concept of a subject, to know the fantasm, is already marked by

the seal of the genealogical order. All subjects carry within them, if
I can express myself in this way, the institutional order under the
primary form of familial institution.'78 In dogmatic terms, the child
is a portion of the mother's entrails79 and bears the image of the
father, his similitudes or likenesses - vestigiis et similitudinibus - on
the soul.80
In some of his later work, Legendre has revived the classical
conception of the Fates to depict the largely ignored prescriptive
and providential dimensions of law. The Fates spoke the subject in
advance, they indicated that the individual entered an institution of
life and that the individual was destined to die. The subject thus
experiences the institution of the family as a prior order or fate, as
a first law which can neither be resisted nor evaded. The crime of
Corporal Lortie can in this respect be treated by Legendre as fated
to happen by virtue of a genealogical failure, namely that Lortie
was born into a family which had transgressed the order of familial
places: not only was his father a tyrant who recognised no limits to
his violence, but he also engaged in incestuous relations with his
children and Lortie's youngest 'sister' was the child of his eldest
sister. Wishing to kill the government of Quebec - 'the government
which had the face of my father' - the accused sought the restora-
tion of the Father: 'he killed the person who, in the concrete life of
his family, represented the transgression of the taboos and the prin-
ciple of differentiation. This was the tragedy in which Lortie, at the
cost of his own life and that of his unfortunate victims, sought to
found himself and to live. This was in short a genealogical crime.,SI
There was, in other words, no order of meaning, of names or places,
into which Lortie could be inscribed, there was no law to recognise
and no law to observe. If such was true at the fantasmatic level of
the subject, it was equally true at the level of the social enactment
of Lortie's parricidal desire.
The failure of meaning which characterised Lortie's biography and
his crime can serve to draw attention to a second order of homology
78. Papageorgiou-Legendre, Filiation, at 33.

79. Fortescue, De natura legis naturae, 1466, reprinted in The Works of Sir
John Fortescue, 1869, London: private distribution, at 240 (portio est
viscerum maternum).
80. Fortescue, De natura legis naturae, at 233.
81. Legendre, Crime du capoml Lortie, at 141. Alain Pottage, 'Crime and
Culture', at 431, remarks that 'Lortie's inheritance was a hand of
genealogical cards that his father had not played.'
between psyche and law. The two instances of the subject share the
fact and the sociality of language and gain their expression and their
representation through speech and through writing. The psychic
text and the legal text are comparable objects of interpretation and,
by virtue of the commonality of language, belong to the same insti-
tutional order of meaning. One could hazard that the law speaks as
if it were a subject, while the subject speaks as if it were a law. Lan-
guage, in other words, is irremediably social, a fact which necessarily
engages the psychoanalyst in the juristic enterprise of interpreta-
tion and more broadly in the tragedy of the dogmatic institution of
life: 'what does it mean to communicate? The reference to law sug-
gests a wide-ranging response: law communicates orders. And yet
normativity cannot be reduced to a mere play of appearances, it
mobilises a much more subtle set of human relations. Communicatio
is a substantive derived from communis. In other words, normative
communication implies making things common, making something
common which must not remain private.'82 Because the subject
speaks and because the subject's speech must be interpreted, lan-
guage implicates the psyche in the institutional order of reproduc-
tion, in the genealogical relay that is law for us.
The case of Lortie also allows the specification of a further site
of commonality between psychoanalysis and law. It is that of the
fantasm and of the image as the vehicles of subjective attachment.
The order of law is a theatre of truth. The institution is built upon
fictions, represented through images, repeated through rituals and
elaborated through the simulated categories of a collective subject
or will. The age-old war of texts is complemented and at times
exceeded by the war of images. Law relies upon images because it
is through images that the legal subject is most directly affected by
law. The power and hence also the danger of the image was the
primary force that motivated the various movements of reform and
counter reform within ecclesiastical history. The image was polit-
ically effective but also potentially corrupting, too great a love of
images (Iatria) would distract the subject from the dictates of law,
while an absence of images would deprive the law of subjects. Thus
the concern of lawyers to govern images and to regulate the social
forms of representation, the theatre and the ritual of government
and of law. 83 The image is cognate with the imaginary and it is
through the image that law is most directly linked to the mechanisms
82. Legendre, L'Inestimable objet de la transmission, at 166.

83. On which history, see Peter Goodrich, Oedipus Lex, at chs 4 and 5.
of subjective attachment or to the direction of individual desire.

The case of Lortie is a case of the failure of the ius imaginum, of the
representation of the order of successsion. Lortie had no legitimate
identity because he had no image with which to identify, no imagin-
ary space within which to found his own project, and hence he felt
the need to kill an external father - a bad father - so as to make
room for a good father within.
The theatre of law, the images, symbols and rites around which
law is identified and reproduced, are also domains of attachment or
subjects of love. The role of the image in the imaginary is to incite
attachment and to focus desire or love upon circumscribed social
objects of affection or legitimate political sites. The structure of social
love is one of the great enigmas of political power and one of the
most opaque of the features of the history of law. The proximity
of the image to enigma deserves a parting word. The project of a
psychoanalytic jurisprudence is linked to a desire to understand
more and not less about law. In Legendre'S depiction, it could be
said to belong to a venerable scholastic project concerned with the
pursuit of an impossible knowledge: 'the celebrated interrogation
fides querens intellectum, word for word, faith in search of under-
standing, faith in search of intelligibility,.84 The conjunction of desire
and law, of love and power is not only a fertile ground for under-
standing the mechanics of law's governance of the subject and so
its inscription upon the soul. It is also potentially the site of the
recovery of law's difference. The case of Lortie can remind us that
in the most tragic of senses a subject without images, a subject who
cannot see himself, is a subject without identity and so without any
consciousness of law. More than that, a psychoanalytic reading of
the history of law can also remind modernity of the unconscious
significance or latent meanings of law. The poetics of legal texts, the
art of justice and more broadly the aesthetics of legal order are all
parts of a history of resistance to a unitary or positivised and closed
order of law. Legendre reminds us that poetry and the poetics of
the text signalled amongst other things 'the insurrection of desire
against the institution'.85 Poetry and in varying degrees the other
legal arts, painting and music in particular, suggest a history and
an erotics which wrote against power and implied the possibility of
using or interpreting law to other ends.
84. Legendre, L'Inestimable objet de la transmission, at 13l.

1
The Dance of Law
It was illegal to dance, just as it was illegal to try to take to the
air. Morality saw these as forms of magic. In Europe it was
believed that nature had been subverted by man, or that God
had been disobeyed. This wingless biped was not supposed to
lift itself off the ground, either to dance or to fly, until the day of
its death, when its soul would take flight.
PRELUDE
The question to be re-opened here concerns the institutional dog-

matics through which Law is created, quite literally, by a play of
regulations which inscribe and fix the body.
This Law remains inherent in the Text. The Text, as I have fre-
quently reiterated, produces its own system of truth, outside of
which there is nothing to believe in or to love. As to the subject -
the institutional subject - there is only one thing to know about
the tortured science of the Text, or about the context of legal truth,
and that is the following: the body of Law is a human body; the
substance to be counted, that which signifies, is not some eternal
principle but rather the human body.
It is on the strength of this complex mystification of the body and
equally by reference to the amnesiac discourse which supports it,
that the various species of dance inscribe their pervasive formulae.
The strongest evidence of this is to be found in the classical forms
of breeding, which were later taken up by Christianity and by indus-
trial cultures, which all practised a particular form of domestication
which became intrinsic to our historical forms of organisation. They
dictated to all the bodies present, standing respectfully and greedy
to be loved, a mother tongue (which in contemporary Europe is
inseparable from the national language), conformity of manners
and of gestures, and a doctrine of rectitude. Everyone comes to
dance with the Law ...
37
The technical system of dancing, with its primitive theology, its

legal procedures of reproduction, its theory of numbers and of rela-
tionships, constitutes a complete summary or wholly representative
and privileged example of a type of traditional speculation which
far from being exhausted in the West is, to the contrary, re-used in
hyper-industrial societies. The technical knowledges of dance thus
take their place in the dogmatic order, which is to say in the order
of Law. This order presents itself as a logic of those exceptional
values which can only be approached or spoken by those who have
the learning and the power of lawyers. These untouchable founda-
tional values appear only through the medium of a rite. They cannot
be proclaimed except by means of a solemnised speech emanating
from a political mouth. Dance inscribes itself in this medium.
This reference to values allows us to see the means by which the
technology of dance enters into the discourse of Law. Consider the
following:
(a) Law functions in the imaginary by means of a political theory played

out on the human body. It is at the level of the Text that the leaders
who are qualified to utter a solemnised and true speech, to invent
rules and dissolve all uncertainty, are reproduced. For such a role
to be plausible, the Law presupposes a corresponding theatre of
enactment, a disqualification of the real, the use of deception and of
masks, and the concordant noises which ceaselessly both destroy
and recreate identity. Even the most minor leader is divested of his
human body, to see him requires that you believe in him. This
theatre of power is directed exclusively to making us take up our
partner and enter into the dance of absolute power.
In this respect, the repression of dance is extremely helpful in
illuminating the mechanics of Western institutions in the domain of
nation-states. It is essential to know why, and by means of what
arguments, dance was repressed. Other manipulations, other moral
rites of passage, other styles, were substituted for dance as the means
of marking the skin of the Western subject as a member of the human
species. Not only did gesticulation come to be regulated differently,
but the meaning of the body and so also the symbolisations by
which it was conceptualised took their own course. Humanity, thus
tamed and resurrected, has devised new means of protecting itself
while simultaneously developing and seeming to destroy a mytho-
logical heritage, without which there would be neither science nor
politics. It is essential to observe that this process of eradication of
wild or primitive dances took place under the cover of a Christian
The Dance of Law 39
ideology of culture, and the consolidation of beliefs which are still

identifiable today behind the mask of a more user-friendly sys-
tem of power. Most particularly, these beliefs reproduce a rigorous
allegory of the triumph of the soul over the body, that is to say, they
present a mystical theory of the division of the human body. It is
this symbolisation which supports the essential edifice of the insti-
tution of which we are the supposedly liberated subjects. We need
to call attention to the strictly theogonic marks of this division, and
so explore this dissimulated dimension of Law, this dancing memor-
ial of an archaic order.
(b)The refutation of the body established an ideal of constraint that was

peculiarly amenable to modern forms of human domination. The Chris-
tian doctrine of the body is fundamental to the subject'S adhesion to
the order of structure. It is equally essential to the exaltation of an
absolute yet nameless power which is viewed as being called to judge
the human genre. The institutional subject cannot come into being
without a relation to this unknown yet familiar Other, which founds
power and supplies it with the guarantee of Reason. One is forced
to return to the mediaevals and then to a metaphysical idea which
was prevalent in the scholasticism of the Counter-Reformation: dance
is not a physical question, but rather a question of a beyond of the
physical. 1
It is a question first of observing the skies, the mystic space of the
speaking body of desire and of the all-powerful, the space also of
revelation and of the guarantee of the truth of Law. Next there is
the immense and infinitely complex doctrine which sets apart the
body of the dead and arranges a medicine of the soul. Finally, at the
canonical intersection of these diverse doctrines, a liturgy of move-
ment refers dance to its proper place within the art of hierarchy: the
prelate is he who dances first. 2 Traditional discourse embodied, in the
form of a concept of dance which is openly rejected by contempor-
ary discourse, a complete theory of the universe and of the science
of power.
1. One should not be surprised by furtive references in the ancient liter-

ature to Aristotle's Metaphysics, approached via the theory of music, or
in terms of the theory of numbers and of imitation, in the analysis of
movement and of the geometrical implications of dance.
2. The allusion is to the Latin praesules, which originally referred to leaders
of the college of Sa liens, an order of dancing priests from the era of the
Roman empire.
To recollect this play of the ideal, it is necessary to recognise

in the thematics of modernity and of its pretended new men, its
spurious happiness and separation from the past, a dethroned
theology of the various moral agencies which modelled the setting
and extolled a normality of gesture, an ethic of sounds, a law of the
body and the image of an Other towards whom the unconscious
addresses itself. What place will the ideology of industrialised
nationalism assign to dance? Dance is not yet seen as an essential
element in the political simulation of good power; it remains on this
side of the margins, no more than an erotic and worldly practice.
To challenge this devaluation of dance it is necessary to try to dis-
cover why the practice of dancing has dwindled in the West. It is
necessary to recognise that this is not an accidental withering away
of the historical functions of the Text, but rather a most coherent
operation within an institutional system which refers everything
to the discourse of Law. Thus a return will be made to the codified
model of the body which industrial cultures legitimately inherit
from a politics of posture and a legal fantasm which defines the fabrication
of the body. There are numerous consequences to this irreal construc-
tion of the human body.
THE SCIENCE OF GESTURE AND OF TEARS
An elementary anthropological reflection can demonstrate that all

systems of organisation presuppose the institution of the body and
the use of dance. An examination of the textual spaces of the dog-
matic tradition in the West also evidences a foundational order of
discourse which harboured, in an elaborate and well-kept manner,
a science of lawful manipulations of the body whose object was the
inscription of Law in the unconscious.
Transmitted by means of this obscure and frequently denied dis-
course, rooted in the fog of doctrines of the sublime, choreographical
regulation touched the living and crying flesh of humans. Here as
elsewhere, the body was worked, stupefied and massaged so as to
ensure the triumph of the love of Law.
Even though they are abused, repressed and confined to the inter-
ior of a very narrow technology of amusements managed by the
public and private administrations of culture, the rules of dance
still have the status of a paradigm. If psychoanalysis can contribute
The Dance of Law 41
to the analysis of the capture of the individual by the institution, it

is through uncovering certain unrelenting cultural patterns of repe-
tition, and through the identification of the rites - the ceremony
and circumstance - transmitted by classical texts. The ancient texts
contain a timeless and undying message, which remains as relevant
today as in the past. I will note parenthetically that, in this context,
the interrogation of what the textual tradition transmits also has a
certain psychoanalytic importance. To recover the political dimen-
sion of psychoanalysis while at the same time integrating it into
new ceremonial practices and rites is an important task and much
to be preferred to its contemporary role of policing discourse. It pro-
vides the opportunity, one might say, of developing an understand-
ing of how, in relation to the repetitions of the Text, the demand
for love works in the domain of law.
We thus return to the extraordinary significance of the corporeal
inscription of the rules of dance. These rules constitute a type of
solemnisation of the body through discourse. It is a solemnisation which
forms part of the more general legislation of all the modes of
human expression: all the movements, all the emotions and all the
gestures are objects of law. The motor functions and the nervous
system are alike incited to produce institutional responses and the
most complex physiological operations funtion to support them.
The Law gives a meaning to the organs and decides their functions.
This legally inspired technology dictates the justice of formal ges-
tures, and aligns the body with the speech of Law.
To begin with one should note carefully the more or less inten-
tional and systematic insertion of problems relating to dance in
official doctrines concerning aesthetics. These problems can be
identified as part of the fascinating enterprise of elaborating an
administration of beauty, a notion which is inseparable from that
of order. It is necessary to reiterate it here: the most essential aspects
of dance are not necessarily discussed in terms of dance. Similarly, it is
a distinctive feature of certain eras of institutional discourse that
there is no discussion of dance. Despite remarkable advances in
erudite historiography, the cultural bureaucracy which is heir to the
arts [beaux-arts], the blind guardians of a knowledge of mutilation,
have nothing to say of this silence. They are custodians of a history
which is as ignorant of its provenance as it is of its disappear-
ance. We need, therefore, to return to Berlioz and to Lifar, unim-
peachable theorists of political value, patrons and remodellers of
the arts in France, to elicit a final doctrine: aestheticism has invaded

everything.3
The crucial question to be addressed by reference to this observa-
tion is that of what aestheticism does not say. Its source, what it
veils, what it was substituted for and so, according to a basic doc-
trine of repression, what it repeats or reproduces, is an antique set
of techniques of containment designed to overcome the anarchy of
the passions, to control the predilection to pursue pleasure and to codify
good taste. These traditional Western formulae have been admirably
summarised by the Jesuit historian Menestrier: 'We no longer make
use of dance as a religious act .... we rather content ourselves with
honest recreations, so as to mould the body to noble deeds and
decency. We make it perform acts of public rejoicing.,4
This reference is an important one. It should convince the reader
of the need to overcome the contemporary propaganda of beauty
and to return their attention to the most profound evidence of the
Western branding of the body, a reality which has been conjured
away. First, one should analyse the most general institutional recipe
for the solemnisation of the body and its variants.
Solemnity should here be understood in the sense ascribed to it by
jurists: to restrain a speech and signify its inscription in such a way
that no one can doubt it, to legislate a play of statements that cor-
respond to the truth by virtue of the authenticity of their repres-
entation or form. It is, in other words, that which speaks the truth
to everyone, in a form guaranteed by the Law. Various kinds of
solemnisation indefinitely repeat the same absolutist procedure of
seizing hold of manners and of the grammar of the senses. Law acts
ceremonially, it attacks the body by means of its formalism, so that
nothing can be said about anything whatsoever outside of its code.
Early political systems demonstrate this by means of rituals of
varying origin and form, but they have the same function, that of
making the body resonate with the Law. According to the Text, all
bodies (including those of animals marked by the absence of a soul)
harbour a unique and fatal truth. The regulation of gesture and the
3. These two authors lend a tone and measure to these changes, in so far
as their writings expose official beliefs on the arts. See H. Berlioz, Les
Grotesques de la musique, 1969, Paris: eRNS, p. 223 ('Music and dance').
S. Lifar, La Danse. La danse acadimique et rart choriographique, 1965, Paris:
Gonthier.
4. This analysis is frequently reproduced. See, for example, G. Vuillier, La
Danse, 1898, Paris.
Tlte Dance of Law 43
various forms of domestication denote a mode of submission which

proclaims this truth.
Before one can properly understand the normative apparatus upon
which the system of dance is based, it is necessary to recall how the
body formalises itself. The Western Text has defined a legal seman-
tics, and this theory of appropriate or good signs has facilitated the
operation of a regulation of gesture. In reality, however, as adverted
to earlier, there are few historically identifiable formulations of these
rules. There is at best a very modest science of religion, but in
general the industrial world and its form of training the human
body (in the school, the factory, the hospital, or even leisure pur-
suits) have not been explored. It is almost as if the implanting of the
doctrine of sacred and consecrated gestures, of the beneficial and
the harmful, of the proper and improper, did not exist for Whites
because they are subjects produced by a history which the Acad-
emy propounds as being outside of mythological time. Only under
the guise of ethnography and so as to assure the West that reputedly
savage societies were indeed inferior, did our objective and per-
secuting sciences dissect the strangely physical soul of shamans, of
acrobats and of Hindu dancers. On the Divine function of the hands
(Plate 3) in the cosmic dance of Shiva or Kurukulla, there is one
outstanding work which can be read in translation as the Mirror
of Gesture. s Here one can again glimpse the denial introduced by
an exoticism which, following on from the canonical theory of cul-
ture and its suppression of pagan theory, has led to an almost total
ignorance of the specific composition and details of European cor-
poreal rites. 6 More precisely, dance is incomprehensible unless it is
referred to the complex history (a history which is itself conceived
as including a mythological repetition) of the theory of gesture (see
Plate 2).
Consider how the ignorance with which we are dealing con-
tributes to conjuring away a primordial fact: the Western industrial
regime, which is supposedly demystified and based upon a new
administrative science, jealously guards its own pact with religion.
5. The Mirror of Gesture. Be;'lg the Abhillaya Darpalla of Nalldikes Varll, 1936,
New York.
6. The example of the amulet is significant, because it concerns the the
mystical cutting up of the body. In part Christianised, this practice
was repressed by the discourse of culture, only to reappear promin-
ently in theory, at the time of the Reformation. Consider the learned
study of J. Wolff, Curiosus Amuletorum Scrutator, 1692, Frankfurt.
However much we may try to mask or deny the fact, our organ-
isations are the bearers of the emblems of Christianity.
The organisational experts who peddle this ignorance of our his-
tory do not themselves have any difficulty in elaborating and dif-
fusing imagistic themes which help to sell the myth of a demystified
development of industry. In first place is the theme of the stereo-
typical, liberated and self-sufficient individual, the rational and
methodical mass consumer, who has no historical reason for being,
but simply inhabits the globe as a freak of nature. These allegor-
ical propositions directly touch upon the question of the promised
future of the liturgies and of dance in the modern organisation,
because the past of the imaginary is supposed to remain in limbo,
just as the structural work of signification is now abandoned. The
tradition, which is to say the repetition of a Text - that organisation
of meaning through which myth constantly regenerates itself -
has been erased from the map and censored by the new dogmatic
sciences, and so the signs at work in the body also have to be
expunged. Organisational politics thus has nothing to say of the
benefits to be reaped from the history of the body, and at the same
time it denies that it manipulates human beings in the same way as
the archaic practices of Law, that is to say, as corpses. In such cir-
cumstances, it is deemed best to locate the political status of the
body as something unknowable, simply uninteresting, or, more
strictly, that should be abandoned to the amusement and distrac-
tion of psychoanalysts who treat the laughable subject of the phal-
lus and who, when it comes to institutional questions, are as ignorant
as are managerial organisations. Our earlier universe may have
disappeared, and the gestures and dances which derive from them
may no longer make sense, according to modern dogmatics, unless
they are tied to the spurious humanisation of work and of product-
ivity or are subjected to the dictate of a cultural happiness created
through the sale of leisure. Even at work, according to one recent
bureaucratic advertisement, we are supposed 'to smile and relax'.
Contrary to these pronouncements and predictions, the govern-
ance of gestures has an essentially religious meaning. The success-
ive laicisations of this domain have been adjustments and reforms
occasioned by socialised economies. They have produced their own
glossatorial systems, their own commentaries and eventually new
versions of legitimate text. This constant revision of the legal regula-
tion of etiquette is inscribed in the grammar of symbols, and in the
recognised signs that pass between political subjects who know the
The Dance of Law 45
meaning of the pleasure of Law; in short, it has major consequences.
The issue is that of resurrecting a simple and singular fact: according
to the teachings of the scholastics, the Western model of the solemn
ised body was constructed in the same ideal space in which religion
was defined. The result is a normality that we inherit and cannot
disown.
Finally, the man to whom the organisation pretends to address
itself is a phantom, a fictional man who does not really exist and
who no one has ever seen or ever will see. We are dressed from
head to toe in the garb of this fictive man and according to the rules
of the Text. Each of us can say: 'that man is me', and dogmatic-
ally that is true. That is the meaning of the early and constantly
repeated institution, and of the savagely civilised subject: one must
show this functioning subject how the ideal man, the man in the grip
of the ideal, should march. Religious legislation, the womb of the
modern sciences and laws, constructed a series of model regulations,
which are often metaphorical in their enunciation of the legitimate
forms of communication with the heavens and the sacred space of
the political. Their representations constitute an extremely fertile
ground to which the modern industrial organisation is indebted for
its brands and marks which define and divide humanity just as
profoundly as do climatic and geological structures.
The problematic of dance thus depends upon a tradition, upon a
vast system of laws from which both religious and secular litur-
gies are derived. The corporeal manipulations in question are tied
together and disseminated, in a more or less acute form as the case
may be, through a science of elementary signs whose consequences
are inscribed in a textuality which is referable ultimately to the Law
- of the Church, of penitence, of love. Like all other procedures,
dance realises a covert deal or bargain between the body and the
Law, and in the circumstances a sort of summary is implied or
repeated; dance acts, in short, as a contraction of discourse. This is
why liturgical phenomena, which recognised this, open up a direct
access to the question of knowing how both the theory and the
practices of dance communicate with the ideals which govern the
functioning of the body. We here come face to face with certain of
the political implications of the diverse textual combinations of tra-
ditional precepts. The mass of legal texts both signal and underline
the following: the legal order fabricates the human body. In other words,
to feel the rapture of the ideal, to be in conformity with the truth,
the body must be fabricated a second time. Institutions deal with this
second body. In the West, dance was also regulated in this fashion
so that it could coincide with the generalising of authorised ideas
and the diffusion of the imperialistic techniques of Law so as to
make the political ideal of the other body universal.
This essential theme can be the basis for the development of a
number of doctrinal observations:
First, in that it articulates a social rule for the enjoyment of sex,

dance captures an ideal. The basic question is this: How should one
enjoy oneself? It finds its initial demarcation in the penitential code,
the ancestral code which sets out bodily dangers of exposure to the
love of Law.
Second, in terms of social communication, dance vouches for the

efficacy, within the legal system of copulations, of nuptial prepara-
tions and other public celebrations. It is an immense question and
it has rarely been treated in a theoretical manner. It is this rarity
which gives such enormous value to the work of a late sixteenth-
century author, Thoinot Arbeau. I shall call attention here to his
doctrine of the function of the authorised kiss as the means of
exchanging smells so as to verify that bodies are ready for use:
The purpose of the practice of dancing is to know if the lovers
are fit and healthy of body and limb. At the end of the dance
the dancers are allowed to kiss their mistresses so that they can
respectively smell and be smelled by each other.... And if they
smelled something malodorous, it was called a shoulder of mut-
ton, and whatever the other benefits derived from the dance, it
was in this respect necessary for the proper government of the
social?
Thus the honesty of the dance was governed by rules whose func-
tion was similar to that of the doctrine of penitence. They should be
combined with the rules of etiquette which were used to classify
choreographic exercises as legal procedures of biological repro-
duction at the heart of social groups. The other body is at one and
the same time the policed body - in penitential terms, it dances
'honestly' - of all textual subjects and the body of an other desired
according to the rules of etiquette.
7. Thoinot Arbeau, Orchesographie, 1588, reprinted 1888, Paris: Fonta,

p. 2 verso.
The Dance of Law 47
On the strength of the above observation one can again raise the
importance of dance as a legalised spectacle. The success of theatre
and the development of the theory of ballet both advance a tech-
nique of alienation, typical of an ideological structure which has
been peculiarly efficacious in the West and which consists of treat-
ing the human body as a spectator-body. This political enterprise of the
pure gaze demands explanation. To project the other body, and the
ideal which supports it, not onto the imaginary of the body that
actually dances, but effectively onto the body of another, this other
being a specialist dancer, say a professional of the ballet, is a most
disarming strategy for organising a ceremonial division of labour,
and it has quite striking consequences. This style of celebration and
recognition of the Law has been systematically privileged, encour-
aged and used by all state forms since the Renaissance. Nationalist
regimes, brought to perfection by the cultural politics of modem bur-
eaucracies, have found a genuinely formidable technique, that of the
seizure of the rhetoric of love. Singly or severally, carefully chosen and
trained, the professional dances take the place of all the others; they
are themselves all the others; they are the masters of the language.
The classical theoreticians already understood this matter. Con-
sider again the following lines from Arbeau:
All the learned hold that dance is a species of silent rhetoric, by

means of which the orator can make himself understood by his
movements, and can persuade his spectators that he is strong
and deserves to be cherished and loved, without speaking a single
word. Is this not, in your opinion, a prayer that he says to him-
self, through the movement of his feet, in the genre of a demon-
stration? ... And when there is also a masquerade, the dance has
a tremendous potential for moving the affections, sometimes to
anger, sometimes to piety and to commiseration, sometimes to
hate, sometimes to love. 8
Finally, to convince yourself that the political passes by way of

the body, one should note that the technology of Western dance
accumulates a great number of doctrines relating to the liturgical
description of the body and its parts. The whole body undergoes a
trial, it sustains a mystical cause, it does away with itself, and takes
its bearing by reference to rules of composition, and to choreographic
8. Arbeau, Orchesographie, p. 5 verso.

descriptions. The classification of movements are eloquent, and

underline the extreme variety of grammatical creations. And yet,
contrary to the practices of the Western styles of religion, dance
cannot be reduced to a liturgical exercise.
PEOPLE IN TEARS
If, as we have seen, dance in the West is fundamentally associated

with doctrines concerned with the manipulation of the spectacle, it
is the theory of organs which stipulates and finally lends plaus-
ibility to the severity of such mechanisms of control. The type of
expropriation of choreographicallanguage achieved by the theatre
shows clearly how the Law utilises the pleasure of specialist dancers,
in displaying them to the order of the gaze, in controlling their dis-
cursive representations and in keeping them apart from the ordin-
ary subject who is designated as the one who looks. This remark
allows us to understand why contemporary attempts to deprofes-
sionalise the theatre are particularly pernicious and difficult in the
case of dance, the question of seeing but not touching being at the
heart of the canonical discussion from which the policing of cho-
reographic aesthetics is directly descended. These ought to be bound
to a very specific casuistry. My hypothesis is that what is at issue
is the question of exhibition and requires a careful re-reading of
the dictates of a classical text by Charles Borromee. 9 It is necessary
to return to and reiterate insistently the following banal observa-
tion: many things pass across and happen to the eyes. Eyes which
gaze and which weep. Put otherwise, it is necessary to reintroduce
once again the mystical anatomy of the text. According to the organ-
isation which we currently both suffer under and enjoy, the Text
indicates that, under the rubric of the authorised gaze of the emblem-
atic eye, the eye is the privileged political organ.
What is most directly at issue is the dogmatics of tears. Treated
in terms of the theme of eyes which weep, the prescribed significa-
tion of tears was a question which is extraordinarily difficult to
recover within the Western system of law even though the gravity
of the theme, particularly as regards our theory of gesture, requires a
detailed treatment. One should never forget the degree of complexity
9. The treatise in question is entitled Opusculum de choreis et spectaculis in

testis diebus nOll exhibelldis, 1662, Tolosae.
The Dance of Law 49
which emanated from the doctrine of tears. This doctrine and prac-
tice was in turn confusing and paradoxical, sublime and systematic-
ally repressive of this apparently naive or spontaneous mode of
expression. The codification of manners, and the regulation of the
sphincter in particular, underwent social and historical variations
in accordance with the general evolution of the political or religious
order. These subtle variations have rarely been studied and yet
they should be kept in mind in that we are still a long way from
being able to account for or properly understand the science of an
ideal which prescribed, for example, that one should weep mystically
and not with real tears. The West retained its tears; it knew how to
contain itself, it knew how and why to behave in such a way as to
achieve that end, and yet this means little unless we know what
this continence concealed.
Once again, it is to religion that we need to return, not as an
arbitrary and superfluous form of government, but as a matrix of
symbols within which the casuistry of meaning can be found stated.
The Text proclaims the manners of weeping. This has become Christian
manners to the extent that Christianity has been, for the White races,
the means and the mechanism of a reversal. This branch of human-
ity has not simply been turned upside-down by Aristotelianism,
which founded the mediaeval scholasticism which both supports
and justifies modern legal science; it entered into a cosmogony of
the body and the soul, into the legend of a universe of vanity - of
division and of tragedy - in which humans exist so as to suffer.
Religion tied the Text to its most ancient strata, and specifically to
a knowledge of the construction of the melancholic body. Everything
that Europe inherited of the antique mythologies came through the
continuous succession, the unbroken genealogy, of its laws. That this
mythology was violently Christianised by the learned doctors of
the Middle Ages should not distract from the importance of the role
that myth played in the demarcation of our laws and sciences; a
fact that can be appreciated best by referring to the classical exposi-
tions of Melancholia, a much repeated and highly convincing image. lO
10. Richard Burton, surnamed Democritus the Younger (the allusion

being to Democritus, reputedly the traditional philosopher of melan-
choly>, The Anatomy of Melancholy, 1638, Oxford, constitutes the best
introduction to this point in the history of the Western Text. See also
the extraordinary study of Klibansky, Panofsky and Sax!, Saturl! alld
Melallcholy. Studies ill the History of Natural Philosophy, Religiollal1d Art,
1964, London: Nelson.
Christian doctrine takes us back to the fascinating arguments of

saturnine mythology which show the mechanics of the relation
between the real order and the coherence of human signs. It pro-
vided a fantasmatic map of the universe in which one can read
health and sickness, the temperaments, physiognomic appearance,
and so on, as symptoms of meaning. The Christianisation of the
ancient discourse of the science of the body implied a profound
revision of the human relation to the heavens. The theology of the
Church Fathers, while being radically dependent upon the Graeco-
Roman rhetorical form, while at the same time disturbing the doxa
of pagan religions, was well aware of this disorder. The celestial
order was complicated because it was humanised according to a
revised legal code. The perspective of the metamorphosis of the
body, according to the economy of salvation, itself transformed
the economy of the heavens and changed many of the assump-
tions of casuistic morality. The result was a new level of subtlety
in interpretation, with implications for every human body and the
destiny of its image. The simplification of the dogma, both of pol-
itics and of love, in the world of the gods thus opened a dis-
course of absolute desire from which, through the embrace of
death, our notion of separation from the Other is drawn. The
heavens became the primitive space of the encounter that comes
after waiting, a topical place celebrating the birth of the body.
With respect to this part of the topic, I will recall the eschat-
ological theme of the game - before the throne of the Lord, the
ancients told us to 'go and play' - and its reiteration in the Chris-
tian theme of hilarity (hilaritas). Finally, we should not omit the
traditional aesthetic and its sexual allusions: the bucolic character
of the beyond (calm and fresh) concluded the humanisation of the
eternal residence.
The theory of tears, whose most important fragments are tied
strictly to the legal and political code of the human body, derives
from the preceding complementary formulations. This code, in its
Western version, is powerfully and graphically formulated. In the
history of the present, there is no howling, no spasms which pro-
claim the atrocity of the Law, no gymnastics of terror aimed at
vomiting out spirits; no body struck down by music or drugs, no
dance of the possessed. The Latin fathers, and later, the penitential
proposals relating to confession, reacted vigorously against the forms
of physiological subversion, which were traditionally badly controlled
by Western law.
The Dance of Law 51
One can measure the distance that separates the mediaeval and
modern law of penitence (that which dates from the introduction of
the private auricular confession of the thirteenth century) from such
terroristic rites, by reference to a brief anecdote. It can be found in
a little known passage from Saint Ambrose: 'I knew some penitents
who furrowed their cheeks with tears, who stretched themselves
out on the ground so as to be trampled on by passers-by, and
who seemed like walking corpses, because their faces had been
so ravaged by fasting.,n
The canonical regulation which finally triumphed in Europe was
tied to very different forms of submission; it organised a meth-
odical, constant and universal form of correction, and it instituted
the repetition of gestures in a word for word liturgy, ordered in
advance to be pronounced or accomplished over an innocent and
victimless sacrifice. Above all, it stipulated the restriction of tears.
Christianised humanity had swallowed its tears and transformed
them into penitential words or rhythmic invocations accompanying
sacred processions.
Yet how does the doctrine which treats of tears bring the tech-
niques of dance into play?
Our body is not ours. The Law states what it should do. Such is an
interesting point, by virtue of which one can appreciate the import-
ance of the Christian influence upon the system of European law
of which we are the traditional subjects. Consider the theory of
spirituality. If the destiny of the body is somewhere other than
terrestial space, namely a space where the I that I am cannot speak
because this I is not dead, and if the body waits to become Other, that
is to say to enter the heavens where it will realise its amorous
desire in another body, this life outside time, the only desirable life,
has to be merited, that is to say negotiated, because we have to
have something to exchange it for. If the body suffers by virtue of
not being where desire resides, the desire to exist in the absolute,
then life on earth is one of waiting and of suffering. Moral theology
defined this tortured waiting not as a passive indifference but as
the patient resistance to the wound of the here-below, where the
path of desire is closed because our condition is to live under a Law
which our bodies resonate. Penitence as a medicine of the soul, of
that part of the soul which signifies the desire for union with the
11. This description can be found in the treatise Of penitence, I, 16, 91

(Corpus scriptorum ecclesiasticorum iatinorum, 73, pp. 160-1).
absolute Other, constitutes a technique of deliverance. As such, it is

naturally, by virtue of the biases of ancient moralities, in a direct
relation with the discourse of dance. The dictatorial casuistry of
penitence stipulates under what conditions the law of the body is
exercised so as to come to a pure enjoyment guaranteed by the
absolute Other according to the rules set out in the Text.
The repression of tears is inscribed in a rigorous logic of gesture
and attitudes of command developed out of Christian doctrine. This
fundamental mark can be understood initially by reference to the
Text and to its legal inscription of fantasms relating to death:
(a) When it was a question of control of the institution of mourn-
ing, the repression of tears translated the change that came about
through the legislation of attitudes towards, and celebrations of,
the manipulation of the putrefying body. In this regard, the melan-
cholic situation, traditionally qualified and included in a cosmogonic
conception of destruction, found itself differently regulated, in a
manner which separates us from anti-Christianity. Legally dictated
by the Text, the destruction of the body took on a symbolic signi-
ficance appropriate to the fact that this body was defined by the
canonists as not lost, prior to its metamorphosis. Canon law also
struggled simultaneously against antique practices and against weep-
ing. Liturgical legislation, for its part, had channelled and tempered
lamentations, and had excluded tearful women12 and commanded
them to shun their tears. On this last point, scholasticism was par-
ticularly lucid, as one can observe by referring to Gratian's Decretals:
'To weep for the dead originates from meanness.,13 The diversity
of the consequences of the manipulation of mourning should not
be underestimated either in terms of the significations inflicted
upon the body or in terms of the grammatical function of excluding
dance from celebrations of death.
(b) The dogma of a death which results from sin returns us to
sacred pornography, inspired by the economy of salvation. Tears
are here inscribed in their turn. I shall summarise the doctrine by
reference to the following essential distinction: weeping signifies
femininity and emotion, the absence of tears masculinity and reason.
This relation has beaten a path from the lyrical modulations of
12. See de Martino, Morte e pianto rituale nel mondo antico. Dal iamento
pagano al pianto di Maria, 1958, Turin.
13. Decretals, rubric of canon 26, cause 13, question 2.
The Dance of Law 53
mediaeval theory all the way to the psychologism of classical Euro-

pean theatre, and its political importance, its implications and effects,
in the vast repertoire of gesticulation as also in expression more
generally, should not escape us. In order to estimate the value of
this doctrine, it is again necessary to return to theology, the true
matrix of the Law, and so also to the concordant development of pro-
perly mystical spirituality since antiquity. This doctrine was tied to
a dialectic of sin and redemption, in a theory of salvational exchanges
whose symbolic elements were defined by reference to a two-sided
femininity. One side represented a radical impurity, the foul smell
of fetid sex in which man literally liquefied himself: it is the side of
culpable enjoyment governed by the temptress Eve, the thief of the
interdicted phallus, the mother of the human race. On the other
side, an absolute purity is put forward, an innocence which does
not know of the phallus, the fire of virginal love which redeems
humanity: it is the side of mystical pleasure, of the non-sex, where
Mary, the mother of God, finds her place. There are thus two faces
of the feminine and they allow access to the logic at work behind
the theory of tears in the Latin tradition of Christianity.
To cry thus had the two meanings articulated in relation to the

feminine. It had a negative and diabolical meaning: tears are bad,
because they propel us towards the feminine, towards impurity
and sin. In crying, we become women, and so it is necessary to avoid
weeping. It also had a positive and mystical meaning: tears generate
the joy of a delicious languor (langor mirabilis) and bring us close to
heavenly purity; and therefore it is necessary to look into the causes
of this species of tears. The theme is a constant one in spiritual
doctrine: we cry not only out of fear of the torments of hell, but also
because we taste the desire for the heavenly kingdom. The demand
of the 'gift of tears' inspired certain passages of the liturgy, as, for
example, the prayer pro petitione lacrymarum, in Roman rites dating
back to the Middle Ages. This time, it was not normally a question
of real tears; one talked of mystical tears, that is to say one talked
mystically or metaphorically, of things and sensations that did not
belong to the mundane human order.
These remarks make it somewhat easier to approach the ritual
language of institutions, where weeping did not necessarily mean
to shed real tears, but rather to lament liturgically. In the most
ancient, and long abolished, ceremonies of liturgical law, of which
we now know very little, this meant to cry out or howl rhythmically,
and latterly to supplicate, to march while praying, to intone and

respond to chants, and so on.
From this we can derive another essential pOint: tears are a part of
the ceremonial order. They must be understood in terms of an imagin-
ary burden. From this point of view, one must recognise that the
symbolisation of tears constitutes the ultimate ritual weapon for
making the body march, and march with the Law. To supplicate, to
call out, in the sense of the doctrine of tears, is to mobilise an
important part of the liturgical order of the ancient Christian reli-
gion. These ceremonies are eloquent. Because they are regulated
and controlled, tears, and their various discursive substitutes, act in
conjunction with the other canonical instruments in a battle against
an enemy. It is a battle which is ceaselessly waged by means of the
liturgy, and accomplishes what, in other textual systems, would be
achieved through dance.
ALIGNMENTS
Dance serves as a form of political mirror, in which contemporary

institutional doctrines reveal their vacuity. The happiness of the
soul, or the management of what people imagine to be the human
body, are no longer of any interest. At least, so it seems. Consider
the wizards of advertising, that science of our most recent mytho-
logy. According to them we should be content, we should seek
personal freedom, we have nothing to fear from a benevolent power;
a smile will open any door, even in politics. In these circumstances,
what place might there be for dance? As just one form of amuse-
ment among many, or, as people say, a form of relaxation, nothing
more than the rediscovery of sensuality. It no longer has anything
to do with a story of division. Each of us is free to dance whatever
dances we please; negro dances, Hindu dances, and so on, and,
more recently, those dances endorsed by the mass media or sold to
us by advertisers or show business technicians.
This state-sanctioned subversion of the classical taboos - which is
essential to the organising schemes of industrial humanity, and
which has been so effective at demonising all morality, and not
least Catholicism - is the trump card of a very extensive system of
institutions, which not only survive but whose power is being
restored. People who were once Christians contort themselves
before our eyes; they are no more prepared to embrace some form
The Dance of Law 55
of 'open theatre' than they are to give up their passion for leaders,
academic dogma, feudal attachment to firm or union, or the sublima-
tions of bureaucracy. Even without God, Churches of whatever sort
will always be Churches; they remain an indispensable reference
point for the dogmatic order of institutions. The French model
of the centralised State, despite the fact that it has been decentred
by international capital markets and displaced from its traditional
functions, retains its fetishistic allure.
The question of dance necessarily concerns the State because the
modern State (the apparatus of administrative pontiffs) is just as
interested in dance as the Church of former times. This offers yet
another clue to the nature of the relationship between dance and
politics.
Prom this perspective, there is a striking symmetry between, on
the one hand, those doctrines which establish the approach taken
by the state to dance and, on the other, canonical theories of penit-
ence or Lutheran ideas of government and salvation. Dance has
always been of particular interest to those who control the norms
which regulate the body because dance has to do with the basic
order of things, that is, with the division of society or the order of
enjoyment. Dance plays a vital role on the political stage. This point
can be developed in a number of ways.
(i) Dance is a medium which disseminates a Text. This is an important

point; the scholastic root-stock which supports the ramifications of
legal reproduction and of bourgeois codes and codings has pro-
duced a legal discourse which is a peculiar sort of textual envelope.
This Text has undergone certain alterations, not to say upheavals;
these have affected its style, the images of law which it contains,
and the content of the glosses which offer authoritative inter-
pretations of it. It is split into so many offshoots, and its layers of
sedimentation are so complex, that it is easy to forget that even its
starkest distinctions or its most abrupt discontinuities are joined by
lines of continuity. Yet there is in this discourse a sharp edge which
has always cut along the same line: politics serves to maintain an
ideal locus of power, where Law is enthroned, and from whence
human beings are governed and classified. Just as there are rulers
and subjects, there are those who are morally learned and those
who are moralised about, those who enjoy and those who watch
the enjoyment of others, those who dance and those who watch
others dancing.
The secularisation of aesthetics during the Renaissance and the

process of re-classification which took place throughout the eight-
eenth century gave rise to something new, but the sacred distinc-
tion was left untouched, confirming something that lawyers in
Europe have been repeating since the era of scholasticism: the Law
is written in the domain of pontiffs and rulers; the people, as mere
subjects, are separated from it. The Text declares the mystical order
of a great spectacle, and it is at this point that dance becomes
entangled with Christian theology.
(ii) The relation of dance to the spectacular. Secular propaganda organ-

ises morality by means of a quite specific implement; armed with
sovereign police power,14 the bureaucratic State has assumed the
role of traditional Christian institutions in manipulating bodily signs.
According to the leading lights of bourgeois classicism, penitential
legislation and liturgical ordering have been replaced by a more
liberal and, supposedly, a more enlightened principle of organisa-
tion. But what effect has this change had? It is, in fact, more a
process of substitution than one of radical change - an expansion of
the institutional field of dance and a transformation of the social
practice of festivals. What is said of theatre might equally be said
of dance; theories of performance have inherited not only a com-
mon grammar and rhetoric of the body but also the legal ideo-
logy inherent in it: whatever instils morality is good. Adriani, an
eighteenth-century theorist of the commedia dell'arte, made this point
by referring to an often cited comment of Euripides who, when
an audience suggested changes to one of his plays, retorted: 'You
simpletons, idiots, cretins, morons, my plays are there to teach you
and not for you to teach me. /1S
It should be emphasised that religious definitions of dance were
not abolished by processes of enlightenment; rather, they were
14. Here the modern State is again linked to earlier textual forms of admin-
istration, a fact which can he addressed by reference to early legal
writings. See in particular the synthetic work of one of the earliest
centralists, Delamare, Trait! de la Police, 1705-10, Paris, vol. 1 espe-
cially, where the laicised control of the classical moral condemnation
of dance (as threatening debauchery), of dancers and other spectacles
is analysed. See book 2 (I, 2) and 3 (III, 1, 2, 3).
15. See S. Therault, LA Commedia dell' Arte vue atravers Ie Zibaldone de Perouse.
Etude suivie d'un choix de scenari de Placido Adriani, 1965, Paris: CNRS,
pp.16-17.
The Dance of Law 57
extended and consolidated by an official discourse of aesthetics.

Elsewhere, different forms of Christian casuistry (after the Reforma-
tion, there was a division between penitential Catholic doctrine and
the notions of Protestantism) rather mechanically developed the
scholastic debate, which had itself been modernised and reworked,
so as to decree the purity and impurity of those dances whose
theatre was the body. Public morality, in the form bequeathed by
legal tradition, developed alongside State organisations, while pri-
vate morality (which was a matter for the science of the confessional)
was left to the care of the Church. When considering the regulation
of dance, this diversification should not be forgotten.
The following maxim offers a simple illustration of the fact that
a rigorous distinction was maintained: dance should be used to
teach Christian people. Is anything fundamentally changed if we
erase the word Christian? Doctrine, produced in the name of, and
for the benefit of persons of quality [gens de qualite] (a basic theme
of theories of theatre and dance between the twelfth and eighteenth
centuries, as in the work of Adriani, Feuillet, Noverre, and so on)
functioned as a principle of secularisation and appropriated institu-
tionallogics of performance. It was, and still is, a matter of elevat-
ing some and repressing others, of bringing down from the heavens
an absolutist and sacred moral science. If we consider the French
example - which is of particular interest given the precocious use
of academics in developing the official culture of the centralised
state - the methodical character of this repression is plain to see.
French tastes in dance and theatre, or in musical arrangements of
movement and speech, bear the imprint, not to say the stigmata, of
the most drastic forms of centralisation imaginable. The Ballets du
Roi and the ComMie Fran(aise supplanted popular forms of expres-
sion, which were gradually repressed, relegated to the margins of
the Text and to the seedier parts of town. Clowning, acrobatics, the
savoir-faire of the circus, what remained of commedia dell'arte, and,
later, musical hall performances (until they were made universally
accepted by the powerful propaganda of show business) or street
theatre; all these remained in the obscure realm of entertainments
which had not earned an official stamp of approval, and which
therefore could not reach the more elevated dimensions of human
sentiment. It should be recalled that Western choreography has
traditionally spurned comedy. Here we have another clue as to the
relationship between dance and power, as it was expressed in the
following pedagogical formula: God smiles, but never laughs.
Distinctions such as that between theatrical dance and circus dance

are also of great referential value. They should be taken not as
inconsequential anecdotes, but as products of meaning which are
referable to a symptom. Dance as a source of laughter is a variant
of circus performances, or of performances of that origin or style
(see the Favourite Comic Dance, Plate 1). It is not insignificant, there-
fore, to note the immense difficulties faced by contemporary dance
groups in their efforts to develop a form of choreography which
accommodates comedy. Given that this attempt strikes at some-
thing which the tradition holds particularly dear, the sacred order
of power (the centralised taxonomy of French performance in par-
ticular suggests this point), success is by no means a forgone con-
clusion. It seems to me to be (to say the least) inconclusive that in
France - despite a new advertising wave in favour of mime, circus
comedy, and so on - the noble and serious culture of dance has
been impeded.
One should therefore pay close attention to the following point:
the State, by means of its administrative legislation and its aca-
demic or educational institutions, still teaches an anti-populist doc-
trine of the body, characterised by a distaste for the untamed and
the vulgar. It continues to embroider the motif of the raised gaze,
directed towards a mystically constituted locus of power and celeb-
rating the grandeur of princes and of the State (as Noverre put it,
'great princes are great men'). Taste, which expressed a bourgeois
aesthetic, was realised by means of those centralised institutions
which the French find so indispensable, and which were supported
by the unifying techniques used and abused by the Holy See to
destroy or regulate local liturgies and popular practices (in, for
example, the suppression of funeral dances), by replacing them with
Roman rituals and sovereign norms which legislate gestures, sacred
music, and so on.
This link to Rome is particularly useful because it reveals a great
deal about the workings of institutions such as dance. The central-
isation of rules which was so important in the formation of our
academic tradition, is not extinguished either by the disappearance
or replacement of leaders or by the propagation of dissenting the-
ories. Whatever variations there might be in expressive content, the
political discourse of theatre is anchored in a locus of myth, a space
outside of time to which all beliefs are attached. In other words,
official productions are replicated only if they are believed, and if
they perform a sort of idealised procedure, a play of love and illusion.
The Dance of Law 59
Thus, through the medium of dance, one can identify beliefs. Dance,
as categorised in the regulated categories of composition, serves to
memorise the ideal, to rehearse a particular version of the Law, and
to proclaim submission to an instance within the order of discourse.
It is a means of communicating with the ideal.
A discussion of bourgeois classicism, therefore, can serve as no
more than an illustration of much broader themes. So long as the
values of the Law, or belief in the divinity of power or the sacred
and omnipotent science of leaders are left untouched, culture
remains intact, because culture is nothing if not our stylised bond
to an absolute Other, it is the discursive idol to which any work of
signification refers. We would do well not to forget that the State
has a quality of immortality. The theory and practice of dance test-
ify to this super-endurance of the Text. Theatrical impotence points
to the same impasse as the reform of the State. It is not that ima-
gination is lacking; rather, the hypertrophy of mythological belief
paralyses all attempts at disengagement. Within the discourse of
the ideal, whose reproduction shapes us, everyone is engaged in a
work of imitation. Which is only natural. Leaders imitate greater
leaders, and inferiors imitate lesser leaders. The art of dance, an
essentially political art, in theory consists entirely of imitation. 16
Such is the classical dogma from which modern dance seeks to dis-
tance itself. No one would seriously dispute the point that decen-
tralisation is nowadays the rallying cry of centralised power. Just as
those professions whose business is authority now earnestly advoc-
ate a politics of participation, and just as the notoriously feudal
and self-censoring University preaches absolute and omnipotent
science, so the (supposed) questioning of beliefs within centralised
institutional organisation passes through the very symbolic locus in
which ideals are venerated. Indeed, within such a unitary system
it is sufficient simply to believe in the omnipotence of authorised
speech for the change to appear to work instantaneously. The future
of dance is linked to this political misunderstanding.
We might return, this time, to the eighteenth century and to the
defence of ballet proffered by Noverre, a theoretician who was
widely known in the Europe of the Enlightenment, but who dis-
appeared from view, and was then rediscovered and admired by
Cocteau and has become famous again today. His theories remain
16. Thus the express title of Noverre, Lettres sur fa danse et fes arts imitateurs,
1952, Paris: Lieutier.
valuable because they show us where we have ended up. They

already refer to a bourgeois art, close to its zenith, whose technolo-
gies came, by way of academic models, especially the science of the
Russian school, to serve the cause of the socialist State. Noverre's
theories, and its dependants, are at the opposite extreme from sav-
agery; they constitute a subversive discourse on unity and are pre-
pared to conquer everything. The triumph of the Western soul is
based on this conquest, and upon the famous disourse of the body-
and-soul (corps-a-l'ame) which seeks to conquer everything. I will
make the following observations:
First, dogma:
(Definition of ballet) A well-composed ballet is a living painting of

the passions, customs, usages, ceremonies and costumes of all the
peoples of the world; therefore it must be a pantomime for all
peoples and it must speak to the soul by way of the eyes. Is it
devoid of expression, of striking scenes, powerful situations, of a
variety of contrasts and interests? If so, it offers only a frigid,
monotonous and unpleasant spectacle.
Next, the fable of models:
(Of the necessity of good choice in the selection of character and of

subjects for dance) Should the ballet master wish to depict jealousy
and the movements of fury and despair which follow it, he should
take as his model a man whose natural ferocity and brutality
have been corrected by education. A peasant or a porter would
be just as true as models, but they would not be so beautiful. In
their hands the stick would stand in for a deficiency of expres-
sion; and this imitation, although it has been taken from nature,
would be revolting to humanity and would describe only a shock-
ing picture of its imperfections; besides, the actions of a jealous
picklock would be less picturesque and would offer fewer satis-
fying moments than those of a man with elevated sentiments; the
former would avenge himself immediately by making the force
of his fist felt; the latter would on the other hand struggle to
suppress thoughts of vengeance which are as base as they are
dishonourable .... The rude and rustic man can offer the painter
only a single moment, the aftermath of his vengeance being only
a base and trivial form of pleasure. By contrast, the man of high
station offers him a multitude of moments, he expresses his
The Dance of Law 61
passion and turmoil in a thousand different ways, and expresses

it with equal measures of fire and nobility.17
To view these profound interpretations only in their original mean-

ing and context, as brief historical anecdotes or simple illustrations
of aristocratic or bourgeois taste, would be dramatically to under-
estimate their significance. They undoubtedly contain much more
than that; they are an exhibition of the technical means needed for
perfecting the political use of dance, so as to weigh up the propa-
ganda value of those uses, and to differentiate the various issues
which are in play in a repertoire. By this means the theatrical dance
can attain the absolutist and infallible rigour of religious liturgies.
Noverre perfectly grasped this metaphysical quality of dance as the
rationalisation of an imaginary bond in the following statement:
'give up cavorting [cabrioles1, give up smirking [minauderie1, put
some thought and reason into your two-step'. These formulae are
worthy of the best liturgists, and they also carry a whiff of slogan-
ising techniques.
We are now witnessing a technological progress in the advance-
ment of Western dressage. Dance therefore takes its place in the
perfecting of institutions, just as financial management, admin-
istrative law and labour law have imposed novel schemes upon
the system of contracts described by the scholastic glossa tors. If
Noverre's comments are purged of their hints of nascent romanti-
cism or hatred of popular manners, what remains is a political theory
of education. The suggestion is that dance should be considered as
a weapon of civilisation, as a language to beat man with signs and
to make him 'natural', or as performance to blind him by address-
ing the eyes of the heart, or as Noverre put it, so as 'to disturb the
soul'. From this point of view, it should not be surprising that East
Germany, for example, should have adopted as its own aesthetic a
choreography of modern history, produced by just such a discourse
on dance technique attributable to a single Text. Law - or all legal
systems of the industrial era - can inscribe themselves in the pliable
substance of the unconscious through dance, understood and admin-
istrated as an institution. If we are to understand the structural
orientation of such systems, we should also take into account the
17. Both extracts are from TMorie et pratique de la danse en general; de la

composition des ballets, de la musique, du costume et des decorations qui leur
sont propres (Bibliotheque de l'Opera, cote Res. 1045).
force of mythological gravity which drags each system towards the

locus of its repetitions.
(iii) Is dance a military act? This question points to another topic for
analysis, one which is perfectly expressed in contemporary revolu-
tionary discourses, either as a vehicle for anti-capitalist propaganda
or as a way of evaluating the possibilities offered by the auto-erotic
and dramatic expression of American inventions in dance, includ-
ing the notion of air dancing. Here, I propose only to address this
question with regard to the European tradition.
If dance is seen as part of the gestural system which is character-
istic of the religious and political disciplining of Westerners, and if
procedures for stereotyping human bodies are related to institu-
tions of government, it would seem appropriate to develop my refer-
ence to techniques of alignment by considering military discipline.
This linkage of dance and military organisations is hardly novel,
but so far it has been developed from a rather limited perspective,
dealing only with the theatrical or musical aspects of military cere-
mony. We also know, from ethnographic descriptions, that sacred
dances had a role in the staging not only of martial events as such,
but also in the enactment of ritual sacrifices or practices of posses-
sion. I am concerned to extract rather more from the question.
While the huge organisational systems which command us,
and in particular nation-states, wrap their subjects in a flux of lan-
guages relaying normative prescriptions, more traditional procedures
for communicating with Law might seem not only naive, but also
entirely incompatible with the participatory ideology of modern
industrialised society. The reality, however, is that there is no qualit-
ative difference between the manipulative techniques of advertising,
or the conditioning processes which sustain the liturgically organ-
ised mastery of appearances within contemporary organisations,
and the traditional ceremonial practices upon which modern organ-
isational structures are dependent. In each case, orders are given
and executed with the necessary rigour, and omniscient formulae
are heard for what they are by those who understand the game of
allusion. Most importantly, leaders receive their due. Bodies are
moulded to their function, they arrange and deploy themselves in
strict order, each finding its proper place.
Prescriptions relating to deportment, to the carriage of the head,
to the repetition and symmetry of bodily movement, to the struc-
ture of a gesture of touch, or to the techniques by which one sustains
The Dance of Law 63
a pause or a suspended pose, and so on, can all be found in milit-

ary regulations as much as in dances. Royal ordinances regulating
infantry exercises published in 1766, at precisely the time when the
theory of ballet was establishing its own canonical norms, illustrate
the similarity between the two registers. Characteristically, military
attitudes were described theatrically, showing that we are dealing
with genuine figures, as much as in dance. The connection can also
be seen in the theory of manoeuvres, which sought to order vast
movements of geometrically coordinated units (columns, the pas-
sage from column formation to battle formation, alignments), and in
which the fusing of bodies into whole groups of soldiers devoid of
proper names, realises the fiction of a single man who is spoken to
and who responds accordingly. These examples, each of which is
regulated by a theory of figures,tB share a common explanatory order.
This casuistry of military gestures, corresponds closely to that of
dance, and points to the possibility of a new analysis of the phe-
nomenon of structure. The classical systems of organisation created
human machines in order to validate their authority and to display
their absolutist rigour. Nothing speaks more eloquently of their
success than the anthropologically and historically diverse construc-
tions of alignments of military masses and civilian agglomerations
crowned by sovereign, unified groups which represent the fantasy
of a giant body produced by a discourse. Dances imply this manip-
ulation of living emblems and the ceremony of faithful bodies, the
theme of concurrent discourses on sacred power and political love.
Within the European tradition, the question of military organisa-
tion is connected with political pedagogy in such a way as to foster
numerous different forms of relationship between theatre and dance.
One of the most interesting and least familiar of these is the tech-
nology of the tournament [caroussel], within which equestrian dress-
age was used not only to transform horses into dancers, but also
thereby to obtain an affectingly popular display of propaganda. One
historical example is offered in a lengthy discussion by the Jesuit
Menestrier: Ie Triomphe des vertus de saint Fran~ois de Sales, represente
en forme de carrousel (Grenoble, 26 May 1667).19
18. For an example of a military exposition of such figures, which bor-

rows from the theory of ballet dancing, see the Instruction sur ['esprit
des manoeuvres, a l'usage de ['Ecole d'applicatioll du Corps royal d'etat
major, 1824, Paris.
19. Menestrier, Trait! des tournois, joustes, carrousels et autres spectacles publics,
1669, Lyon, particular at pp. 378ff.
This important moralist and theoretician of festivals produced a

remarkably erudite treatise establishing the relationships between
dance, theatre and the science of the carousel. His comparative work
offers an easy introduction to the singular technology which organ-
ised different sorts of movements or musical practices of composi-
tion (as, for example, in the theory harmony). In particular, it allows
one to see how this form of equestrian dressage worked according
to a theory of ballet. Menestrier's demonstrations offer much more
than a set of simple propositions about method; they develop an
analysis of the complex machinery of the carousel (which uses not
only horses, but also disguised characters and symbolic objects and
colours) as a text fashioned into a discourse. The definition of this
essential point is as follows:
The carousel is always an allegorical or emblematic invention,

which is designed either to instruct by means of races, machines
and decorations, or to honour the skill of princes and illustrious
persons, with which it mingles stories, which are always expres-
sions of the pomp and ceremony of the various machines out of
which the display is composed.
In order to represent a theme suggested by the life of Saint Francis

of Sales, the carousel was divided into five grids, each one extolling
one of the saint's virtues. For instance, one grid represented inno-
cence. Thus, one of the twelve standards bore the following legend:
'Lampridius, a closed oyster. Opes operit metuitque videri. She hides
her riches and is anxious to escape being seen.'
Added to this there was the following explanation: 'The idea
comes from Pliny. He says of Mother of Pearl that opes operit metuitque
videri: When she sees the fisherman's hand she doses up, hiding her
treasures, knowing full well that it is for that reason that she is
sought. In just this way humility preserved the innocence of Saint
Francis of Sales; he hid his talents as much as he could, and he was
loath to show himself.'
This offers one example of the dissemination of a discourse
according to a tried and tested technique, the simplicity of which
recalls the rhetoric of liturgy.
At this point, we have been unwittingly returned to our start-
ing point, towards the theme of that form of textual composition
which was peculiar to liturgical expositions, and especially in the
The Dance of Law 65
old schemes of Western prescriptions dealing with parades and

processions. The latter might be defined as regulated marches, at
once fabulous and emblematic (to use the same words as Menestrier),
which carried the symbols and dictates of holy rhetoric and whose
choreographic character has often been described. 20
What is the basis of this ideography of processions? It is useful to
refer here to the work of the scholastic liturgists, and especially that
of Guillaume Durand, a bishop and famous jurist of the thirteenth
century, whose writings were taken by the Latin Church (right up
to the present era) to be authoritative in dealing with the interpreta-
tion of gesture and speech.21 His formulae have often been adopted
in modern rituals. The following extract is taken from one of these,
and is expressed in quite accessible terms: 22
The Church, which takes the side of the living God, marches with
pomp in orderly procession, not only so as to ornament and beau-
tify the cult of the divine, and for the edification of spectators, but
also so as to strike terror into the camp of the demons. The public
prayers and processions which it commands are like so many
battles waged against this enemy, in which she brings it home to
him that she is as terrible and as formidable as an army in battle
array. At the head of this holy Army there appears the standard
of the Cross, the sign of the Christian militia.... In the middle is
the body of the army, namely the clergy who fight by means of
their prayers, their songs and their modesty; the rearguard is
made up of the faithful of both sexes, who move the heavens,
attracting its assistance by their display of faith, fervour and
devotion.
20. Most notably in the important thesis of M. Sahlin, Etude sur la carole
medievale. L'origine du mot et ses rapports avec I'Eglise, 1940, Uppsala.
However indisputable this relation may be, its origins still remain
enigmatic, on which see the very erudite article of J. Chailley, 'La
danse religieuse au Moyen Age', in Arts liberaux et Philosophie au Moyen
Age, 1967, Montreal-Paris, Vrin, pp. 357-80.
21. He was the author of RntiOlmle divinorum offitiorum, 1572, Venice, whose
doctrine of processions forms the basis of a very interesting inquiry
by E. Wainwright, Studien zum deutschell Prozessionsspiel. Die Tradi-
tion der Fro,tieichllamsspiele in Kunzelsau und Freiburg und ihre textliche
Entwicklung, 1974, Munich: Arbeo Gesellschaft, pp. 21 et seq.
22. Rituel du diocese de Perigueux, 1763, Paris, pp. 207-8. 'Instructions on
processions' .
There follow a set of legal points:
In processions we march two by two in order to honour the

mission of Christ's disciples (misit illos binos = he sent them out
in pairs) and to inspire in clerics and other Christians the fra-
ternal charity which the number 2 represents in Saint Augustine's
teaching .... One should steadily and devoutly sing whatever is
written, marching in order, equally spaced, neither looking around
nor speaking amongst ourselves.
This common reminder, in the strictly religious and liturgical sec-

tion of the Text, of battle and the enemy, emphasises that legal and
well-ordered manipulations of bodies are an aspect of the division
of human beings, and are directly related to a fantasmatics of gov-
ernment as the means of salvation, and to a hierarchy and science
of the sacred which tells us how to speak. Alignment is a basic
manoeuvre of any theory of conforming movement; politically, dance
and the other techniques of capture which make the human body
speak are one and the same thing. It is a work of reference to an
omniscient power, of the same sort as the various religious proces-
sions [cortege] and the modes of expression of military automatons.
Repetition is therefore well founded.
Today, stereotyped gestures, processional action, military culture
and the passion of marching to the same beat for the love of those
who know, and who tell us how to speak, all these declamatory
forms of authority are mediated by advertising, industrial propa-
ganda and other commercial spaces. They together methodically
dictate a discourse of desire, controlled by those who possess the
mystical keys that allow one to invoke the law, or in other words,
to make believe. The Law always speaks the truth, and this repeti-
tion informs us of all the different circumstances of the imaginary
relay of politics. Marches and dances, and the entire government of
bodies, function in this way. The magisterial opinion of the most
banal historiography recognises as much: dance reveals an epoch,
a culture and a political system.
2
Parenthesis: The Text
without Subject
My work has frequently made use of the concept of the Text
without subject. By this I understand the following: the totality
of socially and historically inscribed textual devices which can be
considered simultaneously as support and effect of a process of
reproduction within any given system of organisation. This repro-
duction is the object of the aesthetic and learned manoeuvres of
Law and can be defined in the last instance as the reproduction of
the human species through and across a specific cultural space.
I shall add a clarification. The Text without subject should be
analysed with the same rigour that Freud, in The Interpretation of
Dreams, taught us to treat the creations of a subject, with one dif-
ference, namely that it should be analysed in the mode of as if, as
if there was a subject. Note the reference to the science of dreams, a
return which is fundamental because it is a question here of plac-
ing oneself in the presence of what can properly be termed an act
or deed. A society, a system of organisation, dreams and at the
same time it produces ready-to-wear symptoms, a neurotic myth,
because institutions address themselves to human subjects, to sub-
jects who are sick with desire and who speak, to the 'speaking beings'
so justly evoked by Lacan. The trajectory of my work consists in
endeavouring to understand the importance of the as if and the
function of fiction, a function which is necessary for the physical
reproduction of humanity. This is with systems of texts.
I will not here take up again my previous interrogations of the
industrial accumulation of scripts, of literary belief or of the bur-
eaucratic spaces of writing and of texts. The notion of the text in
the Occident is much more indefinite than is supposed by the bulk
of studies which have this more or less magical signifier as their
object. Consider, for example, the extraordinary superficiality with
which such studies treat the literary activities of legal institutions,
and in particular the question of the epistemic significance of the
legal authentification of documents, and most notably lawyer's
67
notarial roles. In another context, and despite psychoanalysis and

the efforts of some to distance themselves from approximations
based upon the monumental stature of texts and of writing, or the
conception, if I may put it in this way, born of the perennial arch-
ivist or filing clerk's view of writing, the social or human sciences
hardly pause to address questions such as: can one write in the air,
like a child? I should add: or in the manner of the tradition of the
Chinese? I underline this question so as to stress our lack of con-
sciousness of the relationship between writing and ephemerality.
Why this reference to the ephemeral? Because it is very difficult
to gain acceptance for the idea that the transmission of what inter-
ests us in the space of institutions is not the transmission of mater-
ial objects nor even of a discourse, in the sense in which discourse
signifies the contents of a message. As well as the question of acts
- I repeat, of acts - that are judged through the labour of historical
erudition, this transmission, however historical it may be, is not
that of a content; nor is the content of such transmission what should
interest us. I will be quite explicit: what is transmitted, properly
speaking, is nothing, the Nothing. It is when the conditions, the
circumstances, the historical justifications, have been disqualified or
have disappeared that transmission interests us most directly. What
is crucial is the skin, the abandoned costume, the truth not as the
discourse of a content, but as a function.
The Text without subject signifies that the history of institutions
is dependent upon a logic of symbolic, which is to sayan essen-
tially juridical, transmission. It is a matter of framing the Law for
the purposes of reproduction of the species in a determinate cul-
ture, and it is this which colours the Text in a particular way. If
there is a structure (in the Latin architectural sense) in history, and
in consequence in the industrial system, which can neither be treated
as outside history nor outside culture, this would mean the follow-
ing: certain things are frozen and we must reckon with this process
of freezing. Put differently, it is possible to recognize the lines of
force, the various branches of an evolution (for example, the two
scholasticisms, mediaeval and modern), the adulterations and points
of rupture (for example, the effects of industrialisation); but it is not
possible to escape from the unavoidable: the logical relation which
in the Occident unites the machinery of an industrialised legality to
the history of Roman law conceived as the principle of institutional
Reason. It is possible to take some preliminary examples from the
fabric of history and to elaborate from them the way in which, pro-
Parenthesis: The Text without Subject 69
perly speaking, history works. Although it is not possible to reduce

the logic of industrial expansion, as the expansion of a culture, to
the juxtaposition of a series of stages, the following may be noted:
The Text without subject is an operative concept which allows us to

study the fact that each system of organisation promulgates, by
means of dogmatic invention, a discourse, and this discourse works
as if it was that of the system to the interior of which we belong and
in which we believe. This text does not belong to any subject. In this
respect, a State ought to be treated as a constitutive metaphor, and
as an instance of the fabrication of the mythology, which Hobbes,
for example, accounted for under the sign of the monster Leviathan.
Poetry and the arts ought to be treated as texts within the Text
without subject. They represent the reference to the sovereignty of
fiction. Such a notation is formulated admirably by those artists
close to pure scholasticism, and by Petrarch in particular in his
definition of the duty of the poet (officium poetae).
In all systems of organisation a principle of the hierarchisation
of texts exists. Not all texts are equal in the system's economy of
knowledges of the Law. There is the Law, and all knowledges depend
upon it. This means (from the point of view of reproduction of the
species) that one cannot treat all the texts offered us though histor-
ical erudition as belonging to the same order or level. I will return
to this at length, in presenting occidental legal doctrine as being
directly derived from those texts which created faith, that is to say
those texts which, according to legal science and the Law, had the
authority to fabricate believers. In writing Text with a capital letter
I aim to formulate this principle of the differentiation of texts at the
interior of an envelope of ideals which contains us all.
In the historical perspective of Roman law, as I understand it, the
Text without subject signifies the principle of paternity, no more and no
less. Such, as we will see, has extraordinary significance in terms of
the reproduction of the industrial system as a system of conquest.
To exemplify the concept of Text without subject, we can have
recourse to one reference within the occidental tradition: heraldry.
What is at issue in this particular and very poorly studied branch
of occidental law? It is in essence a matter of signalling the genealo-
gical principle by visual means, of articulating through the medium
of emblems what constitutes the truth for a descendant, a truth
which is legally protected by the criminal regulation of the crime of
forgery (crimen falsi). Such is a pre-eminently dogmatic knowledge,
arranged in the Middle Ages in the West in the form by which we

still know it. Consider Plate 4: 1 the arms of the Borromean (those of
a branch of the Borromean family, here Borromius Arese), with the
device of Humilitas crowned, and the rich composition including
most notably the famous Borromean knot well known to mathem-
aticians and, more recently, to psychoanalysts trained by Lacan (in
reality, the three rings conform to a very ancient mystical discourse).
In these arms, you have the perfect example of the Text without
subject, because these arms are transmitted for a family and cannot
be claimed as the text of any subject. Each descendant invokes his
title as a property of a name, as a right of inheritance inscribed in
a familial or, more exactly, a Borromean discourse. At the level of
States, and of the Roman Church, which knew remarkably well
how to manipulate such processes, the same mechanisms function.
The French authors of the ancien regime had a word for designating
a heraldic knowledge which consisted of showing the truth and of
making it function as an organisational principle: the Heroic Science.
It was indeed a matter of such a stake.
The Text without subject is a concept which opens up the poss-
ibility of better understanding, through the necessary reference to
the Law which founds the limit - reference to the principle of
paternity - that the principle of differentiation of texts, and so of
discourses, in the bosom of the system, establishes at the same time
a political and mythological differentiation of legal spaces. The arms of
the Borromeans institute a discourse in the form of codified enigmas,
to which heraldry offers the key. Such a discourse is attributable
to an eponymous ancestor, to the one who gave his name. Arms
thus designate this heroic and sacred space by means of which we
are able to recognise the status of all spaces of the same kind, sol-
emnised spaces where the truth of power, power as the absolute, is
mystically lodged. Thus does power look upon itself. In this regard
the creations of Soviet aesthetics are of great interest by virtue of
their academic quality, which was turned in its full force towards
the repetition of an eponymous discourse by means of emblems.
With the Borromeans we saw Humility crowned; in the USSR, Pravda
(the Truth) is decorated with the Order of Lenin and the Order of
the October Revolution. Every reader, every day, who read the
Party new paper would see those decorations. It can be remarked
further that through the proliferation of the systematically mediocre
1. V. Spreti, Enciclopedia Storico-Nobiliare Italiana, 1929, Milan, II p. 144.

Parenthesis: The Text without Subject 71
photographs of Soviet propaganda, one can see the secret of the

function of emblems in the form of photographs, their role in the
grey portraiture of collectivist demonstrations, and their reference
to a heroic ancestor.
We encounter the concept of Text without subject again in rela-
tion to the question of the bond or the legal delineation of the
passage from the order of the subject to the political order. I must
also underline the importance of that which, here or there, could be
formulated, in particular in relation to the arts, with regard to fiction
and its function. Legal reasoning is in principle very close to what
we call the arts. Thus, in reflecting upon the technical rules of tra-
gedy - technical rules in relation to which there have been some
remarkably relevant studies, as for example on the artifice of time
- you will see that you reflect upon something essential which we
can name the juridical space of structure, or juridical space plain
and simple. At the same time, this reference to the technical rules
of tragedy can put you on the road to understanding that behind
every institutional system something like a love affair is taking place.
Such a reference is firmly at the heart of the interrogations of sac-
rifice, of murder and of suicide in the name of - patriotic truth, the
truth of the Cause, etc. - or the principle of Muttertum and Vatertum
(as it will be questioned at length) at the level of social systems.
3
Protocol of the Love Letter
Contemporary theories of communication forget that messages incite
us erotically. Information as such is not important, what counts most
is the message, because we must first believe.
We communicate in an erudite manner, that is to say by means
of an erotic attachment to the text. It is, therefore, necessary to
return to the notion of erudition and to a model of reading that
challenges the contemporary ideology of the text as the bearer of
information. Erudition evokes a somatic reading, a strict adherence
to the letter of the text. This has its price: it is no longer possible to
propose a purely objective reading of a manuscript; the erudite
reading attends not to narrative but to an extreme poetry, it allows
itself to be carried along on the stream of signifiers. For the schol-
arly reader, the handwritten manuscript functions as a mystically
revealed, secret writing. It has its own particular digressions, its
own lineal order, its own calligraphy, abbreviations and presenta-
tional values, in short each manuscript has its own internal criteria of
legibility. To take an example from my own experience, in copying
a manuscript I once had to choose between two different transcrip-
tions, between inter epulas and inter puellas, either 'between meals' or
'among girls', a strange example of the way in which Reason takes
flight. The best editor of such texts is thus an expert in transcribing
the lines of the manuscript without seeking to correct, punctuate
or understand it, and so to resonate its texture like the voice of a
ghost. This strangeness of writing is directly relevant to the analYSis
of industrial modes of communication; it is a remnant that remains
visible in our system of reading and of deciphering of messages
because we are heirs to a system founded upon a tradition of spir-
itual interpretation, that is to say a rationalist textual tradition, one
which was counterposed to that of Jewish forms of reading.
Put differently, the question of language and of speech remains.
The message functions as an enigma. And it is for this reason that
I have exhausted my greatest gift, my fanaticism, in the indolence
of erudition, in the joy of celebrating something unknown as it
touched me on the page. I received these writings in a thousand
72
Protocol of the Love Letter 73
forms, pensive and sincere, or with my soul on fire, and always in

my own style. Such is the magic of communication and it is well
captured in the technology of advertising, which is the best founded
of all the industrial mechanisms of generating messages because it
always used a wild erudition and understood the basic given of all
messages, namely that their goal is not to convey information or to
make something known, but to be enjoyed. From the point of view
of the unconscious, of our unconscious which muddles everything,
it is not reality that is initially of interest but rather the enigma of
the message.
An extremely naive formulation can provide a point of entry into
this affair of langauge: the authentic truth gleams.
The authentic truth is that of love, that which disqualifies what we
call the real, that for which we would die. The authentic truth under-
pins the system of messages, it is unspeakable except through the
detour of metaphor and all the other forms which allow us to circum-
scribe the divine space of power. I shall propose certain examples:
We claim to read messages everywhere, and most notably in what

we call nature. Where, according to classical pharmacopeia, were
these messages inscribed, in plants themselves, or in the learned
reports elaborated by notarial hands?!
A book is a place which eventually has nothing to do with read-
ing. It is a space containing nothing, enclosing the void. The book
was made to be performed. According to the Latin tradition, both
before and after the revival of scholasticism and right up until the
era of the baroque, the book was understood to be a space for the
soul, a prison of the heart where the Absent spoke, it instituted
the distance of the divine, an amour lointain, or mystical space of
love. Without this reference, it is impossible to understand that an
essentially juridical conception of absolute power was transposed, in
the Christian West, onto a certain version of the Vision of the Book. 2
Love, in the sense of the mystical Banquet, of swallowing the
divine message, and so in the sense of an unsayable communication,
1. An excellent example of this can be found in V.A. Moellenbroccius,

Choehlearia Curiosa, 1674, Leipzig, the work of an erudite German Jesuit,
which depicts the genealogy of plants, their place in the divine order
as a cure for humans, and of the symmetry between liturgical time and
that of hatching and flowering.
2. It is also important here to take note of the importance of the metaphor
of the heart. Cf. G. Bauer, C[flustrum flnimae, 1973, Munich: Fink Verlag.
is inseparable from the social and political circulation of messages.

The physical form of the message is not its medium; it rather repres-
ents it. Classically, only the officially, that is to say legally, recognised
artist was allowed to express this message. Consider in this respect
the words which Bejart put into the mouth of one of his dancers:
'My stage is inside me. I swallowed it yesterday, thinking that I
was eating a fig, and now I have stomach-ache. What is much worse,
however, is the unopened letter lying forgotten near my bed.'3
Why have the modern media abolished the conditions under which
the erudite transmission of messages was made possible through
a discourse which was not separate from its literal support? The
examples cited can help us answer this question by referring to the
play of the enigma and of the incomprehensible, and so focusing
attention upon the point of censure, the smoke screen of utility which
has served the managerial promotion of modern information-based
bureaucracies. Clouded by rationality and abusively transferred
into the theory of social communication, the technicist conception
of telecommunications systematically misunderstands the essential
elements of the message. I shall reiterate them briefly: (1) the theat-
rical staging of everything that serves to carry messages; (2) the
erotics of the message which underpins all social communication; (3)
the question of the protocol, in the diplomatic and notarial sense of
the term, which is intrinsic to the circulation of messages.
Scientism has methodically misunderstood the love of the mes-
sage as such. It is against this that I have taken on the role of evok-
ing a much more elementary question: What is a love letter? I shall
attempt to push this very simple inquiry to its limit, to the point
at which love of the message shatters into slaughter, to the point
where love of the letter becomes a form of madness.
(1) THEY WRITE THEMSELVES. ENTRY INTO

A PROTOTYPICAL ERUDITION
Why is the love letter of interest to the theory of industrialised com-

munication? In this: it addresses an authentic truth to the universe,
it takes the discourse of servitude to its absolute limit, it transcribes
3. M. Bejart, L'Autre chant de la danse. 'Ce qui la nuit me dit', 1974, Paris:
Flammarion, p. 181.
a tortured legalism as poetry. To realise such a perfect subjection,

to recognise an absolute truth in the madness of love, such is from
time to time, and at the price of such subjection, what is achieved
by institutional systems which know how to manipulate the subject's
wild expression in letters. The amorous cry is indefinitely repeated
to the fabulous Other: 'The Throne of the world.' You are the throne
of the world (Rousseau).
Faithful follower of a rhetoric of genres which is far more unit-
ary and legalistic than is often thought, Rousseau recognised two
inseparable theses. The lover says: 'Do you order me to die? Ah! that
will not be too difficult. There is no order that I will not execute.'
He also says: 'I read and re-read a thousand times this delightful
letter in which your love and your feelings are written in characters
of fire.'4
To obey you, to worship your letter. These lovers' rules constitute
the political doctrine of mad love, of amour fou, a doctrine I will
endeavour to address here in an unusual and indirect way by
recourse once more to the ill-reputed path of legalism. I shall sum-
marize my argument in the following formula: lovers defend an
authentic truth. The question can be further specified: What is the
authentic truth of the love letter? Answer: it is the truth in a diplo-
matic and notarial sense of the term. In other words, it is necessary
to clarify the reference to protocol.
Protocol takes us back to the prison of law, to the very lengthy
history of the formulae which served to authenticate the inscrip-
tions of power and to guarantee their source by means of depicting
their physical support as a magical enclosure housing the truth.
The term 'protocol' (an allusion - via the Greek proto-kollon - to the
first leaf of a manuscript) does not refer to any ordinary form
of writing but to an instrument which speaks a guaranteed truth
(instrumentum in its roman nomenclature). The crucial point of
departure is the practice of the byzantine chancelleries whose concept
of the sacred written words was transmitted to the West through the
legislation of theocratic emperors. Even today that model of legis-
lation still provides us with a technology of legal certitude based
upon the ceremonies relating to the formulation of a letter addressed
4. Rousseau, La Nouvelle Heloise, pt 1, letter 3.
5. This reference forces us to return to elementary questions of notarial
practice. For a rigorous general work on the subject, see M. Amelotti
and G. Costamagna, Aile origin; del notllr;lIto itillillno (1975) Rome:
Consiglio nazionale del notariato.
to the whole world. The ceremonies of the letter were conducted

by rhetorical means, by codified repetitions whose allusions were
incomprehensible to unqualified interpreters, and whose marks came
to seal or ratify the text by the metonymic traces of a body that bore
witness. Here one enters the solemnised space of a dictation: the
person who wrote became himself part, by name and by inscrip-
tion, of what was written, and yet he only wrote as an innocent, as
a scribe instituted by the message. He is a hand. He is someone who
writes in the name of the Guarantee. This line of analysis leads us
to a symbolic space of considerable social signficance: the innocent
instrumenting hand inscribes for the benefit of an absolute Other
(here the Other of legal discourse, the absolutely fictive Other),6
while presenting its output as pure transcription. Such is an essen-
tially religious form both of expression and of effacement.
The reference to the birth of scholasticism, to the epoch of Abelard,
should be taken seriously and understood as deserving extended
consideration. It suggests not least the conjunction of 'the arts of
writing and of loving' (ars epistolandi et amandi). This notation is
more than just a rapprochement between two arts, it concerns what
could be termed the key to the structure of the love letter. I am
tempted to specify further what is at issue in this formulation by
means of a question: who therefore writes and/ or who is it that is
written? It is significant that mediaeval literature had so rapidly
recognised the love letter as a specific genre, one which was closely
related to the legal art of dictation in the form it was given during
the twelfth-century reception by the legist Boncompagnus, author
both of a famous legal treatise and of an unfortunately somewhat
less well known Rota Veneris (The Wheel of Venus)?
Scribe, transcriber, in the manner of the dictator of what ought to
be said, the writer is, according to the art of the dictamen, nothing
more than a hand: this is the author of the love letter. Observe the
6. It is precisely at this point that diplomacy, that is to say the science of

official action, is the fundamental point of reference: exact rhetoric:
invocations, techniques of address, rules of signature and so on. The
social importance of the notaries and the chancelleries, whose legal-
istic practices have been more or less completely excluded from the
domain of the political and human sciences should also be noted.
7. On these questions, see E. Ruhe, De Amasio ad Amasiam. Zur
Gattungsgeschichte des mittelalterlichen Liebesbriefes (1975) Munich: W. Fink
Verlag.
range of this process. On the bottom rung, the ready to wear: even
someone illiterate, through the intervention of another person, can
write love letters; in the European tradition, as elsewhere, there are
collections of standard forms which are periodically updated, simple
miscellanea of public writings. On the highest rung, there is lyrical
literature. Here you find the letters exchanged by Abelard and
HelOIse. As their recent editor, E. Konsgen has shown, these letters
are brilliant, but they are also embellished with eruditely bor-
rowed references. s All love letters say the same thing. They state
the truth of the messenger-text, the authentic truth, that which in
the nonsensical argot of legalism is recognisable as unique, incom-
parable, absolutely founded, which is to say founded upon the fiction
of the absolute Guarantor, put forward as such by a politically
imbricated discourse (as, for example, the sacred name of the French
Republic). Surprisingly the State's addiction to law can illuminate
the issue.
The Other is a flawless truth, it is an inescapable feature of lan-
guage that psychoanalysis refers to as the place of the fantastic, or
according to Lacan, that of the big Other. The truth of love has been
taken for granted, yet it comes from our own fictional construc-
tions, from our knowledge as captives or unconscious prisoners of
the fantasm. The beloved other, since we are talking of him, neces-
sarily makes his entrance into this secret theatre, while the love
letter is addressed, I would like to say written, to this 'inspired'
Other, by the captive, by one possessed by the fantasm. The monu-
mental Other, the Other of a flawless truth, unerringly presides
over this repertory as the fabulous space of the poetic dictamen. The
love letter is more than anything else a celebration, it addresses
itself there, to that space over there, or, in a baroque formula, it
works within a burning heart.
There are a number of problems raised by the relation of the
subject to letters. The lover writes like someone distraught, he says
too much. The unconscious manifests itself in fragments, repeti-
tions, debris. So too poetry is excessive in its constant return to and
play upon the same object, and above all else upon an extension or
prolongation of the same. The letter exposes the lover, the writer
lost in a labyrinth, and often functions, in various guises, in the
8. E. Konsgen, Epistolae duorum amantium. Briefe Abiilards und Heloises?

(1974) Leiden: Brill.
manner of a text which has gone astray and whose long hidden
addressee - the absolute Other - has to be rediscovered. A model
of the genre can be taken from Abelard: after his tragic separation
from Heloise, he composed, out of desire for her, a Book of Hymns
(Liber Hymnorum) addressed to a convent of the Order of the Holy
Ghost, a classic lyrical text interspersed with rondeaux. With that
example of genre in mind, there would undoubtedly be much more
to say of the literature concerned with courts of love, and not only
that relating to the mediaeval period but also the more or less cor-
rupt evidence of more modern authors such as Martial d' Auvergne
(fifteenth century) and Franc;ois Callieres (seventeenth century): the
question of the Other is posed there in the most brutal of terms, and
argued in very precise and precociously legalistic forms.
We can endeavour to take these remarks further by learning from
the Occidental tradition of the literate lover, the lover entwined in
her letter. If one wished to research fully the guiding thread that
binds together so many apparently disparate texts, one would per-
ceive that the question of destination marks the most delicate and the
most living aspect of the discourse of the lover, of all lovers. The
question: to whom are they addressed? in fact concerns a vast vari-
ety of texts, from the letter properly speaking, to the erotic songs
transmitted by the German Minnesang, to liturgical poems. By the
same token, the lover's letter presents itself as a peculiarly obscure
feature of a much broader literary genre. At the same time, the ele-
ment of the divine becomes much more apparent. Does it not amount
to the same thing, literally to the same thing, whether desire is
addressed to 'the Divine Maiden' (Puella Divina) or to the 'Celestial
Mother' (Mater Coelestis) or to the specific desired lover named in
a letter? Thus the love letter can also be inscribed within the genre
of the devotional poem addressed to the deified lover.
The letter, as a message addressed to an adored other, can easily
find its place within the lengthy lineage of the religious lyric, that
is to say, amongst all those texts which in some manner or another
address themselves to God. The famous biblical text, The Song of
Songs, is in many respects the fundamental articulation of the
poetics of Christian love from the time of the diffusion of the great
commentaries of Origen in the East and Ambrose in the West. It
clearly evidences the common feature of all these species of literat-
ure: it is that of ambiguity. The sole point of differentiation is that
of the play of the name within the address. What in the end is the
difference between the ascetic anthologies of the high Benedictine
epoch, the courtly poetry of the mediaeval monasteries and the

letters of Abelard and HeloIse, or between Rousseau and the young
Werther?
Courtly literature is certainly of a character to make us reflect
further upon the question of destination. I shall happily admit that
the Christian religion here purloined something, in regulating the
lovers' message in the same way as it exiled the question of ini-
tiation, and of mysticism, to the margins of religion. One can feel
this already by considering the neglected question of the type of
legalism which gives the tradition of the erotic poem and more
generally of erotic literature a certain status of marginality, that is
to say, a status of eccentricity in relation to the central textuality,
which defines poetic discourse, properly speaking, as necessarily
tied to the authentic truth, a truth defined by a religious legality. In
the Christian West, eroticism has always been marked by a cer-
tain infamy, not simply by virtue of its historical association with
paganism (to which Christianity opposes the new Law), but above all
by virtue of the complex economy of the discourse which authen-
ticates knowledge in the structural play of institutions: power knows
the absolute truth of love and of desire. This discourse shifts the
question of the Singular and of the centre, a reference which allows
us to understand, from a psychoanalytic perspective, the direct
character of the link between the logic of normative enunciations
and what we term the mythology of the phallus. The centralizing
impetus of the Latin-Christian discourse of truth, from any perspect-
ive whatsoever, is addressed to the legality and the normalisation
of eroticism. I shall develop this difficult question in a later work,
but here and now it is essential to underline the importance of
noting the institutional place of everything that ought to be said about
love. This site is defined as the ideal centre of the Text, at the heart
of Knowledge, it is the place where incarnate Power declares itself.
Outside of such mythic representations, it is marginal. From Abelard
to Sade, certain things have been written in this margin; but out-
side of that, with the exception of remarks by pioneeers such as
Friedrich Heer, studies have hardly dared take the risk. More
specifically, courtly literature itself, which is not without its links
to that tradition of writing that ends with Sade, provides some
evidence of the importance of the distinction between the legally
deSignated centre and the margins, in its challenge to the legality
of marriage (with which nevertheless this literature does not claim
to deal).
What, then, will explain the violence of the condemnations directed

by Christian Latinity against courtly love, a violence seldom seen
again? The tedious moralistic arguments against the transgression
of conjugal fidelity by an admittedly strange form of adultery, or
the objections to the twelve rules of love set out in Andre Chapelain's
classic codification, are hardly adequate explanations. Elsewhere,
this enigmatic repetition of an old theme pursued its course in the
critical history of cinematography. Consider what happened when
religion and its moral code were confronted by the illegality of a
nonconformist discourse of love, in America in the 1950s, in Elia
Kazan's film Baby Doll, and how he was consigned to the fires of
hell for his twentieth-century version of a pure seduction carried
out on the periphery of the tradition of 'fin amor'. No, it is neces-
sary to look elsewhere. Elsewhere, that is to say, in the domain of
legalistic knowledges destined to protect the authentic truth. It has
not been sufficiently remarked that courtly love is a heresy, or that
courtly literature functions as an illegal interpretation of the divine
discourse of truth.
Such an interpretation could be evidenced in a thousand differ-
ent ways, but we will pursue it through a thoroughly poetic sum-
mary of the story in which Andre Chapelain describes the mystical
route taken by a lover in search of the glorious domain of Love. The
beloved is called Mistress, but a fantastical mistress, a 'mistress
made up in a solemn form' (domina sollemni forma composita). Reli-
gion itself plays in the space of such a discourse, the religion of our
thoughts. It would be very interesting to rethink the history of courtly
love, not so much as an episode in the general evolution of 'Love
in the Occident', according to the formula coined by Rougemont
which Lacan so justifiably criticised, but from the point of view of
legalism or of dogmatics, as a logical fatality, an enclave of texts
within the Text. Courtly literature (or better lettrism) is inscribed in
a certain space within that puzzle which I have designated by the
term Text. This space functions for the entirety of the system as
the enclave within which the lustrous discourse of poetry is born
as a representation of lack. That is to say, as a discourse which
goes nowhere, which does not walk with the others, the unhinged
discourse of heresy. If we return to the question of history, and
specifically that of law, we can observe that many other discourses
have had a similar function to that here assigned to the text of a
wild eroticism outside of law, namely that of representing a threat-
ened desire and so keeping open the margins of discourse. Put other-
wise, courtly love, at least in its written texts, marks an abduction
of the truth in the Text of Christian legality. Further, I have on

occasion indicated that this discourse of heresy should also be con-
sidered a form of political insurrection, in the sense that, by virtue
of its extreme tendencies, it denies to the extant power the right to
legislate on fantasms.
Therein lies the essential problem. This brief and all too allusive
excursion through a series of very varied texts can help elucidate the
remarkably direct sense in which the love letter, as we use it in the
Occident, belongs to a profoundly unitary literary system - a system
that manipulates both the text and its address. It is unitary because
the exposure of desire in this extreme form of amorous address,
will always mobilise the ruses of the unconscious, the logic of what
Freud named the other scene. Nor should it be forgotten that all
discourses of love, whether legal or marginal, depend upon the
same technology, that of the fictitious montages from which all
constructions of truth are derived. In this respect, and by way of
counterpoint to what has just been said, the following ought to be
added: the strictly religious trappings of amorous discourses are
not of significance in themselves, they simply offer something plaus-
ible to the unconscious. If courtly love is a heresy, such simply
signifies that the legal representation of the religious character of
order also functions as a politics: such is the case by virtue of the
fact that institutional systems both prey upon and manipulate their
subjects by techniques of seduction. And when the question is that
of the mechanics of discourse, and it is the same in all cases, then
it is a matter of constructing a message, the mad message sent to a
false address.
In what sense is this message mad? A mythological theme can
elucidate: the lover who writes or who speaks does not know how
to be reasonable, he will say anything at all, even poetry itself. This
reference to anything at all provides a vital clue. If the lover says,
'I would like to inhale some of your words', in what sense does that
say something which the lover does not understand?
It means that something falls apart, and in this case the body also
is involved. His body begins talking wildly, no longer knowing
its innate order, but rather talking in disorder. In all the forms of
pure love the discourse of disarticulation finds its articulation. The
Cistercian mystics called Jesus a mother, baroque forms of worship
gave eyes to the heart, the lover offers both flowers and pain. Desire
expresses itself tirelessly and exhaustively, and its most poetic formu-
lations have the clarity of logic. Consider the following anonymous
extract from an atemporal Middle Ages:
Floret silva undique

Yet how I suffer oh my love 9
There, once again, we return to the fundamental question of the

address. The intended address, published, I would argue, so as to
preclude anyone ignoring the legalistic rigour which carries this
incontestable sign by means of authentic writ to the whole world.
If a lover speaks the truth, it is because he believes in it. He says
everything, everything that he knows, but not his fantasmatic
secret. The secret will be for his dreams: the man in love addresses
himself to his mother and at times even invents ghostly loves. A
scholastic literature gave such spectral love a naive formulation.
This short formal phrase can be found throughout poetry; as, for
example, in the following anonymous piece:
Suffering, the suffering of the lover

How does she live in his face, this woman so much more fragile than you?
This woman who lives inside you, as a memory of sorrow
It is this separation from the first and unthinkable object of love,

from the first object of love in the eternity of the fantasm, that is at
stake and with which the lover's discourse plays. The letter is writ-
ten in the trembling hand of the lover: the lover writes himself. It is
first a question of loving one's likeness: the body of the adored
other takes its place in the highly regulated game of speech, the
game of the Other, a game of place in which the Other is imagined,
a game which invents the body of the beloved other. To write the
letter is to dance into the great secret of the imaginary, to suffer its
disorder, to celebrate its most profound truth, that of the believing
body instituted as a subject.
At this point in my analYSiS, I shall propose the following: the
love letter does not seek a response, the lover does not await a
letter. I shall revise my earlier formulation in the plural: lovers write
themselves. They are bound up in their letters.
The enigma here fabricates belief, in the form of bodily pleasure.
Beyond that the question becomes more complicated. It not enough
to say that the message can suddenly be glimpsed in the meeting
of one body with another, it is necessary to go further and represent
the solitary condition of lovers, the non-dialogue at the heart of mad
love, the strange sweetness of the rituals surrounding the letter.
9. The forest flowers on all sides; Yet how I suffer oh my love.'

Consider the picture titled Love Letters, reproduced from the work
of the English painter Stanley Spencer (1950), a very violent and
enigmatic piece of work (Plate 5). An ecstatic lover is kissing the
pages of a letter, while in his right hand he is holding, and caress-
ing himself with, an envelope. It is not clear whether the hand-
written sheets of the letter are those of his own letter or of a letter
which he has received, while the woman in the picture, guardian of
precious messages, is wholly preoccupied with the rites of trans-
mission. It is impossible to tell whether she is delivering or collect-
ing these sealed envelopes.
The picture is an extraordinary exemplification of a general prin-
ciple of human communication. The principle is a perfect exposi-
tion of the enigma and should therefore be addressed by way of
analytic theory and certain considerations which I have frequently
remarked upon in terms of unforeseen consequences. Contempor-
ary theories of the psychology of communication have difficulty in
representing this confusion, or better collusion, of the message with
the body of the messenger, when in addition - a supplementary
difficulty - there is nothing to prevent the extreme possibility of the
sender making herself the proprietor of the message and suffering
the consequences. What really confuses the frenetic schemata of
psychologism and forces their pseudo-theories of dialogue into error
is the fact that, via the intermediary of an other, the adored body
with which the subject has fallen in love, the sender and the adressee
of the letter, are one and the same. Such a finding should also direct
us towards certain relatively new reflections upon the social and
political domains within which legalism and the protocols of writ-
ing hold sway, namely that, short of liquidating humanity, power
will remain an enterprise based upon seduction.
There is a final and fundamental consideration to be addressed:
the lover, in writing, plays his part in enjoyment, and so too acts
out the drama of life to its end, to death. If the letter can be under-
stood as the message of the Other, that signifies that it is something
which belongs to the body of the lover. It is a matter of enjoyment,
although the question of pleasure, so often hardly raised at all, is
not the only issue. It is also a question of death or of an impossible
love contained in the mad desire to be one with the beloved. Classic
poetry pointed to this in all the formulae that derived from the
slogan: Domus una sepulchri, oh to be one with you in the grave.
Everything that writes, is written. What role is played by that union,
from the perspective of the final stake? In terms of psychoanalytic
theory, it is a question of castration, but also of the drives. Yet this
genre of affirmation remains derisory unless we give ourselves the

means to represent the destination of the love of the message and
of the messenger in the most diverse ways. It is for that reason that
I have opened up the two following approaches.
(2) THE BEAUTY OF THE WOUND. A NOTE ON

THE CASTRATION OF ORIGEN
One point deserves to be clearly marked, even if it might involve

a repetition for most readers: to address the scene of writing brings
with it a radical implication of the unconscious. The unconscious -
and now is the time to emphasise this point - places us face to
face, in the problematic of communication, with something which
deserves to be given the status of a brute fact, namely the inaccess-
ibility of the subject to itself. But why repeat this?
Essentially, so as not to leave ourselves open to being influenced
by the scientism which contemporarily labours to suffocate all rel-
evant questions. Besides, the passion to explain cannot hide its
ambitions anywhere else; it is essentially a question of subduing the
new media produced by industry. To govern, that is to say, is a
question of discovering irrefragable arguments which can be used
to disarm the subject, to render it more governable, simpler and
easier to manipulate. If psychoanalysis had been able to transform
itself into a species of scientific psychology, into a knowledge put
to the use of social engineers, as many of the sedulous had hoped,
the horror of an inaccessible unconscious would have been erased;
the era of dialogue would finally have opened, and writing would
have ceased to be a space of rupture.
A return to the castration of Origen thus has a very specific goal.
It is a matter, I would say, of making an example. My remarks are
directed against the imbecility of those who reduce the question of
communication to the level of a mechanistic treatment of data. These
data concern certain very limited effects of discourse upon beha-
viour, that is to say, upon appearances which must at all costs be
maintained. In such conditions it has become absolutely necessary to
reintroduce non-knowledge in its own right, the dimension of horror,
of comedy, of strangeness, or of masochism to which the uncon-
scious, the maker of letters and of words, submits us. At the same
time, I would also like to illustrate the following: psychoanalysis is
neither an explanation of the world nor of society, it is not an offi-
cial messenger, it leaves the questions posed by life unanswered.
The proof of this lies in our indifference to knowing whether or

not Origen was psychotic, whether his act of self-castration brought
on by reading a passage of the Holy Scripture on God's beloved
eunuchs, makes the adolescent Origen the phallus of the mother, or
whether, by inhabiting this mythological lesson, he derived such
exegetical wonders as would save his life while also fascinating
others with his remarkable knowledge. We can sweep such consid-
erations aside; not because they are wholly devoid of interest, but
because they prolong the belief that pyschoanalysis could also be
such an enterprise, a play of explanations, one game of interpreta-
tion amongst innumerable others, one more rapidly obsolete method
in the service of industrial managers, a technique tied to the fantasm
of the body social, providing the minimum coherence necessary for
the mobilisation of each of us as a believing subject of a prescribed
logic.
I would simply like to recall the extremism of all questions of
writing and of texts. That extremism is echoed clearly when they
touch upon the most vivid space in a person's unconscious mon-
tage, that in which he plays not simply his proper role as inter-
preter of a message lent to the imaginary Other, but also lives out
his very status as a living subject. The love of the message can be
found precisely in that space in which the subject puts desire, and
specifically desire for the other sex, to death. Such is exactly what
was at issue in the case of Origen (c. 183-254), whose extensive
work both dominated the famous Alexandrian school and captiv-
ated the entire history of Christianity up until the great modern
controversies. I shall leave aside the questions posed by the dog-
matic interpretation of this act of mutilation, even though this inter-
pretation is not without relevance for the fundamental discussion
of its relation to the Jewish interpretation of texts on circumcision
and also to the doctrine of the soul, a doctrine of considerable
importance to our author.
Theoretician of the three meanings of the Scriptures (somatic,
psychic and spiritual), Origen remains a disquieting figure in the
history of polemics upon the literality of truth. IO A disquieting
figure, because Origen's erudition - a disarticulated discourse, falsely
unified, and in consequence impossible to integrate into the
to. Origen has his place, albeit a bizarre place, in the historicist discus-
sions of the genesis of heresies. See, for example, H. Crouzel, 'Origene
est-ilia source du catharisme?' (1979) 80 Bulletin de litternture eccles i-
astique 3-28.
orthodoxy of the Text - functions at several different levels, which

he himself marked. Put otherwise, part of this erudition derives or
declares itself in the form of a poetic enigma on the margin of know-
ledge, on the margin where from the third century onwards the
deviant followers of Origen, the followers of his poetics, the heret-
ical acolytes of 'certain of the evanescent dreams which delighted
Origen's vivid imagination'll marched. In the history of esoteric
dogmatics, such is called Origenism.
The anecdote of the mutilation of Origen is recorded for us in the
following terms: ' ... Understanding in too simple a manner, as is
often the case with a young mind, the words there were some eunuchs
who castrated themselves on account of the kingdom of heaven, the idea
was that he would carry out the word of the Saviour and at the
same time, despite his youth, he would teach the Christian reli-
gion not only to men, but also to women. The desire to prove to
the faithful that any suspicion of base calumny was false pushed
him to actually carry out these words of the Saviour, while at the
same time taking great care to conceal his act from the bulk of his
acquaintances.1)2 Any comments on this story should obviously take
account of other aspects of his biography, notably the love life of
his mother and the martyrdom of his father in the persecutions of
the Emperor Septimus the Severe.
This brief reference, taken from a specific biography, is sufficient
to allow us to pose the exact terms of the problem which I am
raising here, that of the amorous relation of a subject to his text. Writ-
ing is a material object which appears to constitute a barrier, as for
example between me, the reader-writer who transcribes, and the
author of the text, the author of holy enunciations, of a speech
which is sacred because in principle it speaks the truth. Erudition
(and not simply that of apologists, theologians and dogmatists in
general, but also that of paleographers, of researchers and editors
of manuscripts) is the occasion for a strange and highly interesting
inversion. In effect, it attends to the birth of the interpretation of the
sacred text. What does interpretation mean in this instance? We shall
try to reflect upon this in enquiring into the notion of a sacred text.
It is necessary to recollect that the scholar plays a part in a scab-
rous game. He does not simply endeavour to learn something from
11. F. Prat, Origene, Paris, 1907, p. liv.

12. Text taken from the work of a great specialist: P. Nautin, Origene. Sa
vie, son oeuvre (1977) Paris: Beauchesne, p. 45.
a text, in the way that one would hear news from someone. On the
contrary, he wants something very different. Because he knows that
the written text contains everything, he wants to know the whole
truth. The distance which defines and separates the subject and
inquiry is suddenly abolished; it is no longer a matter of the same
question. The scholar is involved with a text which knows and
which at the same time puts itself forward as a guarantee of truth.
This guarantee is given (given in the sense of a gift, and so in the
sense of play) in the letter as such, in the letter as graphic inscrip-
tion spreading itself as an order of meaning. What is written is
written. This observation can take us a long way. In scholarship,
literality is an element which genuinely constitutes the relation
between a subject and what is written, for the simple reason that it
is the unique object of knowledge, and knowledge (even in the
making of forgeries)13 authenticates itself. In other words, the guar-
antee of truth is included in literality as such. This is the nature of
a sacred text: it is the ineluctable seat of the truth, of a truth which
is always genuine, founded as it is in the Great Other, the absolute
Other, the imaginary guarantee.
In the context of scholarship, the amorous relation of a subject
to his text necessarily represents itself in a theatrical form: the sub-
ject is confronted by a conflation of the object-messenger with the
Big Other. It is thus a radical game that the text plays. One cannot
be a scholar unless one is in love, gripped by passion, by an all-
consuming passion. The subject is captured in a very radical way
by- the message of the Other. Put otherwise the scholar is fated to
discourse and to its endless extension: writing gets under the skin,
13. It is interesting to note again the fascination which this exercises in

the domain of the law: power is said to be always true, truth is thereby
monopolised. The formalism of deeds which are said to be authentic
proceeds from this axiomatic foundation. On the other hand, the his-
tory of Western legalism is full of 'false' texts which became 'true' by
virtue of being inserted in the collections of writings which made up
the common law (the famous case of the False Decretals, forged in the
ninth century, then perfectly assimilated, without ever being recog-
nised as either true or false, in the great pontifical textual system of
scholasticism). Finally, one should not forget the great battle of schol-
asticism, on this theme of the false and the forged, after the Reforma-
tion: the enterprise of the Bollandists in the seventeenth century (under
Jesuit leadership) responded to the Centuriats of Magdebourg (Prot-
estant authors of a History of the Church, published between 1559
and 1574, 1st edn).
it attaches itself to the subject. In a certain sense which will doubt-

less be labelled dramatic, the literary purist finds himself in the
same state of textual attachment as the lover with his letters, always
excepting one crucial difference: writing expends itself in the closed
space of the fantasm, scholarly enjoyment excludes the other as a
corporeal or real being. Scholarship does not know any limits, it
endlessly negotiates a life against the Other, it lives with despair.
The self-castration of Origen illustrates this dramatically: the self-
taught scholar teaches himself the details of his trial before the
absolute Other. The holy scripture is thus for the scholar a space of
rupture, of the discovery of separation and of enduring sin. In the
somewhat wayward case of Origen we are presented with a par-
tially unsuccessful break from the Other. For whom was this sacri-
fice performed? This simple question allows us to formulate a very
difficult theme. It is what Freud named castration, the possibility of
the subject identifying itself with the other and with what the other
demands of it. In such an environment a text can function as a
knife, as both sentence and instrument of sacrifice. An idea which
radically transforms our Simplistic notions of writ or document.
This and similar anecdotes should not be underestimated. They
raise the crucial question of power and of the human sacrifices
which it sometimes demands. The Other is also the subject's own
conception of power. Power is an enterprise that writes. In this
sense, it manoeuvres the body by means of an exorbitant demand:
believe in the sanctity of truth. In the modern industrial system of
management just as much as in antique societies governed by reli-
gion, sacred texts constitute the law, and this law takes hold of the
human unconscious.
(3) LETTERS THAT FALL FROM THE SKY
We are governed by writing.

I would like to note briefly the way in which politics also finds
itself under the sway of a comparable necessity: it has to manip-
ulate the love of the message to the extreme point where a certain
confusion transforms the object-messenger into a living text. This is
a most extreme matter because this living being can be put in the
place of the divinity, the incarnation of the absolute Other, which
is to say in the position of an exceptional text. This text overhangs
the space of law and of the entire institutional order, its indefinite
articulation of the truth, of any truth, establishes the guarantee of
Truth. According to historically specific yet very varied modula-
tions, systems of organisation take their place within the spectrum
of truth for the simple reason that the administration or manage-
ment of human governance, everything that unifies managerial prac-
tices and provides them with a foundation or legitimacy, requires
the mobilisation of desire. The political order has to function as a
form of seduction, or in other words it functions mythologically.
Such a proposition is even today held to be aberrant, paticularly
in France, a country still caught up in the Christian discourse on the
divine core of knowledge, and consequently heavily dependent upon
a very particular form of academia, one which is fated to preserve
the precious ideas of a Power which both loves us and saves us.
More than anywhere else in the industrialised world, it is necessary
to watch and put aside those subversive studies which, in demon-
strating the religious (and in specific cases Christian) character of
the legal constructions of State and society, would sow doubts in
the minds of good citizens, the faithful who believe but who at the
same time claim to be heretics, even anarchists, wholly disengaged
from the pernicious love of authority. If this apparently innocent lie
was observed dispassionately, what would become of our grandi-
loquent pretensions to rationality or our claims to a benevolent
simplicity in new methods of organisation; what would become of
the objective knowledge of the social and historical sciences, which
labour, so they claim, to soften the harshness of political relations
by opposing the high conscience of contemporary universities to
the barbarity and the fanaticism of outmoded religions? It is symp-
tomatic that in the domains of established legal historiography, my
writings are deemed to be unacceptable.
However, it remains my belief that it is precisely through the
study of legalism, in the historical zone where industry first de-
veloped, that it is possible to represent the phenomenon of repetition
which founds the process of political administration. Repetition,
that is, in its mythological sense, for the reason that human com-
munication has a largely unconscious status. Any problem which
relates to the social function of the message makes obligatory refer-
ence to such a status and ensures not least that humanity will never
be short of poetic reformulations of its founding narratives. Where
did the founding mythology of the message first take root, and where
is it located today? Legal history (in the very broad sense of legality
which I have propounded) is the sole means of elucidating this
occidental lineage; the sole means because the issues in question
are those of the production and reproduction of institutions. The
Romano-Christian identity of the legal apparatus is the mythological
guiding thread. It must, of course, be understood that a purely his-
toricising study of such an identity would prove nothing of itself.
It is simply a form of reference point for formulations of series, for-
mulations that could equally well be arrived at by other means, that
is to say on the strength of other examples of the evolution of dis-
course in other historical domains, as for instance in the Soviet
empire (which in reality is a close cousin of our lineage by virtue of
a common base: the theocratic Roman law codified by Justinian) and
in China. The fundamental point is this: How does one fall in love with
the political message? The history of the Romano-Christian Occident
is in these terms very rich, and its reproduction by a perfectly iden-
tifiable legalism, is of direct concern.
To be in love, and to be in love with the political message, are
one and the same movement: it is a question of that submission
which Rousseau talked of in terms of adoring the letter, of loving
the letter as if it were the actual body of the Other. The violence
of the great systems and on a smaller scale of institutional spaces
lies in an absolute subjugation, one which is capable of fabricating
such a mechanism of amorous fascination. I shall briefly note the
following:
(t) To have their effect upon us, institutions manipulate a number

of rhetorical devices. Consider this in contemporary terms. One
must here observe the extraordinary importance of rhetoric as the
art of persuasion. The current platitude of more or less learned
works on the propagation of messages or propaganda itself, often
treated arbitrarily as if it were the invention of idiots, forms a seri-
ous obstacle to even the most elementary understanding of the
problem which I am raising. I shall leave aside the blunders pro-
moted by a certain pedagogy of the social sciences, but not without
remarking in passing that they are not politically innocent: they
labour to generalise submission by assuming stupidity or weak-
ness. Even a brief consideration of what is known of the tech-
niques and practical skills of the great rhetoricians, skills which are
indissociable from law and the other practices of Western states
since Cicero, Quintilian and their scholastic successors, should give
us pause for reflection. Reflection upon what? In essence upon the

discursive procedures which produce the sanctification of texts.
Moreover, the ancient commentaries on this question, those of the
rhetoricians who analysed the poetic function of power, only recog-
nised one preliminary element, a species of implacable enigma:
everything in the institution takes place as if it was impossible to
articulate messages. In that the institution does not have a body, it
is necessary to construct something that can make us believe that it
speaks. Put otherwise, a single plausible speaker does not exist,
it can only be the terrifying machinery of a Sovereign Name, God
Artifex, the Master of all the Arts and - why not? - the Universe or
all reference to the One. I have already observed, in this respect, the
importance of the ceremonies relating to promulgation, that is to
say rites dictating the address of legal texts, ceremonies attached
to formalised discourses of invocation, of mystical and delirious
allusions, of nostagic appeals to known and unknown destinations
(for example, in the naive style of the antique chancelleries). The
sanctification of texts means that no system, even those organised
in a wholly monarchical manner, can dispense with a formalised
rhetoric, designed to make it understood that for legally legitimate
institutional power to address itself in a normative form to its sub-
jects, it must speak in the name of its absent source. Theatricality is
the very essence of organisations, authority always assumes some
divine transference, a regulated game of corporeal representatives
of the Name inscribed in sovereign discourse. This rhetorical techno-
logy transforms the representatives of Power into martyrs, into the
innocent victims of the Cause, the deserving.
(2) A second fundamental point follows on from the above, namely,

the mythic political space of the message. The best occasion for observ-
ing this is provided by those great social events where the dis-
course of power remembers its legitimacy or finds itself in the
position of having to repeat the necessity of its legal foundations:
it falls from the sky. Political space announces itself in this way as a
site of imaginary origins, a place of noble beginnings; the mytholo-
gical formulation of the history of the Other, the sacred history
of the word, is simply a variation in the use of this site. It is of
course important to examine the diverse forms in which this point
has to date been recognised; its modes of expression always bear a
poetic course. Consider Juvenal, the mythologist so strikingly studied
by Alois Haas: 'Out of the sky descended the "know yourself'"
(Et descendit de caelo ... ) In glancing at the chronicle of legends which

naively repeat the certainty of the origins of the message, we inevit-
ably encounter God, the absolute Other under its diverse signs and
names: the irreplaceable correspondent, the guarantor of political
truth, looks down upon us. The absolute Other surveys us, we can-
not escape that fact, it simply becomes our task to push fanaticism
to the extreme that will call the Other from the place assigned to it
by faith: from its sublime pedestal on high. Politically formulated
and delirious, contemporary social discourse makes an appeal which
always receives a reply and which, because it is not speakable in
the terroristic context of our purportedly non-religious managerial
rationalism, functions no less well in the language spoken by
everyone: silence. Consider the antique but equally ultra-modern
and infinitely renewable legend of the letter of Christ which falls
from the sky:14 from the Middle Ages to the First World War, this
message from the Other served as a talisman and as a bullet-proof
vest, IS an anecdote which deserves to be brought up to date in the
context of advertising. We are here in reality caught up in the great
affairs of Destiny, which are also those of the institution of the social
bond. Here the political message solicits us erotically, that is to say
immoderately, because Power plays itself out in the representation
of the place of the absolute Other as the space in which we learn
to love death.
(3) A final observation, from the perspective of the labour of polit-

ical subjugation, concerns the importance of the confusion between
written texts and the bodies of their real or supposed authors. The
mechanism, which I have described in earlier works in terms of the
pontifical legislation of Latin scholasticism, is not tied, in terms of
the history of religion, to Christianity; it is a feature of structures.
14. In scholarly terms, the anecdotal legend of a letter of Christ's which

falls from the sky is extremely complex. It is tied to other traditions
(for example, that of a dream of the Virgin Mary); it also interests
scholars of Eastern as well as Western Christianity. Since the work of
P. Delehaye in 1899, studies have multiplied, tracing the diffusion of
this letter in the form of duplicate talismans (which were still carried
by combatants in 1914-18). Cf. A. Closs, 'Himmelsbriefe. Beitrag zur
Enwicklung der Sonntagsepistel', in Festschrift fUr Wolfgang Stammler
(1953) Berlin-Bielefeld: E. Schmidt Verlag, pp. 22-8.
15. The most usual form of the anecdote is of the soldier who carries a
copy of the Bible in his breast pocket. His life is saved unexpectedly
when an enemy bullet aimed at his heart lodges in the Bible.
That the Christian legislator was to be an omniscient oracle 'who

carried all the archives in his heart', was an invention which sig-
nalled, in a very particular form, the imagery of a despotic love.
From a strictly anthropological perspective, the rest of the world
provides numerous perfectly equivalent examples. It cannot be dis-
puted that, despite the displacement and the singularity of traditions,
Maoist preaching, for example, functioned according to precisely
the same stereotype, in which one consistently finds the love of the
message-messenger confused with the body of the author of the
message. The Maoist and those that love the Pope use the body and
the text in the same manner, in the manner depicted of the lover
painted by Stanley Spencer. The madness of love comes into the
open, the unconscious runs towards death and receives the message
as the erotic object of discourse, an allusive object caught up in a
passionate hand-to-hand struggle which leaves no space for any
wound. Maoists and Christians never debate, they argue within a
seamless legality, they love with a deadly passion; others serve only
as excess, as the means which lead an endless love to an appropri-
ate end, which pour love into the truth which is guaranteed by the
Other who knows. Such a collage, armed with references to formal
Writings, functions everywhere that there is a need to satisfy the
demands of such mad love.
In the case of the French institutional system, which methodic-
ally reproduces a discourse of love addressed to that living Writing
which represents, to borrow the excellent formula of Suleiman, 'the
sacred State', one could recently observe the same phenomenon
when Jacques Lacan dissolved his school. Psychoanalysts gave in to
a religious war whose stake, however much both sides tried to
disguise it, was the defence of the message of Lacan himself. There
are few survivors of such madness. When one would have thought
that one could wait for the analysts to work upon and interpret
such a message in a way that would put an end to the reproduction
of centralist fantasms, in the name of psychoanalysis, in their own
organisation, the opposite was the case. Lacan was again promoted
into the divine Messenger of an eternal Psychoanalysis which had
been abandoned, in all probability as intolerable, by Lacan himself,
who had scarcely completed the transference of his school, a trans-
ference that we must undoubtedly understand in its full analytic
sense. Put otherwise, this extraordinary gesture, this remarkably
baroque statement is of great interest for political science which
has been as little inclined as psychoanalysis to reflect upon the love
of the message. The fiasco of the dissolution was in my view a

temporary one and should not be viewed as more than an epis-
ode; however, it was meaningful, and sooner or later, if we do not
renounce Freud's dreadful challenge of exposing ourselves to the
risks of analysing our mythological montages wherever they are to be
found, it will re-emerge. The best analysts should reopen this cur-
rently buried question of the dissolution of something which can
be legally divined but is otherwise elusive, namely the institution,
and in this case the Freudian school, the site of many illegitimate
transactions. Lost and perplexed is the title under which I have else-
where offered an open-ended breviary of remarks on this issue. 16
16. See particularly 'Administrer la psychanalyse: Notes sur la dissolu-

tion de l'Ecole freudienne de Paris' (1981) 11 Pouvoirs. Revue Frant;aise
d'Etudes Constitutionelles et Politiques 205-18; and Legendre, 'Egart~ et
perplexe' (1981) 1 Poinr;on. [Jacques Lacan dissolved the school which
he had founded, the Ecole Freudienne de Paris, in January 1980. The
history of that dissolution can be followed in Elisabeth Roudinesco,
Jacques Lacan & Co. A History of Psychoanalysis in France, 1925-1985,
trans. Jeffrey Mehlman, (1990) Chicago: University of Chicago Press, at
pp. 647-79.]
4
Parenthesis: To Fascinate
I would now like to draw attention to the social capture of desire,
especially when such capture comes to function in an extreme form,
and arrives at that point which the Western tradition defines as
marking the place of an encounter with madness. Normalisation
passes through a space of enounter with evil. It is a space which all
powers have known how to manipulate, from the time that, hav-
ing loosened all the constraints of legality, they could only govern
diabolically. The adverb diabolically should be kept in mind and
will be clarified shortly.
Before going any further, I should warn you against the extremely
widespread learned illusion, propagated also by the social and
human sciences, which consists in thinking that the mechanism of
political fascination has yielded up its secrets and that, liberated as
we are, we have nothing further to do with the absolute Eye. Do
not be too sure of it, and meditate rather upon what it means, in
institutional terms, to lose one's head. It is a process upon which
we seldom reflect, and of which we do not wish to learn anything.
Witness the fanaticism with which, in France in particular, certain
psychoanalysts have invested the divine name of their founders,
Freud and Lacan. Happily for humanity, it was not necessary to
wait for psychoanalysis, which today is so virulently and frequently
distorted, to raise the question of the madness of a dying desire.
Thus formulated, my theme will immediately discourage scient-
ism, and happily will be equally unacceptable as an academic cat-
egory. It will, however, be useful to those who know with certainty
from experience that enslavement is not a theory, but is rather and
above all a practice of the unconscious. To limit the following reflec-
tions, we must abstain from considering even the slightest interpreta-
tion of a social phenomenon of the most everyday kind, one which
is inescapable in the industrial world because it relies precisely
upon what I have named the wild or unrestrained dogmatism of
the unconscious in every subject. In such a concept we have a neces-
sary point of access to the question of dogmatics. What, then, does
the allusion to a dying desire entail?
95
It implies an obligation to recover from the occidental Text its

role in the definition and casuistry of fascination. Topologically,
this role should be located on the borders of the scholastic psycho-
logy of knowledge, in a space where it is possible to observe the
fragility of the divisions between theology, canon law and physics.
Such is a singular, yet remarkable, convergence provided that we
do not draw back from this frightening enterprise, namely that of
rigorously uncovering our love of tyranny and the universe of the
magnetics of a power to which, as subjects of love, we can refuse
nothing. Read in this regard De arte magnetica, the work of Athanasius
Kircher, a German Jesuit (1602-80), whose work ought to be held
in higher esteem by political science than even that of Max Weber.
In that work you can glimpse the ease with which human love
comes into contact with madness, the insanitas of which Kircher
talks, and also appreciate how eloquent Freud is when in address-
ing transference and love he recalls the science of explosives.
The occidental theory of fascination - a theory which articulates
a fantasy common to the Latin religion and to the modern ration-
alism of the scientific spirit - claims to be a universal theory of
attraction, concerned equally with the planets and with plants, with
music and with love in all its forms. The theory of fascination is far
more than simply the theory of the dictatorship of the eye and of
the gaze, as elaborated by the doctrines of hypnotism from the
nineteenth century right up until Freud and psychoanalysis put an
end to them. Consider also in passing that the discourse on the eye
is firmly based in dogmatics in general, that is to say, in its strict
sense, in medicine and in law. Through this discourse a science of
the body and of dismemberment is set out and can no more be
ignored in our culture than in others. I refer you in particular to a
fragment of a text from Gratian, 'to observe with chaste eyes' (oculos
castos servare, C. 6, q. 1, c. 13), which set the glossators to work on
the interpretation of the notion of chaste eyes, a notion which psy-
choanalysts could well reflect upon further.
In a general sense, the theory of fascination was destroyed first
by scholasticism (in the Middle Ages and latterly in the post-
Renaissance period) which used it as a foil to its concept of reason, and
then by colonialist doctrines of the eighteenth century. The lineage
of rationalist discourse, even as summarily related in the Encyclo-
paedia definition of Fascination, continues to weigh upon the ana-
lyses of political science. The treatises of Del Rio or of Frommann (on
witchcraft and on magic) are invaluable by virtue of their dogmatic
Parenthesis: To Fascinate 97
construction, and yet they were consigned to the junkyard of the-

ory under the sign of Anti-Science and in the name of the struggle
against superstition and magic. I therefore pose the following ques-
tion: has the moment arrived to re-interrogate the detritus of this
theory and to research why, after all this time, it continues - outside
of certain populist idiocies repeated by occultist publications - to
frighten us? Put otherwise, what are we afraid of discovering in this
ruined but violent theory, and what can we learn from it?
Meanwhile it can simply be observed that it is enough to be
carried along by the political vocubulary currently in use to revive
the damned notions of the Anti-Science: fascination, magic of the
word, magnetism, miracle, prodigy, ecstasy, and so on. Do these
not represent a return to the diabolic? The doctrine of the electrified
crowd says as much.
Dogmatic theory teaches us, albeit contemporarily by means of
some very dull notions, something essential. Referring itself to magic
so as to stigmatise the works of the devil, it has at the same time,
but without knowing it, rediscovered a fundamental question. The
question can be posed quite simply: what is it that the devil does?
It is sufficient to return to etymology to obtain a good idea of
the issue. The Greek verb BU:xP<XAAO (diaballo) states the obverse of
£J!P<XAAO (emballo); it is a question of the following: to pass across,
to throw into the distance, to pass to the other side. Restricted to its
metaphorical sense, the allusion to diabolical effects places fascina-
tion on the path to madness, there where the symbolic function is
deposed and erased. Someone who passes to the other side, who
passes above the space humanised by legality, by speech and other
signs, is someone who is mad. From the perspective of power, to
fascinate is to rely upon the madness of the social.
I would like to add one further detail. The theory of fascination
is also of interest for us in being a discourse upon the functioning
of identifications within occcidental culture. Is it possible to trans-
form one's being so as to become a cat, a wolf or an inanimate
thing? Is it possible for a man to change into a woman? How are
we to make use of, that is to say to humanise, the virtualities of
madness? I would be tempted to say that the avoidance of madness
has not been one of the strengths of European institutions. Built
upon a mixture of Latinity and industrialisation their colonial dis-
course of Reason and of Law has been spread across the planet. We
can glimpse better the gravity of such questions in reflecting upon
the art of cinema or the poetry of words.
5
The Masters of Law:
A Study of the
Dogmatic Function
Any discussion of dogma should begin with the recognition of a
quite basic problem. The notion of a 'dogmatic function' is quite
out of place in the epistemological framework which is ordinarily
used to classify studies of the reproduction of industrialised society
and its constituent organisations. My own work in these areas is
certainly unclassifiable, and, were it not for the fact that it has found
a small but erudite audience, it would probably be discounted as
the work of a charlatan.
It should be emphasised that the word dogma, taken in all its
forms and connotations, inspires a certain dread in most domains
of thought, and especially in the field of science. This dread can be
neutralised by channelling the more pressing questions suggested
by the notion of dogma towards a set of erudite sciences which
are in danger of extinction, not to say of a methodical extermina-
tion. One such domain is that of the history of religion, which is
now taken either as a sort of cultural distraction or as a repository
for beliefs which have fallen victim to progress and to history.
Although the study of dogmatics has - thanks to the work of a par-
ticular school of German legal historiography! - begun to uncover
a set of vital enigmas and issues, it is plain that in existing circum-
stances no demonstration of its value could overcome a pervasive
indifference which, however innocent it might seem, serves a par-
ticular social function. Specifically, this misunderstanding serves
to safeguard the core of our concept of institutional reason. As the
management revolution2 gathers pace, the monumental themes
1. A fundamental work is M. Herberger, Dogmatik. Zur Geschichte vall
Begriff ulld Methode ill Medizill ulld Jurisprudenz, 19811, Frankfurt: Vittorio
Klostermann.
2. The concept is a highly useful means of taking account of the phenom-
enon of managerialism across a wide range of organisational structures;
98
The Masters of Law 99
which are associated with a science of Law - a science which neces-

sarily invokes the mythological foundations of the social order -
seem quite obsolete.
What, therefore, does it mean to embark on an interrogation of
science and law in the context of industrialised society? The answer
is clear: it is first to recognise that by way of law's operations of
repression an unidentified historical contest is being played out.
Throughout this study, therefore, one should bear in mind the
traditional foundations of dogmatic reproduction in its Western
form: that form of political love 3 which, strictly speaking, defines
a culture. 4 The question of dogma and of dogmatism also casts a
different light on the relationships which we have, as subjects,
with the established array of instituted messages. Currently, those
relationships are analysed in terms of a scientific model of dual com-
munication. s In this regard, the historical study of dogmatic produc-
tions unquestionably enriches our understanding of these matters,
just as much as it would allow us to understand how Latin gloss-
ators, unlike Talmudic scholars, never admitted that a book could
be equivalent to a homeland [patrie].
Addressing myself here to historians, I can affirm that the rubric
under which this chapter travels clearly overlaps with the field of
study with which I identify my work. In particular, I shall have to
make use of certain notions which are fashionable in psychoana-
lysis, or more specifically, in the non-militant and non-preaching
psychoanalysis to which I adhere. 6 Moreover, except for my use of
the operative concept of text (in a dual sense: text in its historical
sense, and Text, in its structural sense, which is to say, the absolute
Text without a subject), I abstain from theory in its contemporary
see the very informative work of A.D. Chandler, The Visible Hand. The
Managerial Revolution in American Business, 1977, Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press.
3. It is significant that for legal historians themselves, so little use is made
of the work of Gaines Post, and in particular of his article 'Status, id est
Magistratus: L'Etat, C'est Moi', in Studies in Medieval Legal Thought,
Public Law and the State, 1100-1322, 1964, Princeton: Princeton Univer-
sity Press, 1964, pp. 333-67.
4. The canonical definition of culture is to be found in Decretal C. 26 q. c. 9.
5. An idea that can be traced easily by reference to current publications
such as the Intemational Management Review.
6. For an analysis of the disturbing fanaticism of some French psychoana-
lytic schools, see my remarks in 'Administrer la psychoanalyse', Pouvoirs.
Revue frmu;aise d'Etudes constitutionelles et politiques, 1981, pp. 201-18.
usages. My references to historical sources alone conform to ordin-

aryusage.
ROMAN LAW AS THE DOGMATIC FATE

OF THE MEDIAEVAL WEST
In the domain of science, the twilight zone of industrialised society

can quite readily be identified: it is to be found at precisely the
point where the reproduction of institutional systems becomes the
concern of anthropology, or, more specifically, that form of anthro-
pology which incorporates Freud's discovery of the unconscious.
So far, it has been inconceivable to study this process of reproduc-
tion as though it was taking place in an African tribal society. It is
still less acceptable to recognise that, if the unconscious is essen-
tially a jurist, a study of juridical structures would be the royal road
leading to the mythical foundations of industrial reproduction.
In other words, normative (and particularly historiographic)
studies of law are at issue because in political terms law mobilises
believers. In the eyes of the system of law we are not reasoning
believers but subjugated believers. We are, so to speak, 'resonators'.
We resonate with a legitimacy which has been formulated in vari-
ous ways, but which rhetorically declares the just cause which we
must serve. Legitimacy normalises; as the Latin etymology suggests,
it effects the normalisation of human subjects within the system.
Seen from the perspective of European legal history, the themes
of legal belief constitute a set of interchangeable categories: imper-
ial Majesty, written Reason, legislating God (rex imperator, ratio
scripta, viva vox iuris), and so on, which, although they are inter-
changeable, are quite strictly defined by reference to the rules of an
oratorical art. An understanding of this, the supreme dogmatic art,
is essential to an understanding of the relationship between law
and what I have called the solemnisation of speech. Here one should
recall those great pedagogical figures, Cicero and Quintilian, who
were inextricably associated with the genesis of classical Roman
law. In the contemporary world, the notion of a scientific, rational
and welfare-oriented government serves as an absolute reference,
as a supreme justification of a general textual economy, showing
that an unweakened function of dissimulation survives. This function
of deception is quite essential, and, although it may be difficult to
locate in terms of scientific jargon, it is quite clearly illuminated by
the aesthetics of Kafka who, it should be said, is an important and

misunderstood interpreter of legalism?
It is not surprising that rhetoric, with its play of allusion, its cir-
cumlocutions and its formalism, has so thoroughly deceived theories
of management. To take an example which seems to be a recurrent
concern of American theories, the peculiarly Japanese discipline
of politeness, involving the proper use of white gloves, has given
rise to a set of pseudo-theoretical speculations upon the 'femininity'
of hierarchical relations in Japanese industries. s These speculations
fall squarely within the remit of behaviouralist doctrine, which is
quite unable to take account of the fictional structures of culture. It
is useful, as a means of situating this study, to refer to the doubts,
not to say inconsistencies, which characterise the approach taken
by many theories of law in their attempts to address our current
situation. They find their salvation in a conservatism of the dullest
sort. Our society being governed by a set of ultramodern ideals,
normativity itself is imprisoned in scientific discourse. Normative
or justificatory knowledges dress themselves up so as to be present-
able in the eyes of rational management. The results are plain to
see. The discipline which is conventionally labelled legal anthropo-
logy, keeps its distance from well-received classical texts (such as
those of Bachofen), and remains a discipline without any future in
the social sciences. Similarly, the history of law, which is currently
on the decline in France, despite the institutional support which it
receives, is horrorified at the very mention of Freud, or, worse still,
Lacan. The fact that Freud was, so to speak, blessed in legal liter-
ature, not least in Kelsen's writing (himself an idol and foil in the
world of law), is conveniently overlooked. 9
It would be pointless to open up the causes of this conservatism,
or of the defensive attitudes whose brutality should not disguise
7. In Letter to my father, Kafka gives a remarkable expression to the repul-

sion which legal literature can generate. He writes of his studies of law:
'for spiritual nourishment I have nothing but sawdust, which, to crown it
all, has been chewed over already by thousands of mouths before me ...'
8. On Japanese politeness and its interpretation in the managerial market,
see the inanities published by B. Bruce-Briggs, 'The Dangerous Folly
called Theory Z', 17 May 1982, Fortune, p. 41ff.
9. See particularly, in this regard, a work of Kelsen's which is seldom cir-
culated in law schools: 'Der Begriff des Staates und die Sozial psycho-
logie. Mit besonderer Berucksichtigung von Freuds Theorie der Masse',
1922, VIII Imago, 97-14t an article that was fundamental to the discus-
sions between Freud and Bon.
their logic. We are in the thrall of ideas that relate to the computer-
isation of norms, or to a submission to a dialogue of management
of the sort which speaks of 'Circles of Quality', to a confusion of
private and public speech. In terms of legal history, it should be
acknowledged that despite a number of valuable works, among
lawyers history has become something of a fiasco. In the current
climate of corporatism, it is difficult to locate accurately the reasons
for this. The history of law misunderstands itself by virtue of its
need to render the phenomenon of law palatable, despite the
implacable and violent rigour of the phenomenon itself. There has
arisen a well-behaved model of sociology which, strengthened by
the hostility of French thought towards any serious study of schol-
asticism, has opened the way to a historiography without hypo-
theses, which is as careful to conform to propaganda as it is fertile
in megalomaniacal programmes. Despite this disastrous context,
the history of law remains the only possible approach towards a
study of the dogmatic function in the West. It alone can address the
enormous questions which it raises and which directly concern the
spread of the industrial system.
The importance of the history of law can be identified only by
retracing the guiding principle of Western legalism which, as a his-
torical process of reproduction, is threaded through a lineage of
texts. The texts in question restate a science of law. Before unfold-
ing this proposition, it is important to clarify some questions of
vocabulary.
The idea of a science of Law should be understood here not in the
modern sense of the label 'science', which merely refers to a know-
ledge founded on the observation of measurable facts and governed
by a set of technical rules of application, as exemplified by beha-
viourist experiments which apply techniques learned in the labor-
atory to social life. The science which I have in mind is one which
deals with the most equivocal and enigmatic of knowledges, the
knowledge of a supposedly absolute power which is blessed with
a superhuman capacity for telling the truth unendingly. Other for-
mulae have been used to designate this science of Law. I will refer
to two examples here. One is taken from a twelfth-century source,
Quaestiones de iuris subtilitatibus: Templum Iustitiae 10 and the other
to. For discussion of this formula and its basis in the Corpus, see H.
Kantorowicz and W. Buckland, Studies ill the Glossators of Romall Law,
1969, 2nd edn, Aalen: Scientia, p. 185.
from Kafka, Before the Law.)] In other words, this science locates the
logical basis of a particular discourse, one which contains an oracle
of power. One text, originally from the Theodosian Code, but which
was taken up in Justinian's compilation and glossed at length by
the Renaissance scholars of twelfth-century Bologna, uses a not-
able expression to designate this very special discourse: digna vox
maiestate, or, to translate literally, a voice worthy of majestyP
We can set to one side for the moment the poetic aspect of this
formula and its metaphor of a supposedly absolute knowledge which
should be understood as the place which knows. This poetic quality
is common in classical presentations of the Western principle of
legality, and suggests a supreme justification, which we understand
completely because we too are savages, butchers of the imaginary
body of an imaginary Other, in which the power of truth is located,
and to which the iconography of legal transmission bears witness.
These poetic allusions isolate a mythical space which plays the role
of a logic, and to which other knowledges (those legal know ledges
which make societies work) refer in the context of a more general
Law. Poetry has this role because, for Westerners as much as for
other cultures, there is an absolute knowledge which, although it is
unsayable, must none the less be said. In other words, this poetry
has influenced the historical development of the rhetorical founda-
tions of Western legal thought. It signals a vital point, namely the
mythological assignation without which there would be no social
communication.
What would social communication be without speech, and what
would human speech be if it were not recognised or, more pre-
cisely, instituted? There is an essential truth in issue here. A legal
system is first and foremost a social technique of communication; it
is the only technique which can assure the entry of human subjects
into the order of Law.
At this point it is possible to begin to define the dogmatic function
more clearly. That which - following the history of doctrine which
the German school of legal thought has developed with particular
11. See the very poetic parable in Kafka, The Trial, 1976 edn, Harmonds-
worth: Penguin Books.
12. The text is found in Justinian's Code, C 1.114.4: 'Digna vox est maiestate
regnantis, legibus alligatum se principem profiteri, adeo de auctoritate iuris
l10stra pendet auctoritas'. On the mediaeval commentaries on this frag-
ment, see E. Cortese, La nonna giuridica. Spunti teorici nel diritto comune
classico, 1962, Milan: Guiffre, especially at pp. 146, 150 and 151.
success, both before and after Savigny13 - I describe as the study of

dogma has to to do with the history of concepts and methods which
are common to both law and medicine. The latter relationship is a
peculiar one, which has been an object of investigation since Paul
Zacchias wrote his Quaestiones medico-legales in the seventeenth cen-
tury, an essential work which brought to light the common object
of law and medicine: the human body.14
The issue which structures the dogmatic function can there-
fore be defined succinctly. It is the human body itself which is at
stake. This stake is socially played out in a textual arena or space
anchored, to take the strongest of the Roman formulations, in
the mythological reference to a place which knows. It serves the
supreme imperative of all human societies, the imperative of repro-
duction. In other words, what establishes the relation betwen law
and medicine within the Western tradition is nothing other than a
law of human reproduction. The very rich history of the term dog-
matic is the history of the textual spaces which are put in play in the
fabrication of the subject's bond to a mythological reference. The
reason for this is that human reproduction requires that the biolo-
gical should be knitted to the social and to that strange knowledge
of the body that Freud described as the unconscious. The manner
or technique in which these distinct registers are knitted together
is itself distinctive. I term this technique the dogmatic function.
These clarifications offer some measure of the importance of a
history of law. A study of the production and reproduction of those
texts through which Western legalism deploys a set of normalising
knowledges lays bare the classical aspect of industrial institutions;
that is, quite simply, their essentially anthropological quality. The
social fantasm or propagandistic ideal of a scheme of management
which would be outside of history and culture, and which pretends
to have nothing to do with the mythological representations of power
13. Despite the extraordinary importance of his work, Savigny (who taught
Marx, influenced Bismarck and corresponded with Laboulaye> remains
persona non grata amongst French intellectuals. It is true that Savigny
was a descendant of Huguenot refugees in Germany, and was a reac-
tionary critic of the Revolution and of its legal intrigues, and dis-
pleased many. See, however, the erudite work of a young author: O.
Motte, 'Savigny. Un retour aux sources', in, 1980,9 Quaderni [iorentini
per In Storin del Pensiero guiridico modemo 555-74.
14. This extremely important author (1584-1659) was both a doctor and
a lawyer. His name is inseparable from the jurisprudences developed
by the school of Saint-Siege. He was also personal physician to Inno-
cent X and to Alexander III.
that industrialised society has supposedly left behind it, here face
their limits. Technology may be developing in a quite novel way,
but the same is not true of institutions, which will never be scient-
ific, at least not in any behaviourist sense of the term. Mass society
exists imaginarily or as a real violence: but this reference to the
mass, which is linked uncritically to the Freudian notion of group
psychology (Massenpsychologie) does not say everything; in particu-
lar, it facilitates avoidance of the difficult question of the new sym-
bolic universe of industrial society, in which legalism must inevitably
reappear, albeit in an indirect or masked form. The discourse of
Law cannot be abolished because it is the very condition of human
sexual reproduction. It is towards these and similarly powerful
issues that the history of law directs us:
(a) The dogmatic function in its relation to the history of the sciences.
Unless One reduces the dogmatic function to a caricature of the
perverse forms which it has taken throughout political history, it is
essential to note the influence of the law's development. The rela-
tionship between law and medicine is inscribed in the heart of the
ancient theory of science and sheds new light not only (as we shall
see) upon the idea of normativity, but also on the relationship
between modern sciences and the concepts of knowledge and truth
which one finds in legal circles. In this area, the work of Herberger
fills a significant gap. In some respects it supports remarks which
are occasionally made, especially by Michel Foucault, about politics
and knowledge in the sphere of medicine. Nevertheless, the place
of Roman law in the development of scientific discourse has yet
to be given close attention. Justinian's compilation, by means of
the ius commune encompassed by the Romano-canonical system of
glosses, provided institutions of knowledge with foundations for a
universal discourse of truth. This discourse was particularly remark-
able because, as the precocity of the twelfth-century Italian treatises
upon procedure suggest,lS it preceded the judicial abolition of trial
by ordeal. One might say that the significance of trial by ordeal was
that in any trial truth was a matter of an unmediated relationship
to God (or, in more psychoanalytical terms, it was a matter of an
imaginary and murderous relationship to the great Other), such that
the accused or the intervening party places his own body in the
scales. God will speak the truth through the hostage-body of the
15. For a very detailed example, see S. Kuttner and E. Rathbone, 'Anglo-
Norman Canonists of the Twelfth Century' (1951) 7 Traditio pp. 279-
358.
supplicant. By means of its elaboration of principles of testimony,

clues, authentic or private writing, Roman law made a break with
the technology of incessant appeals to the miraculous.
In this way the question of truth was displaced, or, more pre-
cisely, split in two, so that divine truth became the guarantee of
the entire legal apparatus, and was strengthened by the essential
Roman division between public and private law. In other words, the
principle of authority in a trial is no longer represented by the body
of a patient but by the ratio according to which the lawyers' theory
of facts and interpretation touches that of the experimenter. In this
way the bond between law and science was forged, so as to make
reason triumph according to dogmatic doctrines of knowledge. The
manoeuvring of Roman texts by Romano-canonic law - which Ger-
man historians labelled learned law (droit savant) so as to distinguish
it from those forms of law implemented by the primitive proced-
ures which proliferated in Europe after the fifth century - had an
important discursive effect: scientific practices, as we encounter
them in the guise of management, which is the successor to the
techniques by which traditional legalism was represented before
the twentieth century, are identifiable as a neo-Iegal production
which operates according to the basic mythological principle which
Roman law bequeathed to industrial culture. What is this principle?
(b) A fundamental mythological principle: the living writing. Unless it
is considered simply unthinkable to ignore scientific ideals and to
describe the industrial system which Western history has constructed
and exported in simple anthropological terms, it is important to
understand in what respects this system might be distinguished
from other modes of institutional reproduction, and to ask why the
cultural changes which have been wrought by this industrial system
have so often signalled carnage, a slaughter which, in international
normative discourse, is variously metamorphosed, transformed and
developed. To borrow from Ernst Kantorowicz, I would say that
the concept of management and of efficiency, is so extreme that it
has eliminated all reference to human sacrifice, with the result that in
our era executions of thousands or of millions have become unrecog-
nisable, being no more than operations of liquidation or inevitable
accidents of political communication.16 Efficiency has created a novel
16. See Kantorowicz's conclusion to his article 'Pro Patria Mori in Medi-
eval Political Thought', reprinted in Selected Studies, 1965, New York:
Augustin, pp. 308-24.
censorship: it is forbidden to try to understand why human beings

rush to their deaths for the sake of truth; for the sake of a truth
inscribed in a text. Faced with the development of oil-rich Arab
countries stamped with the letter of the Koran, or with the brutal
methods of identification with the letter in Mao's China, futurology
deprives itself of a major means of insight; that of studying the
question of the human relation to writing, a question which is not
only complex (and certainly more complex than psychoanalysts, in
the intellectual torpor of the academicism which followed Lacan,
might suggest) but also terrifying.
So long as it is addressed in the context of modernity, the history
of law has something genuinely new to tell us about the phenom-
enon of social attachment. In referring to the logic of messages
addressed to bodies endowed with an unconscious, we can see the
structuring influence of Roman mythology in our forms of insti-
tutional reproduction. Structure is here used in its Latin meaning,
that of a stylised construction, which Augustine used metaphoric-
ally to refer to the liturgical order; it was, for him, a struture of
love (structura caritatis).17 We have now reached the point at which
we have to establish something that can only be acknowledged
painfully in the contemporary era of scientism. Humans relate to
writing primarily through an institutionalised erotics. Unless sexu-
ality is considered only as sex or as pure genitality, the question of
the government of the social through writing is inseparable from
the logic of the unconscious, which is that of the love of a messen-
ger object, a love of messages as such. At the institutional level the
idea of the signifier which Saussure discovered and which was so
dextrously manipulated by Lacan, acquires its full significance and
restates the essential role of enigma in social communication. This
aspect of political management is currently denied in the manage-
rial sciences. Which goes to show that these do not have as their
aim the analYSis of the human condition, but the legal realisation of
the governement of subjects.
The problematic which is revealed by the history of law might be
formulated in the following terms: what is the mechanism by which
the love of a messenger-object is represented in the Western legal
17. The formula is as follows: 'Scientia tamquam machina quaedam, per quam
structura caritatis adsurgat': d. B. Fisher, 'Tamquam machina quaedam. Ein
Wort Augustins (epistolae 53, 39) zum Ethos des Liturgiewissenschaft',
in Miscellenea liturgica in onore di S. E. if Cardinale G. Lercaro, 1967,
Paris: Desclee, II, pp. 85-93.
tradition and how has it produced the basic doctrine of industrial

management, according to which a text is not an object of love but
only a bearer of information? In other legal traditions, and most
notably the Islamic and Talmudic, our ways of dealing with texts
seem like an imposture. In addressing this, I will make some simple
observations about the mythological sources of western normativity,
beginning with a formula from the Digest: the living voice of the
law (viva vox iuris).18
This formula, which, in accordance with the principle of concord-
ance contained in the Utrumque ius of the mediaeval Romanists and
Canonists, might be applied to either the Emperor or the Pope, is
usually traced back to the theory of the sources of law transmitted
to the West by means of the Byzantine collection which was redis-
covered as part of the propaganda of the Gregorian Reform at the
end of the eleventh century.19 The Emperor Justinian, the author in
whose name this collection - which is the foundation of all Euro-
pean legalism - was compiled, was himself an illustration of this
formula, which carries the entire tradition of Roman antiquity which
was channelled and arranged by the Christian Lower Empire. The
living voice of the law is the voice of the oracle. There is in this
formula no more confusion between power and God than there is
in other expressions of this sort (such as imperator-deus). Neither
Justinian's jurisconsults nor their mediaeval commentators, were
misled by metaphors, though doubtless they were taken in as
much as we are when we are seduced by the ideal of scientific gov-
ernment. In each case, what we call power operates in the name of
18. The expression is found in a fragment of Marcian, defining Praetorian
law, D. 1.1.B.: 'Nam et ipsum ius honorarium viva vox est iuris civilis'. By
a quirk of historiography, imperial politics tied the power of inter-
pretation to the succession of magistratures and of jurisconsults
(d. the title of the Digest 1.2.2. 'De origine iuris et omnium magistratum
et successione prudentium', where we find the expression autorum
successio) and to theocratic doctrine (d. Novela 105, c. 2 in fine: 'legem
animatam eum [that is, the emperor] mittens hominibus'), the Justinian
compilation referred to absolute power with complete certainty as the
place which knew. The mediaevals remained, therefore, within the
logic of Roman law when, in collating these fragments, they treated
the lawyers as living archives (scrinia legum, iurisperiti), and also treated
their power of interpretation as deriving from the sovereign (princeps)
as the ultimate reference. On this later point, see Post, op. cit.
19. See the important discussion contained in P. Fournier, 'Un tournant
de l'histoire du droit 0060-1140)', 1917, Revue historique de Droit franr;ais
et etranger, 150.
something unrepresentable. When the jurists of the Latin world

used the word vicar (vicarius) to designate the holder of absolute
power - the Emperor, the Pope and, later, all monarchs - they
naively expressed a basic mythological truth: the emperor (or the
Pope) is an alienated body, just as the vicar-slave of Roman law
managed the goods of his master according to fictitious structures
whose subtlety is evident in the formulaic procedures of classical
law. The divinity of the alienated body is a feigned divinity, a the-
atrical ploy, a sacred or, in other words, non-psychotic madness. As
the glossators so clearly saw, we are dealing here with the realm of
a fiction which figures truth. 20
How might this fiction assist our attempts to locate the place of
the dogmatic function in industrialised culture? The answer is quite
precise: we belong to a culture in which a mystically alienated human
body stands in the place of the absolute book. The state has emerged
from this structure.
I set this comment in the present tense, because the human body
which stands in the place of the absolute book is a montage con-
cerned not only with our historical past, but with structure itself,
which is to say with a principle of repetition which supports the
idea of text. Legal fiction works in such a way as to give living
writing its consequences. This is so because it has as much to do
with the hierarchical schema of interpretation, which in the Middle
Ages was promoted by the inheritance of the two laws (Utrumque
ius), as it has to do with the basic foundations of bureaucratic man-
agement procedures which were made possible by the ingenuity
of the glossators, or with a number of basic concepts in the history
of civil law or commercial law.
Some observations on the lessons taught by this fiction of living
writing can aid analysis. Compared with other forms, and espe-
cially Talmudic conceptions, living writing seems to be a quite dis-
tinctive formula. Its basic characteristics can be set out by means of
a fundamental Romano-pontifical maxim: the Emperor carries all
the archives in his breast (omnia scrinia habet in pectore SUO).21 This
20. On the principle of fictio figura veritatis, see the texts assembled and
interpreted by E. Kantorowicz, The King's Two Bodies, 1957, Princeton:
Princeton University Press at pp. 291-313.
21. This forumla crystallises a mystical doctrine of knowledge, and is
well situated within the scholastic economy by F. Gillmann, 'Roman us
Pontifex iura omnia in scrinio pectoris sui censetur habere', 1912,92 Arc1liv
f. katholisches Kirchellrecht, pp. 3-17, 106, 1926, 156-74.
maxim weaves political and legislative ideas into a mystical poetry

of divine love. It is not a question of cataloguing the signs of the
enduring metaphor of the heart in texts of all descriptions, including
those of law, but rather that of establishing a framework for serious
anthropological interpretation. The Romano-canonical foundations
of modern management - the superstructure of a sort of textual
apparatus - are founded in a discourse which denies the essential
quality of the relation of the body to writing. The question of text
and writing is also a question of the body. If the heart of the pontiff
is also the heart of knowledge, what meaning does this allusion to
anatomy have for Western legalism: in other words, what is an
interpretation?
Wherever writing is in issue, so too is the body. Psychoanalysis
suggests how vital the bond between the two is. Mystical anatomy
is a dimembering and, as Origen shows, a text can sometimes serve
as a knife, even if his extraordinary story is treated as an anecdote.
Justinian's famous, and much-commented, Novel 146 - 'the Jews
indulge in some insane interpretations' - sheds some important
clarification upon this terrain by distinguishing the Jewish style
of interpretation, and particularly the rite of circumcision, as the
moment of madness which separates Roman institutions from
Jewish legalism. 22 This is also important for the history of Latin
anti-Semitism.
The space of fiction, from which the logic of messages in the
Roman legal system unfolded, is accessible to us by means of a
body which is mystically transposed into living writing. This body
is the living text, which, as regards the symbolic manoeuvres of
institutions, constitutes the essential mark of the repertoire of
foundations. In Talmudic law, by way of contrast, circumcision
becomes for each subject the mark of an interpreter and the proof
of his allegiance to the absolute Writing Of, in psychoanalytical
22. Novella 146 and its commentaries are of huge significance. I have
proposed a detailed reading of these texts so as to situate the nota-
tion contained in this text relating to Judaism: 'illsellsatis semetipsos
illterpretatiollibus tradelltes ... : The Jews indulge in some insane inter-
pretations. Appraisal of a text.' In La Psychlmalyse est-elle ulle histoire
juive?, 1981, Paris: Seuil, pp. 93-113. In other respects, from a schol-
astic point of view, it is interesting to refer also to the canonists who
participated in production of thirteenth-century propaganda aimed
at burning the Talmud; see the study of B. Kedar, 'Canon Law and
the Burning of the Talmud' 1979,9 NS, Bulletin of Medieval Canon Law
79-82.
terms, of the relationship between the human subject and the logical
place of the Other. The symbolic detour of bodily inscription, I
would suggest, is paralleled in the Latin legal tradition by a single
body which is used to found interpretation, the body in which the
knowledge of an absolute Other who guarantees all knowledge is
incarnated in the form of a sacrifice required of all interpreters. The
mediaeval theory of 'the power to create laws and to interpret
them' (ius condendi leges et interpretandi), was especially valuable to
administrative states in managing pontifical affairs, and reveals the
ease with which Roman law could be used for the banalisation of
writing or the de-multiplication of instances of absolute power by
the generalisation of social relations managed by inscription in the
name of an incarnate writing. 23 Seemingly, the Western mythological
ordering of culture defuses the violence contained in the binding
of human beings to writing and to texts, but it does so at the cost
of overvaluing the phenomenon of 'the literary' and of the artistic
more generally. This effects an important displacement, it sup-
posedly provides an objective safeguard for subjectivity in the form
of the timeless and purely informational relation between the human
subject and the message conceived in its Romano-canonical form.
The mystical alienation of the sovereign-mediator signifies that, in
the imaginary relation to the place that knows, one person alone is
supposed to act on behalf of all the others. More than that, and for
the same reason, if texts change their nature, then, in social terms,
they cease to be sacred. This delegation of interpretative power to
the sovereign produces huge effects: it gives the political the value
of the symbolic bond and opens the way to all kinds of institu-
tional arrangements. Most notably, it institutes an allegiance to an
absolute power and, in a precocious manner, makes thinkable the
sovereignty of what Marsilus of Padua called 'the perfect civil com-
munity', or, put differently, the advent of lay societies. 24
The managerial idea of a text-document, therefore, is no less
founded upon myth than those notions of textuality to which it is
23. The question of the legal State is thus posed by the pontifical sys-
tem itself. On the collection of texts which proposed the theory of
illS condendi et interpretandi, reference can be made to my thesis: La
penetration du droit romain dans Ie droit canonique ciassique, 1957, Paris:
Imprimerie Jouve, p. 50ff.
24. On this much misunderstood notion, see the classical study of G. de
Lagarde, La Naissance de ['esprit larque au deciin du Moyen Age, III, Le
Defensor Pacis, 1970, Louvain: Nauwelaerts, p. 326.
supposedly opposed. It is no more and no less than the product of

a specific culture. In further questioning the history of law, the
problem of unravelling the numerous ramifications of the mytho-
logical principle of a living writing should be noted. They relate not
simply to a theory of knowledge but also to the concept of Law.
The classical formulations are in this respect eloquent: the Law which
breathes (Lex animata) is also the equivalent, as we have seen, of the
living voice of the law. We must return to Roman law and attempt
to understand the significance of this Law, as a science of Law, as
a science of the Law of the reproduction of the human.
(c) The strategic capacity of Roman law. It is time that the concept of
Roman law - which is inextricably linked to industrial dogma - be
revived, not only so as to facilitate research into the reproduction
of industrially motivated organisations, but also to render such
research propitious in terms of the social effects of interpretation. I
do not attach much importance to contemporary observations on
the crisis of Western society, which do no more than rework a recur-
rent theme, and which assuage the socially prevalent fantasms of
guilt. Such observations shed no light on matters, if only because
clarification is the result not of the ready-made criticisms of special-
ist observers of this crisis, but of a more modest and classical line of
inquiry, characterised by patient and methodical erudition, into the
component elements of a specific mode of enjoyment, or, in other
words, into the savage specificity of what shapes the Law. Histor-
ians have a special duty in relation to this peculiarly difficult subject.
The fact that studies dealing with legalism - or, more especially,
Roman law - are dismissed by legal historians themselves, indic-
ates clearly where the problem lies. In my view, this dismissal is
a productive impasse. Censorship serves an essential function in
any society; it designates the anguished space of truth. Far better,
then, to give in to forgetfulness and to cultivate ingenious beha-
viourist doctrines which strive to reduce social problems to prob-
lems relating to the satisfaction of needs. Here, at this very point,
the discomfort is manifest. Behaviourism, which has all but colon-
ised management, does not want to know that humanity is subject
to a law of desire, and that the satisfaction of needs necessarily
proceeds by way of a space of fictions. Nevertheless, the fiasco
of predictions about the death of religion, or about the unification
of the world through trade, and so on, cannot serve as a lesson
because the will not to know our own anthropological status is
more powerful than the inconveniences which ensue, and institutions

listen only to force. Consequently, the history of law is seen either
as a distraction or as an academic archaism, a relic, in which, in dilut-
ing itself in superficial yet reassuring sociological cliches, it contrib-
utes to the misunderstanding of the origins of the institutional system
which produced and which still sustains industrial management.
The question of Law and of a Western mode of enjoyment (enjoy-
ment being taken here in its legal sense, as in the enjoyment of a
right or status) can be studied only by means of a long detour via
Rome. Otherwise, we can have no conception of our own mytholo-
gical structures. The principle of living Writing stipulates that abso-
lute power is a place which operates as a producer and proprietor
of meaning. We have to admit that the play of institutions is first
and foremost a play of language which manipulates human beings
as speaking beings. At the same time, the question of Law is raised
along with the question of power.
What is the Law? In the West it is nothing other than Law as the
Roman system produced and epiphanically reproduced it, that is to
say, as a discourse of truth addressed to humanity. The word sys-
tem - which, from the time of Melancthon onwards, has been useful
in designating government by writing, and which is well known to
German legal theory - is essential to any reflection on power.
Thanks to the work of Hermann Coing and to the universal
historiography which he initiated and successfully guided to its
conclusion, the study of the system of Roman law has today reached
a status of erudite perfection. 25 The concerns addressed by Coing,
and which guide the following demonstrations, are as follows: a
constant interpretative preoccupation; a desire to understand the
political empire of Roman law in the industrialised worlds, the
courage to keep the history of private law, the matrix of the Ius
Civile, as the basis of fundamental legal research. To these remarks
one can add a pointer to the extraordinary possibilities opened up
by the erudition of Stephan Kuttner in matters of canon law, the
other face of Utrumque ius, which henceforth seems just as richly
equipped with tools as the Roman aspect. It remains to examine, in
light of these studies, what I shall term the question of the Law.
I shall confine myself to a few basic observations:
25. See his introduction to Handbuch der Quellen und Literatur der neuren
europaischell Privatrechtsgeschichte, I (Mittelalter 1100-1500. Die gelehrten
Rechte und die Gesetzgebullg), 1973, Munich: Beck, pp. 3-35.
The unconscious cannot be abolished. Romano-canonic discourse

teaches that the concept of law, which is the pivotal point in the
theoretical analysis of myth in its relation to power, can be illumin-
ated only by recourse to the legal science of reproduction. There
is a typically Western route to instituting the human body, which
most usually runs by way of those rules of civil law which deal
with the family, rights of inheritance, and so on. These rules, which
are inseparable from the casuistry of sex, are an element in the
unconscious elaboration of the genealogical schema. The apparatus
of Law, which is as indispensable to the West as it is to other cul-
tures, has the function of indicating to each of its subjects that they
cannot be their father's brother or their mother's father. This is the
ground upon which a society's destiny is played out through the
manipulation of the unconscious. It is essential to note the scale of
the problem. In forgetting the juridical procedures inherent in the
discourses which serve to institute the body, which are established
in the writings of the Law even before birth ex utero, we fail to
recognise that the set of procedures which make up what I call the
psychosomatic element of man are a primordial fact of industrial-
ised culture. In other words, for political reasons which still cannot
be analysed because our tradition confuses them with rationality,
the dogmatic foundations of psychology which are peddled in the
name of ultra-modern management are silenced, and left to their
fate.
If historical science is to be treated as something more than a con-
ceptual rubbish dump or social leisure activity, sooner or later the
founding dogmatic knowledges will have to be disinterred. These
include not only the patristic commentary on the famous ecumenical
councils of Antiquity which have reached us through canonical col-
lections from before the time of Gratian, but also the thirteenth cen-
tury scholastic sources of psychology identified by Father Lottin, and
the classical Roman jurisprudence relayed to us by means of Justinian
and most notably the lex Aquilia which is the basis of the nuanced
and hierarchically ordered subjectivity of modernity and its laws of
civil liability. Neither the 'psychological' sciences, which are now so
popular, nor the theory of the foundations of scientific medicine can
escape the questioning of our cultural presuppositions. The question
which Freud posed in the form of the discovery of the unconscious
is an inevitable stage in an anthropology which will have to retrace
its steps in criticising the scientistic illusions which shelter us from
an understanding of the roots of industrialised culture. Scarcely
different in this respect from non-industrialised cultures, we cannot

live without an allegory of the division of the human subject. Western
psychosomatism serves as just such a discourse.
To what is the historical strength of Roman law attributable? I shall

put to one side all reference to such work as has been carried out
already by a few isolated legal thinkers and historians, on the tradi-
tion of major concepts associated with the idea of Law. Instead, I
shall take up another perspective, and view Roman law as an anthro-
pological tool for industrialised humanity.
What is in question is the science of Law, which is, as I have
suggested, formulated mythologically, so as to knit the biological,
the social and the unconscious. The development of the concept of
the place which knows, by reference to a living writing, to an incar-
nate and absolute power, shows us the way to understanding that
the system as a whole is heading in a particular direction, one which
is quite different from that taken by any of the variety of other
systems examined by classical anthropology. In order to identify
the manner in which our own system reproduces itself, we need to
accept the idea that Roman law is one of the various institutional
experiments by means of which humanity has reproduced itself.
The human experiment of Roman law is a way of staging what in
psychoanalytical terms we should call the imaginary function of
the phallus, from which are derived the problems of Oedipal logic
and of symbolic castration - the basic unconscious problems of
any human life. This indicates the privileged ground upon which
Roman law played out its destiny: the ground of reproduction, or
of private law and its relation to the principle of power. This in
turn suggests that the question of Law must be raised at the point
at which it was raised by psychoanalysis - at the level of family
structure.
I shall return to this basic structure later. For the moment, this
problematic can be introduced by way of reference to its funda-
mental elements:
(1) Roman law unfailingly implemented what Bachofen quite accur-

ately described as 'the triumph of Roman paternity'.26 This observa-
tion goes a long way to explaining how Christianity was written
26. See Das Mutterrecht, 1948 edn, Basle: Henno Schwabe, II, p. 63, III,
pp.981-2.
into the logic of Roman law so as to secure the symbolic structura-

tion of human beings. It also points up some of the more neurotic
questions raised by technological progress and the propaganda of
scientific management. Is it conceivable that the industrial system
might abolish its own logic, and especially that of private law, for
example, by leaving the choice of sex to a medico-surgical economy?
In which case sex would be treated as though the imaginary attri-
butions of a subject could be sustained otherwise than through a
mythological bond with the paternal metaphor. Examples such as
this might suggest a renewal of social fantasms of absolute power.
Or, if indeed such a profound revolution were possible, what price
- in terms of the development of psychoses - would the generations
which follow us have to pay? The problem of a supposedly father-
less society - one which would dispense with the metaphorical play
in which an object is instituted as bearer of the Law - is for the
West raised in an anthropological context upon which the history
of Roman law sheds much light. What must be understood is that
we belong to a culture which, by means of a quite specific legal man-
oeuvre, collapses the biological role of the genitor into the symbolic
role of the father. This manoeuvre has certain consequences which
might explain the perplexity - or blindness - of political authorities
when they make legislative choices.
(2) Roman law offers not only a legal technology but also a principle
of universal legislation. This non-negotiable principle has served
historically not only to justify the rise of what we today call interna-
tional law, but also to justify the use of the equivocal phrase the
history of Roman law in the general theory of institutions, the phrase
being understood not only as a legal concept but also as something
of the order of what can be depicted as theogony. In other words,
Roman law is written into anthropology dogmatically, in the tradi-
tional sense of a science of God and the Universe, including and
instituting man as a microcosm. The tributaries of natural law and
the basic legal categories have served as the fulcrum of purely
logical justifications of the legitimacy of the system. It is interest-
ing to note in this regard that, because Western legalism lacks the
tools which would enable it to grasp the coherence of systems
which work with a different family structure, it considers these soci-
eties to be logically devoid of Law, as though incest was for them
referable to a non-legal system such as that which might be applied
to animals. In its conquest of the planet, industry has made use
of this supreme weapon: the battle waged against primitivism so as

to diffuse the logic of Roman law.
SCHOLASTICISM AND THE KINSHIP OF TEXTS
A study of the phenomenon of law confirms an observation which

haunted traditional legalism but which, owing to the influence of
experimental science, behavioural models of management too read-
ily dismiss from the political horizon. Because they are in the grip
of something other than a pure logic of sense and sensation, human
beings are endlessly driven by desire. Hobbes, who was an excep-
tional publicist and lawyer, and whose Leviathan is still occasionally
the subject of misappropriations, used a particularly powerful for-
mula to identify the unceasing renewal of desire: 'To assure for
ever the way of his future desire.,27 In more modern or more the-
oretical terms, and taking into account what psychoanalysis tells us
about the mechanism of desire, we could say that, for any society,
the dogmatic function consists in taking cognisance of an unsatis-
fiable desire and of the need to recognise by means which secure
the reproduction of the species, that this dimension of lack is pre-
cisely the domain of the institution. This is because human beings,
who are bonded to their desire from birth to death, or, as the clin-
ical experience of the role of the Oedipal myth in the analytic cure
demonstrates, who are bonded to the childhood desire which
relates primarily to the desire of the mother, must enter into speech
in such a way that this speech constitutes a social bond. These insti-
tutional manoeuvres are also manoeuvres of the Law which, by
means of a fundamental prohibition, introduces human beings to a
space of lack by extracting them from the univocal desire of the
mother. For each subject, Law is a function played by the father, or
what we call the father, according to a triangular Oedipal logic. The
entire structure of legality is built upon these foundations, because
these are the principles of authority and legitimacy. Institutions,
therefore, have a primary relation to the mechanism of human desire
and to its genealogical recognition. This must be taken as a primor-
dial fact if we are to understand not only the extraordinary flexibility
of Roman law throughout the history of the West, but also that this
history is a structural phenomenon.
27. Leviathan, Chapter XI - 'Of the Difference of Manners'.

In one way or another, genealogical recognition, or the organ-

isation of a human order of transmission, lies at the heart of all
institutional systems. This is because the question of the origin of
power and of Law is necessarily inscribed in a set of vital social rep-
resentations. The discourse of legitimacy remains an unavoidable
precondition of sociality. An aphorism might make things clearer:
everything to do with law has to do with paternity. There is a
paternity of institutions because Law needs a legitimate author. The
mythological order of the West is founded on a living Writing which
acts as the sign of a place, that of reference to pure power. This
place can be occupied by any signifier capable of guaranteeing the
Law, whether it be Justinian, science or the class struggle. In other
words, we are dealing with a combination of elements.
Legalism is indifferent to the content of the signifiying categories
of discourse. This observation is undoubtedly difficult for legal
history to accept, so long as it refuses to consider what Lacan quite
rightly called the prevalence of the order of the signifier in human-
ity. I shall not dwell upon this theoretical aspect of things here,
except to observe that it concerns the imaginary function of the
phallus, and so also note that such a notion disqualifies any sexist
conception of institutions because the different mythological path-
ways of the male and female sex are equal in the mythology of
castration. The social inequality of the sexes has no basis in the real,
and the history of law could cast some unexpected light upon the
study of this basic anthropological fact. Suffice it to say that through-
out the history of the West, legalism has served any and all political
causes. Today, it spruces itself up to serve the new cause of equal-
ity. But this observation contains a good deal of complexity, which
has so far been neglected, precisely because it would lead to a
questioning of the workings of this strange adaptability of legalism.
A few examples might serve to illustrate the importance of the
genealogical element in the constitution of the various branches of
a Romano-canonic legalism which is still engaged in a process of
self-reproduction, and indeed expansion within the contemporary
industrial world. What matters in the political destiny of societies
is not the scientific genealogy of their institutional development,
but the mythological narrative which mobilises unconscious beliefs
and binds them to a discourse inspired by the mystical truth of the
all-powerful signifier (Justinian the theocratic emperor, science, class
struggle, and so on). Romano-canonic law is called upon to func-
tion in a number of different ways: at times, it is recognised as the
foundation of the system, as in the case of the Holy See which is

essentially managed by lawyers with a very traditional training
(inspired by Europe before the advent of codification). Elsewhere,
it is used formally, as in the case of British common law (but with
the shadows cast over canonical sources by the Reformation); at
other times it is quite ostentatiously misunderstood, as in France,
a country which is solidly anchored in the doctrine of the legists
of the ancien regime and, obliquely, in propositions hostile to the
empire, or to the notion of popular rights, and which were sup-
ported by the sort of rationalism which was violently denounced
in Savigny's Germany. Even the Soviet Union could claim an alle-
giance to the Latin glossators, who, just as the reception of Western
juridical structures was getting under way in Russia, were being
reworked by the European Enlightenment in such a manner as to
produce the infamous notion of jusnaturalisme. Nevertheless, the
ideal of a worker-state necessarily functions as a principle of cen-
sorship, in much the same way as the revolutionary French State,
having abolished the doctrine of the glossators along with feudal-
ism, was fascinated by the ideal of a Roman-style republic. These
two examples, which are of great interest to any history of the
administrative inventions which accompanied the revolutionary
destruction of institutions and the rise of dictatorship, suggest
that the tradition could not function with a clean slate. This gives
the discourse of myth a quite special significance. Other examples
might clarify the primarily imaginary character of the genealogical
recognition which underpins the symbolic work of society. As we
know from a number of studies which show that the Romano-
canonic process of transmission was also at work in Protestant coun-
tries, largely because of the influence of intermediaries such as
Melanchthon, the question transcends the problem of nationalism.
The neglect of this is attributable to the fact that such a link has
been forgotten, even in the countries most affected by the Counter-
Reformation where the compilations produced by Jesuit scholasti-
cism praised the work of the mediaeval doctors amongst whom
shone the papacy itself.
Returning to the brute fact of transmission, it is necessary to
attend carefully and critically to the way in which societies affected
by this supra-national textual tradition have elaborated the condi-
tions of their reception of Roman law, a phenomenon which is abso-
lutely crucial to the development of Western legal systems. I will
not give an account of this much abused term here, for the simple
reason that it is too weighed down by ill-conceived ideas and, there-

fore, is inadequate to the task of helping us understand the problem
of the lineage of texts, an issue which is essential to the repro-
ductive logic at play in the dogmatic function. The historical traits,
which I shall describe below, confirm the mythological dimension
upon which all transmission necessarily depends, but they teach
us little of the exact nature of the reproductive mechanism of legal
writings. My observations will bear upon the internal decor of the
first scholasticism, that of the Middle Ages, between the introduction
of Gratian's Decretals (c. 1140), contemporary with the first phase of
the rediscovery of Roman law in Bologna, and the first half of the
fourteenth century which was marked most clearly by the Glossa
ordinaria, or ordinary gloss, of Jean d' Andree (1301), and by the
death of Bartolus (1357), who was a kind of librarian of the two
laws (utrumque ius) and whose work served as a constant reference-
point for later doctrinal writers. The period in question was in many
ways the classical age of the learned laws. This phase of textual
expansion and of the modernisation of the system allows us to
make the following observations:
(a) Knowledge of Law is fundamentally a science of commentary. From

this the following can be drawn: The Law is a logical space across which
interpretations pass.
In order to make the most of this formula, one should be prepared

to renounce current presentations of the formation of law. Since the
rise in Europe of the monumental State (monument being taken in
the classical sense of repository of texts) and of notions of codifica-
tion which, under the influence of the Enlightenment and various
forms of democracy, have overturned the traditional concept of law
and of popular right, the theory of legal sources as founding fictions
has become unintelligible. Were it not for the analysis of constitu-
tional doctrine in terms of the relations between Law and State, or
those sociological studies inspired by Weber and Eisenstadt which
have given renewed impetus to political science, we might have
lost sight of the idea of legalism as a fictional structure. What I have
said so far invites us to reintroduce that fiction. The object is to
represent an essentially mythological point: in any society, the law
must be made to speak.
We might begin with an easily identifiable element, which the
mediaeval experience of the glossators allows us to study, even if
contemporary epistemological discipline would term that experi-

ence naive. That element is the following: even though the Law has
no body, it speaks. The structure of fiction here consists in acting as
if that body existed. It is on that basis that legalism takes over, and
scholasticism shows us what that body is: it is a workshop in which
the pieces of a repertoire are manufactured as an instance of what
I shall called the ready-to-speak, or, in other words, it is the sym-
bolic space of the erudite doctors. Scholasticism intervenes in order
to represent the know ledges of Law in their theatrical dimension.
The realm of the masters is one in which ordinary men do not
speak; instead, stars shine. A text of Honorius III on the University
and Roman law declares a mystical truth: 'like the brilliance of the
heavens' (velut splendor {irmament).28 Law makes knowledge shine,
a formula which should be kept in mind when considering the
question of dogma.
Particular attention should be given to canonical writing, that is
to say, to pontifical law, for two reasons: the canonical system,
having been immersed in a set of traditions which emerged from
collections of ancient law (from Antiquity and the High Middle
Ages), and being the propagator of Roman legal sources whose
categories it transmitted according to the doctrine of imitatio imperii,
represents the first systematic modern use of Justinian's collection.
At the same time, it was the workshop in which the fundamental
legal concepts transmitted to Europe through the Corpus Juris Civilis
were fashioned. The idea of consent as the source of contractual
obligation, the administrative notion of public office, the regulation
of effigies and images, the founding principles of the ius gentium: all
these modern techniques had already been settled by the middle of
the thirteenth century, after more than a century of elaboration by
the decretists (commentators on the decrees, who belonged to the
period between the generation of Paucapalea, Rufinus, etc. and that
in which the great apparatus Decreti of the beginning of the thirteenth
century were composed) and the decretalists (who commentated
upon the decreta Is, from the Compilatio Prima of 1190 to Innocent
IV, who died in 1254, and who was the author of a vast apparatus
dealing with the official collection of Gregory IX). How did this
corpus function?
28. Decretals (of Gregory) IX.x.5.5.5. The text has been the object of a
remarkable study by G. Le Bras, 'Velut splendor firmamenti. Le docteur
dans Ie droit de I'Eglise medievaIe', in Melanges offerts a E. Gilson,
1959, Paris: Vrin.
This production offers the spectacle of a scholastic circuit of texts,

and the circulation of the discourse of Law at the level of mediaeval
societies, not as being governed from above, but being part of a
network of juridical inscriptions which are mystically unified by a
governing reference, namely, the reference to a living Writing. The
idea of 'the monarchy of learned laws' - in which canon law was
one of two component parts, and which existed, according to the
Gelasian image of two Christian powers, the lay and the ecclesi-
astical, in an ideal relation to its counterposing power 29 - is not a
witticism invented by Le Bras, but more precisely, according to his
staunchly justified theme, a university town, Bologna.3o In other
words, the town of the doctors, the womb of the two laws, func-
tions in the discourse of lawyer-historians as an allusion to the
commentator's fatherland (patrie), just as Rome was said to be the
universal fatherland of law: Roma communis patria, Rome is our
common fatherland, as the Digest suggests?)
I mingle modern scholarly speech with an invocation of the work
of the glossa tors because nothing is more difficult to locate than
dogmatic discourse, which is by definition a discourse placed out-
side time. Where might one locate it, given that it descends meta-
phorically from the inhuman locus of absolute knowledge? How, if
not metaphorically, could one locate it in such a way that it emerges
from a space which has no inside or outside, and no top or bottom,
and which is, to be precise, the place of a signifier separated from
its signified (which in this case is geographical)? To locate the learned
laws in Bologna is to indicate the ideal homeland of the com-
mentators, an absolute monarchy with no subjects, this being a
discourse addressed to all the subjects of an ideal political space.
Scholasticism thus places us before the very nature of institu-
tions. Above all, legal grammar keeps to the letter of the Latin:
institution means doctrine or teaching. The pontifical system suggests
the content of such a remark.
In both its canonical and its Roman aspects, the knowledge of
Law seems to be split in two: on the one hand, there is the text, and
on the other hand, there is commentary. The latter, being essen-
tially tied to the phenomenon of the school, was developed not so
29. The basic text of Pope Gelase, is contained in a decretal, Dis. 96, c. 10;
Gratian summarises it as follows: 'Auctoritas sacra pontificum et regalis
potestas huius mundi gubernacula regit.'
30. 'Bologne, monarchie medievale des droits savants', in Memorie per la
Storia dell'Universittl di Bologna, 1956, pp. 1-18.
31. Digest 50.1.33. (Modestinus), 'Roma communis nostra patria est'.
much in order to illuminate what we would now caUlegal practice,

but rather as a celebration of the text, or of a lineage of writings,
through which a principle of authority can be located. This is an
essential point. It enables us to understand how Justinian's corpus
was systematically scrutinised, glossed and set out in the form of
treatises which soon became a codified literary genre, while at the
same time twelfth-century society could refer to the law of the
Roman Empire only as an ideal, given that its techniques were in
practice only remnants which had been gathered piecemeal into
customary or feudal regulations. The difficulties of evaluating the
problems surrounding the reception of Roman law in the twelfth
and thirteenth centuries are well known. We also know, how-
ever, by tracing the history of the Holy See's legislative or quasi-
legislative activities, that the legal magma, the outlines of which
can be gleaned from Gratian's first distinctiones on the sources of
law, was in reality manoeuvred according to the logic of a principle
inspired by imperial Roman law, and which cannot be formulated
without a mythological reference: the sovereign pontiff does not
innovate: rather, he indefinitely interprets that which, according to
mystical legalism, he alone knows. The formula Omnia scrinia habet
in pectore suo suggests a legal principle according to which law exists
only by virtue of a foundational Law which is mystically known
and transmitted. If we recall that, in the economy of imitatio imperii,
the place of the sovereign is also the place from which the paternal
metaphor functions institutionally, at the level of the system as a
whole, then the full weight of the classification of institutions - or,
in other words, the doctrines of living Law (following the title of
Justinian's Institutes, Sacratissimi principis institutiones) - becomes
apparent: on one side, there is the author of law and the texts, and
on the other the commentaries and the school. In other words, inter-
pretations are divided into two orders: sovereign interpretations and
doctoral interpretations.
In developing these observations, it is important to notice that,
if one leaves to one side the particular case of the councils held by
the Pope, the technique of pontifical legislation, which was almost
entirely centred upon constitutions and rescripts,32 or, in other words,
the process of answering questions, formed part of the scholastic
circulation of interpretations. There is in this a dual movement of
ascent and descent, which gives priority to the phenomenon of
32. The rescript (rescriptum or rewriting) was the official answer of the
Pope to any legal question.
interpretation, to which not only governmental or administrative

practices were related, but also the various ties which linked the
Holy See to school doctrines or to the schools themselves. 33 The
popes manifest themselves by their knowledge of both laws, their
science in utroque iure, as in the case of one of the most important
popes of the early thirteenth century, Innocent III, a student of the
celebrated glossator, Azo. We should also notice how those ties
were reinforced by the fact that, mediaeval society having gradu-
ally aligned itself with the civilisation of civil law which the canon-
ists so skilfully manipulated, there arose a set of power relations
between the doctors and the papacy, and, although they were dis-
guised by a mode of erudition, one can see how far the power of
the schools extended, this power thereby making the reference to a
sovereign space seem to be a deception. A typical example is the
disguised, but ultimately victorious opposition of school doctrine
to the terroristic principle declared in a famous text of Innocent III
against heretics: pro peccatis patrum puniri (to be punished for the
sins of one's fathers).34 In this movement back and forwards, one
should notice the ability of school doctrine to accommodate all these
practices of interpretation, and even managing to dissolve para-
doxes by incessantly recalling the supremacy of the Law through
various eloquent formulae. For example, it was said that, even if
the Pope was ignorant of law, as was Celestine II, his interpretation
always prevailed. Symmetrically, the powers of the emperor were
an issue: might he one day destroy Roman law? This circularity of
thought was appropriate given that dogmatic thought functioned
in non-chronological time. Legal scholasticism is also recognisable
by that trait; it indefinitely reinvents the question of the logic of an
absolute power which is primarily recognisable as a place.
These observations on the scholastic process of indefinite reit-
eration of texts and commentaries directly relates to the structural
33. Such practices were copied from the model of imperial Rome in a
history that continued uninterrupted despite the fall of the Western
Roman Empire. Despite the dying away of administrative structures
during the High Middle Ages, what was crucial for the canonists of
the twelfth century, was the legitimate appropriation of Roman law
by the Church. This appropriation was marked not only by legendary
stories (as, for example, the 'donation' of Constantine) but also by
sloganistic formulae (as, for example, 'Ecclesia vivit iure romano', or
'Velleralldae romanae leges' which we find in Gratian C. 16 q. 3 c. 17).
34. K. Pennington, 'Pro Peccatis Patrum Punir;: A Moral and Legal Prob-
lem of the Inquisition', 1978,47 Church Histonj pp. 137ff.
conditions in which any socialisation of norms must take effect. The

work of the masters consists in ensuring that the Law of the mas-
ters prevails, a notion which is essential because it suggests that
structure, which I aim to locate by isolating the dogmatic function
itself, is usable in every sense of the formula. Legalism is as useful
in founding the liturgical dimension of sacramental theology as it
is in promoting the rise of commercial capitalism. Both historically
and sociologically, the law of the masters bears down with all its
weight, even in the normalisation of an economic order. From this
perspective there can be no autonomous history of law, not even
capitalism could have developed without a mythological relation to
the divine place of truth.
The question of the relationship of knowledge of the Law to
truth carries us towards the border of a much ignored but crucial
issue, that of legal interpretation as an art. I will emphasise the
importance of this question again. If my analysis is well founded,
scholasticism, taken both as a circuit of legalism and as a fictional
structure, must be understood as a system of interpretation in the
literary or theatrical sense, as the glossators' doctrine about law as
an imitation of nature suggests. Indeed, Kantorowicz recalls just
this doctrine in relation to the legal and political basis of literary
and artistic property.35
Another aspect of the question of the relation to truth should also
be invoked. It is one which is a consequence of an elaboration of the
dogmatic apparatus according to the governing Romano-canonic
code: the claim of the West to have eliminated the function of what
I shall call the Master of Truth within institutions confuses the lat-
ter function with that of the living Text. The imperial or pontifical
model of an incarnate power brought about the destruction of genu-
inely esoteric or initiate approaches to Law. This practice of the
signifier, which is intelligible primarily by virtue of Freud's dis-
covery of the unconscious, is characteristic of the culture associ-
ated with industrialised society. It is one which diverges from other
approaches to Law, which are more supple but which are undoubt-
edly less compatible with the ideal of rationality as it is understood
in the Romano-canonic system and the discourse of management. If
industry is the product of Christianity, then the dogmatic function
in the West develops according to a particular institutional course.
35. See 'The Sovereignty of the Artist. A Note on Legal Maxims and
Renaissance Theories of Art', in Selected Studies, pp. 352-65.
It is undoubtedly difficult, but it is not impossible, to examine
this elimination of initiations, the vestiges of which, such as the
Masons, have become virtually inaccessible, smothered as they are by
a literature of ridicule. The one exception to this is the specialist
historiography of Enlightenment Europe and beyond, which distin-
guishes traditionalist (essentially that of Britain) and rationalist (pre-
dominantly that of Latin Europe) branches of esoteric knowledges.
(b) Knowledges of Law require a zone of neuroses, a zone which encloses

a legislation of speech and of the subject's enjoyment.
To suggest that the legal system is identifiable with a founding

mythology which can be deciphered with the help of psychoana-
lysis, requires that one should then consider the implication of
subjectivity in the deployment of the Text, or the economy of texts
and commentaries which mediaeval scholasticism described.
The question concerns not only how the functioning of institu-
tions depends upon human eroticism, but also how these institu-
tions condition the subjectification of individuals. If one abandons
the current passive style of reading, which deals with a tradition
which is supposedly external to culture, the history of law tells us
something about the status of social reproduction in industrialised
societies. Political love, the mechanism of guilt, the institution of
matrimony; these are questions which lie at the heart of legalism.
An essential point to be reiterated is that the basic function of insti-
tutions is to produce human beings and to lead them towards death.
The meaning of this rather brutal proposition is that legal know-
ledge emerges from a science of the body because it presupposes
human beings in the grip of unconscious desire. If one analyses the
tradition at the level of its unconscious, the domain of Law is a grey
world, uniform and terrible, in which regulations are haunted by
transgression. It is in the legal inscription of guilt, in the institu-
tional marking of discourse, that one can identify the effects of
scholastic interpretation upon the social structure. The following
points are of particular significance:
The subject of speech is instituted by Law in the form of the dictinction

between private and public law. The study of legal tradition provides
some interesting insights into the submission of the individual to the
sociality of communication. What is involved is a unitary operation,
it is the necessity of a guarantee in the order of truth within which

casuistry functions.
The Roman law distinction between private law and public law
is of fundamental importance to what we now call, without the
need for too great a degree of elaboration, the social imaginary. If
there is such an imaginary, and for it not to be mad, it must be
structured by precisely that legal distinction. It spans the whole of
social space, converting it into textual space. Individual speech is
only communicable if it is inscribed in a sort of generalised legal-
ism, so that discursive effectiveness is the result of loading speech
with a set of legally and rhetorically instituted beliefs. A basic maxim
of the Western tradition suggests that the enemies of the faith are
both mad and delirious (dementes vesanosque)i a definition from
Justinian's corpus which quite neatly defines a political concept of
madness by giving it legal form. 36 The legality of communication
means that it functions according to specified procedures. The rules
which ordered the Roman trial process are also significant because
they offer the best introduction to a critique of notions of spontan-
eous communication. Elsewhere, our subjection to law gives the
question of poetics and of the arts in general their quality of rebel-
lion, because, in terms of social reproduction, that question leaves
open certain possibilities of subjective challenge, of defiance and of
protest. The desiring subject's room for manoeuvre is nevertheless
quite narrow, and any release of desire is paid for dearly in the
currency of guilt.
The Romano-canonic tradition also contains an important lesson
on the significance of the persistent attempts made to abolish the
distinction between private and public. The lesson is to be found
in the history of the law of penitence, a subject which was radic-
ally transformed at the beginning of the thirteenth century by the
advent of private confession, a confessional technique which was
spread by the Irish Church and which was heavily dependent
upon monastic practices. The reformers of the Carolingian era had
already taken a step towards unharnessing themselves from public
penitence by establishing the principle of 'public penitence for public
sins; private penance for private sins'.37 The decision, however, of
36. See the first title of the Code, 'De Summa Trinitate .. .' C.1.1.1., para. 1.
37. The principle is announced in the False Decretals in the following
form: 'Mallifesta peccl/ta 11011 sunt occulta correctione purgandl/' (Hinchius,
Decretales pseudo-Isidoranae, 1863, Leipzig, p. 140).
the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215, became part of the common

law of the Church in the compilation of Gregory IX.38 Such a deci-
sion was much influenced by the long-established psychological the-
ories of the decreta lists on the intimate as opposed to the externa1 39
causes of sin and was to form the basis of a law which legislated
upon speech, a law fashioned from an exchange between public and
private speech, in a space of fiction which replicated the domain
of the court of conscience. The lesson is the more telling in that,
despite the occasional relaunching of the doctrines of the antique
Church as to the exclusive legitimacy of public penitence, and des-
pite the abolition of private penance during the Reformation, the
psychological approach established itself as being at once an offer
made to the desiring subject and as an instrument of social control.
According to different institutional modalities, Protestantism elab-
orated a form of psychology which it inherited from mediaeval
authors whose work spanned both branches of Western Christianity.
This kind of psychology was extremely sophisticated, it distin-
guished the inside and outside of the body, it established a doctrine
of dreams, and attempted further to establish a scale of sensations
from which a universal theory of pleasure was deduced. These the-
ories were put into effect, most notably in the social regulation of
guilt. 40 In this regard, they remain a valuable reference because they
occupied a space which legal discourse has continued to repeat
and which is now taken up by the functionaries of a model of neo-
legalism which is qUite unaware of its dependence upon such doc-
trines. It is a legalism constructed from a diverse set of psychological
discourses which set out the scientific bases of happiness, an idea
which was itself inherited or transmitted from the eighteenth cen-
tury and the so-called police sciences. It can be noted finally that
the idea of happiness dates back even further, to the post-classical
glossators' distinction between pleasure (voluptas) and happiness
(felicitas).
38. See the celebrated canon 21, called the canon Utriusque sexus, which
became law in the Decretals of Gregory IX, X. 5.38.12.
39. This doctrine was expounded by one of the first decretalists, Rufin, in
his Summa, ad. Dis. 40 c. 5: the text of which is reprinted in S. Kuttner,
Kanonistiche Schuldlehre von Gratian his auf die Dekretalen Gregors IX,
1935, Vatican City, p. 23.
40. See particularly Gratian, Distinctio 6, where a doctrine of dreams is
elaborated. On the details of the discourse elaborating the canonical
notion of culpability, see the work of Kuttner cited above.
On the status of transgression: the prohibition of incest and the legal

control of pleasure. Whatever has to do with the social transmission
of Law necessarily has to do with the notion of interdiction, or, in
other words, with transgression. From the perspective of the insti-
tutional order, societies cannot be distinguished from one another
as being either repressive or permissive; the most one can do is
to refer to the possibility of the modification of their founding
mythologies. This would require nothing less than the propagation
of a new faith in the face of traditional beliefs. What does it mean
to change faith? Essentially, it means taking apart the precedent
machinery of interdiction and replacing it with a new one so as to
overturn the extant conception of transgression.
The mechanism of such a subversion has not been depicted in
the context of scholastic transgression, except by means of a history
of mentalities, which, if it were less sparing with concepts, might
become an important discipline. This is, doubtless, a direct con-
sequence of the resistance to theory amongst legal historians in
France and elsewhere, and in particular of their boundless fear of
psychoanalysis. Nevertheless, it is precisely in legal sources that
one finds evidence of the fantasmatic structure of enjoyment which
was so vigorously propounded by Lacan and which is quite indis-
pensable to a study of the incest taboo. Levi-Strauss has given new
impetus to the work of lawyers by bringing out the link between
myth and the structure of kinship which is implicit in the transmis-
sion of interdiction or taboo. In so doing, Levi-Strauss identifies the
level at which studies of transgression should be located, namely at
the level of the relation between enjoyment and Law. In terms of
legal history, this line of questioning raises issues of civil law and of
the law of confession, both of which are concerned with the incest
taboo. The term enjoyment, if one gives it the meaning which psycho-
analysis borrowed from Law, simply refers to the inscription of the
human body into the mythological order of an unconscious fantasm,
an inscription which determines the imaginary stake wagered by
each subject in its relation to incest and to Law. To enjoy means to
follow one's unconscious fantasm to the letter, this being the fantasm
which organises what Freud called the libido (a scholastic term if
ever there was one) or the subjective economy of desire, which is
primarily determined by the desire of the mother. In human soci-
eties the textual apparatus of myth, by means of which the logic of
kinship operates, works in a manner analogous to the fantasm, so as
to regulate enjoyment. But in the case of the social, such management
of pleasure occurs in relation to the regulation of the libido at the

level of the governance of groups in such a way that the reproduc-
tive funtion can be sustained in accordance with instituted beliefs.
In other words, a myth is a ready-to-wear fantasm, it works by means
of the transmission of instituted speech in the space of public law.
The significance of these observations is that they help to elu-
cidate the reasons for modern science's distaste for myth, or the
unconscious, and its misunderstanding of the value of anthropo-
logical and historical thought in elaborating the foundations of the
industrial system. Here we find ourselves in a position in which,
because the distinction drawn by Gratian between theological and
religious registers has influenced moral discourse, which is squeezed
between both registers, we are unable to perceive either the logic of
the link between systems of regulating pleasure or the way in which
the institution of marriage is organised around the desire of the
mother. In this respect, it might be said that the work of Bachofen
has little influence, and, this being the case, history and anthropo-
logy have had great difficulty in either analysing or understanding
the Erotics of industrial culture. The concept of Mutterrecht [Law of
the Mother] is ignored because to take it into account would mean
establishing a relation between the order of kinship and a fantasmatic
reference introduced in the policing of eroticism, that is in the auri-
cular and secret unfolding of private penance. The principle issue
is that of understanding how the problematics of incest and of Oed-
ipal myth are held together by a logic of kinship that is constituted
first in language, which designates certain legitimate places and
forbids others. This order governs all institutional systems to the
extent that they are founded upon the reproduction of desire. It is
an essential point, but legal history is still unaware of it. The study
of the institution of marriage, once it is removed from a perspective
informed by the classical trilogy of progeny (proles), faith (fides) and
sacrament (sacramentum), sustains a reductionist scientism, which
deals with sexuality without dealing with the dimension of uncon-
scious desire, and which deals with enjoyment as if it were simply
a question of social adaptation. In forgetting that the principal aim
of marriage is to manufacture mothers - not reproductive machines
but what, for men, are the living reiteration of their first love object
- we misunderstand the incestuous character of marriage itself, and
therefore the mythological significance of statements about eroti-
cism. When modern lawyers reiterated the Romano-canonic theme
of honestas and the notion of marital chastity, there was nothing
absurd or arbitrary about what they were doing; they were simply
putting forward a dogmatic proposition which was designed to
relieve anxieties about the founding interdiction. It is only at the
level at which law deals with marriage as a question of chastity that
it is possible to appreciate the complexity of a question such as that
of incest, which depends not only on systems of kinship which give
representational content to interdiction or taboo, but also upon a
sort of policing of eroticism which serves to give effect to the uncon-
scious fantasms that are inevitably at play in all social interaction.
The history of legal regulation of eroticism in the West is of con-
siderable importance in undoing the claims of scientism, not least
because it helps to clarify confusions about the current develop-
ment of private law, which has become so changeable as to be
almost psychotic. I have already referred to the promotion of the
surgical free market in sex changes. It brings about a conflation of
the two separate registers of the unconscious economy, those of the
real and the symbolic, and poses a key question for industrial cul-
ture: does industry have the power to reform the unconscious? Seen
from the perspective of the legal regulation of fantasmatic enjoy-
ment, the various propagandistic efforts to suggest a legislation
adequate to reform the unconscious are a guarantee of only one
thing, namely a resurgence of psychotic forms of social discourse
and, beyond this discourse, a return to related psychotic forms of
murder. The textually based history of the related statuses of guilt
and of eroticism in the economy of law can still teach us something
essential about sociality.
CONCLUSION
The dogmatic function cannot be separated from the work of

bureaucracies. The bureaucracies necessary to the management of
industrial societies are the social expressions of a transformed but
still extant and greatly understudied legalism. If we were to take
one final example, under the rubric of the masters of the Law, that
of the French national bureacracy, it is without doubt one of the
social systems closest to the matrix of administrative law which
descends in a direct line from the Romano-canonic experience and
is tied most closely to mediaeval scholasticism and the experience
of pontifical centralism. It depends upon a centralism which can
be explained both as a product of Roman law and in terms of the
Freudian narrative of the family. Let us touch upon one of the best-
known examples of this species of bureaucratic theology, the ancien
regime and its representation in terms of public law or 'policing' in
the works, for example, of Domat and Delamare, at the dawn of the
administrative state during the reign of Louis XIV. The centralism
of this state instituted the concept of an ideal governance with-
out frontiers, the logical governance of humanity at large. In this
regard, it must be understood from the perspective of a geographical
theology, one which conformed strictly with the hypothesis of a
providential government put forward by the mediaeval scholastics
in the form of the concept of imperium mundi or imperial world.
This concept prepared the way for the secular idea a general geo-
graphy (geografia generalis) whose history has been well elaborated
in the work of M. Buttner. 41 This history directly concerns that of
legalism, in the precise sense that it was the Roman and canon law-
yers who provided the Holy See with the idea of centralism in its
purest expression: Ecclesia non habet territorium [the Church does
not have a territory], an idea which in turn conforms closely to the
notion of territory defined in the Digest. 42 The significance of this
formula for an understanding of the French state is considerable.
Behind the admistration lies a belief in the omnipresence of the
State and the hope that it will guarantee everything, including
the sovereign who holds the place of the absolute signifier. The
relevant doctrine, that which celebrates and marks an omniscient
power, was well expressed in the principal theatrical formulation
for representing the Name of the Law as it lived in the administra-
tion: where the body is absent, authority is present (absens corpore,
praesens auctoritate}.43 There, in the immobile time of the structure,
41. See the remarks collected in his article 'Die Emanzipation der Geo-
graphie zu Beginn des 17. Jahrhunderts. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte
der Naturwissenschaft in ihren Beziehungen zur Theologie', 1975,59
Sudhoffs Archiv. Zeitschrift f. Wissenschaftgeschichte pp. 148-63.
42. In canon law doctrine, the concept of iurisdictio served to define at one
and the same time the universal empire of the Church and particu-
lar ecclesiastical competences intra fines. The maxim thus elaborated
helps us complete the apparently paradoxical reference in a fragment
reported in the Digest which gives the following legal definition of
territory: a limited spatial competency to exercise the ius terrendi; from
which we derive the etymology of territorium from the verb terreo [to
terrify].
43. The formula is that of the twelfth-century decretist Huguccio in his
Summa, ad Dis. 94, c 1 (Bibliotheque Nationale, ms. lat. 15396, f. 94 v,)
we can address an essential point: centralism is not a question of

territory, but of belief in the names which justify repetition. Put
otherwise, the regulation of a territory remains a question of a sym-
bolic regulation.
What the managerial sciences of the hyper-modern era and
their ephemeral knowledges lack is access to their own historical
and legal foundations. It is for this reason, and so as to study the
self-misunderstandings of modernity, that the teachings of the
mediaevals are so crucial. To the brutality, rigidity and grandi-
loquence of the moderns they offer the counterpoint of the poetry
of founding compilations and the reservoir of enigmas which the
glossators studied and theorised in their own unique way in terms
of the textual form of transmission. It is a basic fact that legal trans-
mission operates under the masks and dissimulations of politics.
The most important lesson to be drawn from this desperate legal
experience is this: the purpose of institutional systems is to repro-
duce themselves, that is their primary function.
In unravelling the Romano-canonic instance as the atemporal
mark and precipitate of the mythological formation of modernity,
the history of law faces serious difficulties. In France, in particular,
it will be opposed. It is almost as if, when it comes to the very
specific question of the history of law and of its Romano-canonic
foundations, the condemnation of what they do not understand
has become the essential task of the pedagogues. Furthermore, to
claim ignorance of Freud's discoveries, particularly in relation to the
exposition of the social workings of Law in its various different
industrial manifestations, presupposes the complacency of indolent
teachers and an increasingly pervasive charlatanism. In this way,
through a highly effective dissuasion which makes reference to the
idea of the specificity of law, the horizon or ambitions of legal
historians in France grows ever narrower.
Lawyers were always the first to be called upon in the great man-
oeuvres designed to socialise the unconscious and so to institute
the human body. On the strength of this simple observation it is
possible to advert to a singular necessity for all would-be legal his-
torians, it is that of studying seriously the one school of thought
that is of any value in relation to the history of dogmatics and of
truth, namely scholasticism. It is this logical place which underpins
modern history, it is here that the knowledge of Law in its human
manifestations is articulated and announced under the Latin refer-
ence of the term ars or art of legality.
6
Parenthesis: In Praise
of Calligraphy
In this work, The Children of the Text, the principal question is that
of the Text and of texts. We will also, however, reflect upon the
lesson of writing, on the manual art of writing well. To begin with,
we must return to the initial entry into the art.
Some of those primary school teachers who have observed the
passion of children for computers, and their fingering of keyboards,
have reflected again upon the gesture of writing. They have redis-
covered the necessary foundation of grammar (of the combina-
tion of letters), the beauty of the body of letters, the science of the
downstrokes and upstrokes, the whole memory of the construction
of words which has been squandered by behaviourist pedagogues,
who deal in the new forms of illiteracy. My remarks here are as
much as anything else both encouragement and homage to those
who teach writing.
I recommend that the reader look at Plate 6, the reproduction of
a page written by an unknown copyist at the time of the medieval
revolution in interpretation: folio 103 recto, of the Latin manuscript
3934A in the National Library in Paris. The leaf is in two columns;
the left column has been removed, no doubt so as to make way for
a new text (basic materials being scarce in the fourteenth century
when the text was composed); the right column gives the text, which
begins in the middle of a phrase: pro populo, pro libertate, pro tutela,
pro absente causa rei publicae, pro captivis (for the people, for liberty,
for guardianship, for those absent by virtue of affairs of state, for
prisoners). This text gives the reasons for which one can legitim-
ately replace someone or act in their name. The treatise, a fragment
from an educational work by Placentinus, a very well-known law
teacher in Bologna and Montpellier, then continues to summarise
the Institutes of the Emperor Justinian.
Here, then, is an intermediary, the copyist, who belonged no doubt
to one of the monastic writing rooms (a scriptorium) which tran-
scribed texts by hand, often in large numbers, in order to sell copies.
134
Parenthesis: In Praise of Calligraphy 135
Later, as is well known, the printing press did no more than mod-
ernise and mechanise the manuscript tradition, that of the text written
by hand.
To evoke the manuscript as a work of art is to engage in a reflec-
tion upon calligraphy, or, literally, the art of writing beauty. A great
deal has been written, in predominantly technical terms, on the aes-
thetics of this art. 1 Obviously one hesitates, used as we are to treat-
ing the text as a document containing information, before talking
of the hand which draws. We forget the intermediary, the human
instrument or living tool.
I shall call upon my memories of my own palaeographic training.
The deciphering of abbreviations and letter-by-Ietter transcriptions,
the rediscovery of deleted, cut or separated words, all taught me to
forget the meaning, to take my place in the mediaeval scriptorium,
to recognise myself, minimally trained, amongst the copyists. Assidu-
ously attending to the shapes or forms, I found myself oblivious
to what I was writing. Similarly, in making copies of collections of
distinctions intended for twelfth-century students, I discovered a
musicality from which I was later able to deduce the form of inton-
ing or psalmody. The form bears witness to the religious character
of early legal scholasticism, and of its inability to understand the
texts, or the Significance, of that which was to be taught. 2 Somewhat
later, and by virtue of other avenues of experience, I was struck by
the love of the forms of the written. Because writing calls upon the
tradition of the artisan, of the artifex, it represents for the subject the
commitment of entry into the great affair of symbolic differentia-
tion, entry into the ties and alterities of images. Borrowing again
from the Hegelian description of the work of art, I shall say, in
relation to calligraphy, that it is a species of reproduction of oneself,
something that belongs to the sublime order of subjectivity. This is
what lends the great cultures of the letter and of the love of the
letter - from the teaching of the Torah to Japanese calligraphy -
their dimension of humanity and equally allows them to resist the
scientistic outbursts of our times.
1. See, for example, the collective work: Mise en page et mise elt texte du
livre malluscrit, Paris, Cercle de Librarie - Promidis; see particularly,
C. Sirat, 'Le plus beau manuscrit hebreu ecrit en France', at pp. 101-4.
2. An incomprehension which is thoroughly understandable given the
fact that the Corpus [uris, which then circulated in the West, described
institutions that had long vanished from feudal Europe. It was a ques-
tion of teaching a system of irreal rules.
The practice of calligraphy teaches us a very important lesson in

relation to the institution of the subject. In calling upon the body in
a formalised manner, the exercise of writing introduces the human
being, if I can put it this way, to the circuit of the Third, to the meta-
phorisation of the enigma and to the point at which it can break
through the narcissistic fantasm: to refer to Hegel again, it is neces-
sary for a man to recognise himself in the shape of things; a topic
that teachers today could well reflect upon. 3
3. Functionalist ideology conceives of teaching in a dualistic manner, as

the transfer of knowledges, according to the received formula, as a rela-
tion between teacher and taught. Where does this model take account
of the dimension of the Third, of the symbolic function? On art and
the need for art, see Hegel, L'Esthetique, 1979, trans. S. Jankelevitch, Paris:
Flammarion, and particularly the remark at pp. 60-1: 'this species of
reproduction of oneself which constitutes the work of art.'
1. The Favourite Comic Dance, print from the library of the Paris Opera,
filed under the rubric "Circus".
2. Michel Denard in Giselle, performed at the Paris Opera, 1972.
3. Feminine divinity in the pose of a dancer. Bronze statue
from Tibet. Guimet museum.
4. (left) The Arms of
Borromeo Arese (or fig-
ure of the borromean
knot) from V. Spreti,
Encyclopedia Storico-
Nobiliare Italiana, II, 1929,
Milan, p 144.
5. (below) Love Letters by

Stanley Spencer, 1950.
6. Twelfth-century fragment from Placentinus. Summa institutionum.
7. Miniature taken from a collection titled Clementines, with marginal
commentary by Jean d'Andree, 1476, Venice, folio 1.
8. The King of Kings governs the 9. God works through words and
King (Rex Regum Reges signs (Verba et Signis Efficax
Regit), emblem extracted from Deus). Emblem extracted
J. Bornitius, Emblematum from J. Bornitius,
Ethico-Politicorum, 1664, Emblematum Ethico-
Heidelberg, no 13. Politico rum, 1664. Heidelberg,
no 1.
10. The Spyglass (La Lunette d'approche) by Rene Magritte.
11. Zurburan, The Holy Face, 1658.
7
Hermes and Institutional
Structures: An Essay on
Dogmatic Communication
(1) REMARKS ON VOCABULARY: DOGMATICS,
COMMUNICATION AND THE MODERN HERMES
The term 'dogmatic', having been deemed incompatible with mod-

ernity, has been banished; nevertheless, it is still used occasionally
to describe either the religious vestiges of European textuality or
certain totalitarian structures of discourse. Although it does not
recognise the fecundity enjoyed by this term in the period preced-
ing the twentieth century, and specifically its role in the emergence
of a differentiated concept of law for each of a number of inter-
twined discourses (natural science, medicine, law, theology), the con-
temporary attitude does implicitly recognise that dogma harbours
an obscure and compact phenomenon, which has to do with the
power of speech and with the question of Reason or un-Reason in
human communication.
We shall begin by delineating what each of the three terms
referred to - dogmatic, communication, Hermes - is concerned with,
drawing throughout on formulations contained in the heritage of
the West.
The Greek word 'dogma' refers to that which appears, which
seems, which shows itself, even if in misleading forms. The word
draws us towards two facets of its meaning, both of which are
simultaneously mobilised in the social organisation of discourse: on
one side there are founding axioms, principles or decisions; on the
other there is honour, embellishment, decoration. On the basis of
this distinction, it can be seen that what is declared or taught by
the expression 'dogma' refers to a discourse of truth which is legal
and honoured, a discourse which is said because it must be said.
Hence the term 'dogmatic' refers to a quite specific discourse, impli-
cit in which is the locus of origin of a message, a site to which its
137
addressees refer, the social representation or staging of the place

of legal truth. A typical dogmatic proposition is the emblem, some
excellent examples of which are illustrated in the classic ornate for-
mulae of Bornitius in his treatise Emblematum Ethico-Politicorum (1664)
(see Plates 8 and 9).1
Second, the term communication, which contains the Latin root
communis - having munia, or gifts, in common. 2 Although commun-
ication means the exchange of gifts, the dogmatic perspective does
not focus upon a bond of reciprocity between donors. Exchange
here refers rather to a process of stratification by means of the dif-
ferentiation of two levels, a division which Roman jurists conceived
of as the separation of two worlds, namely the human and the
divine. 3 In classical Roman terms, wherever the question of estab-
lishing rules for the reproduction of human beings is at issue, as for
example in the case of marriage, divine and human law commun-
icate. The dogmatic style of explaining the working of communica-
tion might be translated into the language of modern anthropology:
the domain of dogmatics constitutes an order of fiction which
organises the transmission of words and texts organised between
two structurally differentiated levels. The basic aim of this ordering
is to set the law of the human species in operation. In other words,
each society has to innoculate each of its individuals, and society
itself (as the vehicle which embraces these individuals, bringing
them to birth, causing them to live and ushering them towards
death) with the law of what Aristotle coined as the speaking being.
As the users of modern rationality, we can only begin to under-
stand dogmatic communication by introducing an essential com-
1. J. Bornitius, Emblematum Ethico-Politicorum, 1664, Heidelberg. [Two

devices are particular interest to Legendre. The first depicts a crowned
and winged heart hanging by a string above the earth, the string being
held by a hand that emerges from the clouds. The accompanying motto
is rex regum reges reg it (the king of kings governs the king). The refer-
ence of the piece is to a biblical proverb: the heart of the king is in the
hand of God, he lets it dangle where he will. The second emblem
shows a celestial mask suspended above a city state. The motto reads
verba et signis efficax Deus (God works through words and signs).]
2. See the study in E. Benveniste, Le Vocabulaire des institutions indo-
europeennes, 1969, Paris: Minuit, vol. I, at p. 96.
3. A formulation of the antique Roman jurist Modestinus, which was
recorded in the Digest, which became one of the bedrocks of the Euro-
pean legal tradition [juris prudentia est divinarum atque humanarum rerum
lIotitia].
Hermes and Institutional Structures 139
ponent of dogmatic discourse, namely its own peculiar concept of

foundations, and specifically the question why? If speaking being is
defined by this why, and if the representation of this why - or, more
simply, the (known or unknown) Reason of what is said - is insep-
arable from the phenomenon of speech, each society must institute
a representation of this why? which has the logical status of a legal
representation. The aim is to enunciate, at the level of society as a
whole, a founding discourse imbued with the full force of law.
Finally, the figure of Hermes - he who, according to Socrates,
imagined the utterance - the discoursing god whose activities are
described by Plato, his self-appointed theoretician,4 and who is pre-
sented to us by Greek Antiquity as a notification of the fact that the
discourse of foundations belongs to the order of myth: Its destiny
is to construct the social discourse of Reason as a system of rep-
resentation. Understood in this way, the mythological component
of dogmatic communication requires us to examine how the func-
tional equivalents of the classical figure of Hermes are constructed
in highly industrialised societies.
(2) DOGMATIC ECONOMY AS AN

ANTHROPOLOGICAL PHENOMENON
Before embarking upon a detailed analysis of exchange within the

dogmatic economy of messages, one should first identify the inter-
ests which are in play. In mediaeval terms, which were largely
inspired by the legalism of antiquity, it might be said that there is
a communication of utilities (communicatio utilitatum); or, in other
words, interests. What, from an anthropological perspective, are
these interests?
The most straightforward answer, and one which is entirely com-
patible with the dialectic between individual and society to which
Western thought is so attached, is that society represents the long-
term survival of the species within which the individual wagers his
subjectification. The question we must address is captured in a
maxim of Roman law: it is the function of law to institute life (vitam
instituere).
4. See Plato, Cratylus, in Collected Dialogues, 1961 edn, Princeton: Princeton

University Press, 408.
The object, then, is to focus attention upon the foundational point

from which the dogmatic order of a given culture is deployed as
something which is humanly plaUSible, maintaining its specific
capacity for repetition and diffusing it to the most diverse parts of
a society. The foundation in question is the institution of genealogy,
and its importance can be demonstrated by taking up a question
which is central to anthropology and which is quite closely related
to dogmatic structures, namely the constitution of Interdiction as a
social and subjective category.
The role of psychoanalysis - so long as it respects the institu-
tional imprinting of the subject to which Freud devoted so much
attention - is to develop a more complex problematisation of Inter-
diction than is currently recognised. Taking account of the uncon-
scious dimension or 'other scene' allows us to rethink our idea of
the way in which the subject is committed to schemata of clas-
sification, and, on that basis, to transform our conception of the
dialectic between individual and society, and so also our concept of
communication. We have to set aside the economy of prescriptive/
interdictory contents which is brought to light by identifying the
sociological foundations of law (as does Levi-Strauss in his study of
the incest taboo) and conceive of Interdiction as an empty category.
As the Latin etymology suggests, Interdiction (an utterance between,
or among) is an intermediary utterance or interposed speech, which
I would define as an utterance which stages speech, which stands
between the subject and primary undifferentiation, or between the
subject and the opacity of origins. The subject is summoned to its
birth in speech, or in discourse and in the truth of discourse. Seen
from this perspective, the express normative components of law are
inscribed in the category of Interdiciton only in a secondary logical
phase, at which point law becomes prescription or interdiction.
So, in anthropological terms, the subject's concern is that, by
acceding to the bond of speech, ushered into life by Interdiction, he
should conquer his own existence. Within the speaking species,
subjectification is not a biological given; it is in essence an effect of
the representations - the montages - of the institution of genealogy
and the discursive orders which are woven into them.
(A) The dogmatic component of man. The structural need for each
subject to develop a bond with the taboo
At this juncture, I shall consider only the implications of the fact

that human beings, who are subjected to a long period of maturation,
take a distinctive path in their entry into life. For human beings, as
members of the speaking species, this entry involves a second birth,
out of which a subject of speech emerges, and duly takes up its
genealogically constituted position in an order of kinship. This sec-
ond birth is a birth into an institution of speech, and it founds the
regulation of life in all societies. From this perspective, what is in
issue is the problem faced by each and every subject in elaborating
a relationship with the founding Interdiction.
Each human being has to live through a process of differentiation
and to take on human form in accordance with the law of the spe-
cies. This requires a principle which, to adopt a psychoanalytical
insight, might be conceived of as a law of division. There are three
essential points here:
(a) Division implies that each subject should pass through the experi-
ence of a symbolic void; or, in other words, that he should enter
into the dialectic of presence and absence - or the Freudian schema
of the fortlda - on the assumption that the object's disappearance
implies neither the ultimate disappearance nor the mortal mutila-
tion of the subject. The experience undergone by the infans is pri-
mordial in two senses: first, by breaking the fusional bond between
mother and child it founds a problematic of incest which is quin-
tessentially human, and which is therefore lived by all subjects;
secondly, it founds the entire symbolic structure of the subject by
replacing the physical presence of things with presence through
representation. In other words, the law of division, which imposes
- and dialecticises - a polarity of presence and absence, divides the
subject itself. The essential point is that the subject's relation to
Interdiction involves a play of representation.
(b) Division also implies that the subject should be introduced to

causation. Seen from this perspective, the subject's relation to Inter-
diction is also a relation to causation. In the Oedipal structuring of
each subject - whether man or woman - this manifests itself as a
relation to the principle of Reason. Psychoanalysis reveals the full
implications of the problematic of origins, which is deeply rooted in
the workings of the unconscious, and through which each human
subject squares up to the fundamental and enigmatic symbolic cat-
egories of father and mother. The order of Reason is entered by
dialecticising these categories, locating their cause in terms of a
given symbolic representation, namely, an image of origin.
The anthropological roots of thought are contained in this man-

oeuvre - as, by implication, are the foundations upon which the
communication of basic categories of human thought rest - because
this symbolic representation of origins pervades the whole scheme
of a subject's discourse. These problems can be defined only if one
appreciates that the representation of categories (which are pro-
duced by the division of terms) cannot be dissociated from the
basic representation which founds the idea of division. In other
words, the dialecticisation of terms - or, more generally, the dia-
lecticisation of words and things, the symbolic communication with
the world - refers to a legitimating principle which guarantees divi-
sion. In psychoanalytical terms, the question of causation opens into
the question of the representation of the Father - the guarantor of
the division within which the subject constitutes itself.
(c) Finally, division implies that the subject should recognise itself
as the addressee of discourses, whether it addresses itself or is
addressed by others. If the differentiation of the speaking subject is
effected in relation to speech, it seems that the question of addressees
is a fundamental one for any investigation into the economy of
dogma because it problematises speech as the representation of an
other. The question who's who? which is implicit in any message, is
a testing of identities, and the stumbling block is the relation of the
subject to Interdiction.
(B) The role of the institution of genealogy: constructing a dogma

of limitation
From the perspective of the reproduction of the species, subjectifica-

tion can be defined as the testing of identity. Biological individuality
is not an automatic guarantee of subjective existence. Institutional
structures anticipate the subjective construction of individuals by
attributing to them ab initio the status, in terms borrowed from
Roman law, of a person (persona). In other words, the institution of
genealogy establishes the line of destiny in which, from life to death,
the existence of each subject is played out. It establishes the frame-
work of the law of persons by means of which different systems of
kinship precipitate the various versions of family organisation. The
dogmatic fabrication of man begins at that point, with the tracing
of a line of kinship and law's marking of the newborn being as the
issue of two speaking subjects.
Beginning at the most modest level, with the appearance of each

person in the world, each assigned to a place in the field of speech
by means of a legally defined genealogical marker, the anthropo-
logical idea of Interdiction becomes much clearer. Its functions and
articulations can be summarised in a simple formula: the purpose
of Interdiction is to notify the subject of the limit or, in other words,
of sex and death.
(a) To suggest that Interdiction should be conceived as interposed

speech which locates the subject in language even before he has
spoken, is to suggest that the institution of genealogy should itself
be taken as a discourse which inaugurates the subject's speech.
Within this relation to an inaugural moment, the subject therefore
finds itself spoken in advance. The genealogical order - which might
be expressed metaphorically as being the swaddling clothes and
the shroud of the subject - is founded in what the ancients called
the Fates [Fata], or the word of Destiny. This idea, which Roman
jurists referred to without hesitation, might be described in modern
language as the speech which manufactures persons. It should be
emphasised that the institutional framework of human lives is a
normatively constituted framework of words, which lays down the
law for the subject. If we ignore the Fates as a logical element in the
construction of the bond of speech in all societies, we exclude from
our investigations the foundations of the modern organisation of
discourse.
(b) The function of the genealogical order within an individualistic

culture is to represent or mark the limit. This means two things:
first, that the schema of division be used to distinguish the institu-
tional positions which make up the genealogical order of kinship
within which each subject takes its place as ancestor or descend-
ant; and, secondly, the fixing of those legal rules which are essential
to symbolic permutation within the order of kinship (such that a
son might become a father, a grandfather, and so on, and so that a
daughter might become a mother and a grandmother). The prob-
lematic of the limit has to do with the issues of incest and murder.
From a general anthropological perspective, whichever historical or
geographical variant is in question, any genealogical system can be
reduced to a dogmatic construction of a limit, or a discourse of
dogma which seeks to effect the subjective differentiation of the
individual as it comes to identify its destiny within that of its kind.
(3) HERMES AND MODERNITY. THE SOCIAL

CONSTRUCTION OF THE LINGUISTIC THIRD
The dogmatic order, upon which the organisation of Interdiction in

all societies is based, consists in the following manoeuvre: insti-
tuting the Third of language and causing it to produce its norm-
ative effects. For reasons which have to do with the Western style
of social analysis, theories of communication misunderstand this
essential point.
The resistance, if not the refusal, of the social, human and mana-
gerial sciences to recognise their dogmatic function in the life of
ultra-modern society undermines the study of the technological
transformation of communication. Because they multiply the number
of possible approaches to the phenomenon of social discourse, these
transformations have implications for the viability of a general
perspective on communication; nevertheless, they do not challenge
the logic of the bond of speech as a logic of Interdiction. Because
they misunderstand their normative dimension and their place in
the structure of contemporary dogmaticS, modern forms enter into
an unwitting rivalry with the traditional religious and secular rep-
resentations of what I have termed the why? - representations which,
in anthropological terms, are essential to the functioning of speech
in the West. The universal need for a representation of the founda-
tions of speech and of the categories of discourse - a representation
which I term a Hermes for modern times - cannot be avoided.
The theory and practice of what is called Communication have
come to be inscribed in a certain place, the structural place of Refer-
ence - the divine locus of the antique Hermes - as the dominant
discourse of the two differentiated levels of the why? and of the
normative effectivity of foundations. Communication should be
posited as the equivalent of a planetary discourse. It supersedes the
various religious and mythological forms which were invented to
enunciate the bases of the power of speech, and, at the same time,
ritualises the principle of government in the empire of signs. Pro-
gressively, and, it seems, peacefully, the discourse of commun-
ication has substituted itself for the experience which mankind
has so far acquired of government through speech. The problem of
understanding such a mechanism, which has not been identified
by modern scientific anthropology, will arise more and more insist-
ently given the confrontations induced by the expansion of man-
agement as it comes up against the great religions of the non-Western
world, the latter being competing representations of the foundational
role of Hermes as it has been understood and deployed within the

Western European tradition.
Here we touch directly upon what, ever since the Greeks, we
have termed Politics, in its most elementary, and essentially anthro-
pological meaning, which is inseparable from the imperative to
institute life through Interdiction. It is appropriate here to recall
Aristotle's comparison of men to bees: only men, who alone among
animals possess speech, have Politics. s In the context of the prob-
lematic of Hermes, and in view of what is suggested above, there
emerges a structure (a term which, as I understand it, refers to
institutionally manufactured montages which have an anthropo-
logical function): politicS occupies a structurally defined space of
representation, from which the Third of language is elaborated at
the level of the social. On this basis, the social function can also be
understood as inseparable from a logic of places.
(A) The montage in which the Third of language is situated: the

logic of Reference
Politics appears here as the construction of the dimension of the

inaugural or originary, which must be reckoned with by any cul-
tural discourse of structuration. What is involved, to adopt an
antique metaphor, is a process of machination or of instituting and
thereby founding speech.6 But what is it to found speech? Here,
we rejoin the theme of the Greek Hermes, the god who imagined
both language and speech; Hermes, whose very name, according to
Socrates, refers to speech and to the power of the practice of the
interpreter (hermeneus) in its various forms: messenger, nimble thief,
betrayer through words or clever merchant. In more modern terms,
we might say that Politics implies the construction of a discourse
on the origins of power as a power to speak, so that by enunciating
this discourse Politics posits itself as a form of speaking. Hence,
from the perspective of logic, the altogether secondary status of the
successive contents of discourses on the forms of utterance. What is
in fact essential is that this discourse should be spoken from the place
from which it is spoken, this place being the place of a representation.
5. The celebrated passage can be found in Aristotle, Politics, 1, 11.

6. The idea of machining (Cratylus, 48 a), and thence of machine, has been
of great service to the West, most notably in providing an account of
ritual practices. See B. Fisher, 'Tam quam machina quaedam ... Ein Wort
Augustins zum Ethos der Liturgiewissenschaft', in Miscellenn C. Lercnro,
1967, Paris-Rome, 2, 85-93.
Given this observation, it can be seen that the nature of such a

space is essentially symbolic, that is, linguistic; just as a word stands
for an absent thing, which becomes present in representation, so
the inaugural element of the discourse of Politics has the status of
invoking an absent thing, namely the absolute Object of power.
The basic principle of this notion, and the various institutional
elaborations of it, which I regard as the lynchpin of historical sys-
tems of representation, can be addressed only if one has grasped
the function of representation and its multifarious modes of human
expression. Representation signifies giving substance to the image
of an object. The object is absent, the subject is separated from it, and
this object becomes present by means of a representation, as an
image.
Once again, we must return to the conditions in which the sym-
bolic universe of a subject is constituted, these conditions being
linked to the reproduction of speaking being. Humanity symbolises
much as it breathes, and it is by means of symbols that it commun-
icates; but in order to reach this point it has to emerge from opacity,
it has to dialecticise the fort/da, to enter into an order of causation
by fashioning a bond with the founding principle of its categories,
which is the supreme object of representation: the causal Object.
Psychoanalysis has revealed the unconscious bases of the Oedipal
question, we know now that this bond with the causal Object is
organised through the mediation of the parental images which attend
the scene of origins (or, more technically, the primal scene) and
whose horizon is the representation of this causal Object. Hence,
the function of representation should be understood as that of fab-
ricating a symbolic universe of mediating objects, a universe for
which the institution of the family serves as a juridically instituted
relay, and in relation to which the human being develops its iden-
tity on the basis of Reason, that is to say on the basis of a separation
from the absolute Object, the causal object which founds the bond
of speech.
Such is the anthropological heritage which enjoins a society to
live as a society of speaking beings. Its function is to introduce the
imperative of representing the causal Object, the absolute Object
from which each subject must hold itself irremediably separate in
order to live and to reproduce within speech. In other words, the
social construction of this representation serves not only to estab-
lish the principle of Reason, and thereby to legislate on causation,
but also to instal language as an institution positing a discourse of
images, based upon the founding metaphor of all discourses. The

differentiation of messages and of the corpus of language itself are
dependent upon an essential social wager: that of producing the
founding metaphor which gives the absolute Object its status as the
Third of language, or, of organising Reference.
It is worth noticing that any attempt to formulate the causal Object
and its institutionalisation as Third, at the level of the social, can
only be mythical; this observation should lead modern theories of
messages (were they to venture into this area) to revise the notion
of mythology as it is distinguished from what we call reality.
Although, as a matter of convenience, I have used the metaphor of
the Greek Hermes, I could just as well have used other metaphors of
structural order, such as the totemic animal of certain non-Western
societies or, in Christian Europe, the theological enunciation of the
doctrine of the incarnate Word. Today, in the industrial context of
Politics, when it becomes necessary to understand the problem of
pure logic which the Latin (and, ultimately, European) tradition
enclos~d in the word religion, and to appreciate the universality of
the question of Reference, it is necessary as a preliminary exercise
to locate the key elements of the structure of the Third. It is neces-
sary to note the following:
(a) The constitution of a space of discourse specific to the founding

reference: the representation of the Messenger.
The space of Reference is that of the symbolisation of a void, by
means of which any given society can extract itself from opacity
and elaborate an intermediary speech addressed to all the subjects of
discourse. What we recognise in this, in its primary meaning, is
Interdiction in the sense elaborated above. It should be recalled that
Reference gives presence to a representation of an originary why?
mediated through the causal Object, and translated into the institu-
tion through the figure of the Messenger, and through a discourse
of pure representation. In other words, the Image of a causal or
absolute Object, of an Object which, within the perspective of the
general problematic of representation, assumes the status of a prin-
ciple of alterity: the causal Object is also the absolute Other. In
short, if the phenomenon of representation is at this point so crucial
to the constitution of Politics, this implies that the message of such
a messenger, of the Messenger, is itself an image, and evokes a
response which the Romans called cultus, or cult.
According to the analysis which I have suggested, the cult of

Reference in all its forms, including the political context of the
negation of all cults, signifies the emblematisation of the Messen-
ger, or the inseparability of messenger and message. As a result it
inaugurates a phenomenon of attachment: the absolute Emblem
calls for a response from living emblems, or in other words, it calls
forth a succession of images. One essential point should be noted:
the representation of the messenger carries with it the risk that the
differentiation of messages could be compromised and that they
might be reproduced as stereotypes. Modern political and commer-
cial organisations unwittingly but systematically make large-scale
use of techniques of ritual. The pseudo-theoretical formula that 'the
medium is the message' connotes both an ignorance of structure
and an anthropological misappropriation of the subject; it evacu-
ates the ternary logic of discourse and gives communication a
dualistic status. This doctrine of duality indeed threatens to intro-
duce a species of behaviourism, and with it the inevitable effects
of mass desubjectification which behaviourism implies.
(b) The logic of Reference, being a logic of the linguistic Third, is

constitutive of a system of legality. Here we touch upon the genea-
logical principle as a cultural principle, that is to say we touch upon
the great social manoeuvres of the discourse of causation with
respect to the law of human reproduction based on the unfolding
of the principle of Reason. If Reference is understood, accordingly,
in relation to the structure of speaking being, this means that the
foundational representation and its discursive elaborations are made
up of a relay of words through which our Oedipal stakes are played
out, or projected upon the social stage as if on a screen. In other
words, the political location of the discourse of Reference necessar-
ily implies an oedipal positioning with regard to the image of the
Father, or, in other words, with regard to the representation of the
principle of differentiation. This is more easily understood if one
recalls the religious tradition of institutional montage: the Torah,
and the Christian Testaments in the West, the Koran or totemic
bodies elsewhere. In other words, where Westerners recognise the
fact of institutions in their religiOUS forms, the idea of structures
bearing the image of the Father and its Oedipal associations seem
readily understandable. But what of ultra-modern societies cast in
the European mould, which pretend to secularisation under the
auspices of a state which manufactures legal norms?
It would be pointless simply to suggest again that the State, in all

its various national forms, is a Totem, or that within the normative
tradition of Western Europe it might be considered as a form of
Western monotheism. In order to facilitate such an apprehension of
structure and history, one should first reconsider the foundations
of the historiography of Western institutions, and especially the great
rupture of the twelfth century, which I describe as the Revolution of
the Interpreter. At that moment, the distinction between theology
and law was drawn, the rationalism of Roman law was assimilated
into culture, and the idea that discourse might be organised by
means of an abstract hermeneutic function, that is to say a Hermes
without mythology or religion emerged. The mediaeval scholastics
called this principle Status, which comes from the Latin stare, to
stand upright, and which might here be translated as a particu-
lar way of making Reference stand upright, although in French it
becomes Etat. Once this manoeuvre had been accomplished, the
discourse of Reference spread throughout Western society, dis-
membering and transforming the religious function, and initiating
a set of transformations of the discourse of origin through the pro-
motion of Science. Nowadays, the logic of Reference, or the Third,
presents itself as the logic of a Law identified with the discourse of
Science. Although it forms an institutional problematic which is
unrecognised by the contemporary social sciences, the montage of
Interdiction as a structure peculiar to speaking being remains ines-
capable, a fact which does not bode well for the possibility that we
might conceive of communication within contemporary humanity
in non-arbitrary terms.
(B) The secondary logical space which the West calls law
The approach which the social, human and managerial sciences

take to the phenomenon of law follows the direction taken by the
history of European dogmatic structures since the mediaeval revolu-
tion. Having progressively adopted the role of secularised theo-
logies, that is, having assumed the place of those hermeneutical
discourses which represent the why? the scientific ideologies of the
twentieth century, which are inscribed in the patristic lineages ini-
tiated by Marx and Weber, have de facto denied the structure of the
two levels of dogmatic communication: the level of the founding
Reference and the more technical normative level of legal constructs
and their effects. The symbolic character of social structure, which
is in essence fictional, and which for that very reason is largely

incompatible with the calculative measurement of social objects,
has become unrecognisable. The dimension of the Third, which has
been confused with the stock of religious and other obsolete rep-
resentations, is not objectifiable in accordance with the criteria of
differentiation promulgated in order to institute the bond of speech.
We are now in the era of binary communication and quantifiable
dual relationships. With respect to the register of subjectification,
this implies the birth of the subject-as-King, or, in other words, the
unlimited subject. This is supposed to be the new order of commun-
ication; communication unmediated by the institution of the lin-
guistic Third. But this is only a matter of appearances; the discourse
of Science as it applies to the social cannot but develop normative
social effects of its own, especially those which unfold through the
governmental and adminstrative, or private and public, networks
which give substance to ultramodern Politics. Within the dogmatic
economy which manifests the logic of a society, Science as it is
applied to the social cannot avoid setting itself up as an industrial-
ised discourse of Interdiction and, in so doing, establishing itself as
the basis of an occult legalism. Given this confusion of registers,
law can no longer readily be identified as a distinctive logical space,
a space which is secondary in the sense that it is closely dependent
upon the anthropological structure of Reference, within which these
effects of structure are played out as effects of representation. We
might escape this confusion of ideas more easily if lawyers were
to recognise their status as dogmaticians. This would mean break-
ing with the chimera of a scientific law practising a species of social
experimentation (which is how legal sociology often represents
things), and would be facilitated further if the sciences of man in
society for their part conceded to structural logic and began with
the idea of society as a figure of kind.
As far as law is concerned, what is this structural logic? It might
be summarised in terms of an imperative function: that of ensuring
the conservation of speaking being, by way of the circuit of mes-
sages in which law occupies a median and mediating role, that of
translating, maintaining and elaborating Politics (in the sense given
above: representing the order of Reference, the Interdiction through
which the species lives and endures) through a work of interpretation.
The place taken by law is therefore that of the hermeneut or
interpreter, and the co-ordinates of this place can be set out by
considering those human interests which justify legal normativity:
(a) In that it translates structure into norms, law is a knowledge of

fiction. Since the mediaeval revolution, the Western style of reason-
ing has obscured the extent to which the technical activity of law-
yers is woven into the discourse of foundations, and thus into
the construction of Reference. This intrication is nevertheless quite
apparent in a number of privileged domains: in public law, for
example, when it addresses the internal scaffolding of the State, in
private law to the extent that it deals with genealogical justice, and
in lawyers' discourses on the foundations of law.
Law sets the cultural Fates (Fata) in motion. In other words, if
one considers the discourses of social classification through which
each subject is spoken in advance, law is primary. This means that
the subversion of logical structure by means of particular legis-
lative or judicial interpretations is also a subversion of the sub-
ject's founding representations, the consequence being the effect of
de-subjectification which contemporarily poses such questions.
(b) Law is a knowledge of exchange, and thus a knowledge of speech.

Legal categories translate the basic principle of exchange; their
primary function being to establish the conditions of the principal
exchange: the differentiation of places across successive generations.
What is at issue is the basic ordering of human life; the inaugura-
tion and reiteration of each subject's desire through the recognition
of genealogical places. One should not forget the other dimension
of exchange, in which infinite commercial variations are played out.
This is is still the realm of Hermes, who, according to Socrates, was
a skilled merchant. Commercial exchange, the circulation of credit
and debt (the realm of legal obligations), is an aspect of genea-
logical exchange, there being no institutional system in which
commerce between creditor and debtor does not also contain a rep-
resentation which reiterates a set of foundational images: in other
words, ultra-modern economics also has a place in the realm of
dogmatics.
(4) SOCIETY AS TEXT. OBSERVATIONS ON THE

HISTORICAL EXPERIENCES OF THE WEST
To develop the preceding analysis, we need to historicise our observa-

tions through the study of a particular, and politically familiar,
structural example of genealogical structure, that of the West. The
complexity of dogmatics can be apprehended more concretely by

means of a simple formulation of the anthropological roots of the
subject: before we are children of our parents we are children of a
Text. This formula has the advantage of linking the Western experi-
ence to the concept of a universal structure, and specifically to the
notion of Text, which can be taken as a definition of culture. At the
same time, it identifies the relationship of belonging to a culture as
essentially a relationship of kinship; that is to say, it defines cultural
status in terms of the place of a son, where the term son embraces
both sexes pursuant to the traditional European legal formula which
referred to sons of one sex and the other.
The reason for the initial capital letter of Text is not simply to tie
industrialised modern Europe back to what, historically, have been
its religious constitutions, based upon the great religions of the
Book: the Judaic Bible, the Gospels and the Koran. It is rather to
advance once again the idea that the dogmatic organisation of soci-
ety implies a system for the transmission of a founding discourse
- its love of Reference and its structure of interpreters - a system
through which society maintains itself through its manipulation of
a logic of symbolic transmission. What is in issue is a logic which
unfolds the symbolic void which supports the representation of the
Interdiction which is so essential to the subjectification of genea-
logically located individuals. From this perspective, even so-called
oral cultures construct a text, even if they do so by means of a quite
different institutional technique. In this case transmission is not
(as it is sometimes thought> purely oral; it is effected through the
materialisation of ritual objects which are the equivalent of words
and which therefore can be located within a scheme of writing.
Finally, a society, like a subject who has written or who is writing
a text, presents itself as a fictional subject. The subject is a construc-
tion, a fabrication devised by the artifice of institutions. It finds
itself there, representing its own bond to the causal Object, enunci-
ating a discourse, producing meaning, and even, as I have often
emphasised by referring to the social functions of art, dreaming.
Institutions, which I refer to as monumental Subjects, are structures
of writing and are essential to the invention of the fictional subject.
The issue is that of the symbolic bonding of the social, the anchor-
ing of all discourses in the founding discourse of the monumental
Subject, or, in other words, the construction of the identity of soci-
ety as an entity which is distinct from the individuals of which it is
made up, and distinct also from other societies which are culturally
constructed in the same way and which wager their own stakes on
a comparable identity. Without such constructions, society would
be a fluctuating and, from the perspective of the individual subject,
unthinkable set of techniques of government and of kinship. This
entails a logical necessity: the linguistic Third must take the form of
a fictional subject identifiable with what I have called the Text. This
is the case whatever the mythological character of the given culture
or the form of its representation of the symbolic void.
Whatever might be suggested by the propaganda of a new era of
communication or worldwide management as supposedly ahistor-
ical phenomena, the industrial order of discourse cannot derogate
from the logic of symbolic transmission. That is to say, in effect,
that it cannot escape the logic of a Text which, sometimes enriched,
sometimes shattered, and sometimes transformed, transmits itself
as a history in which the biography of a trans-historical Subject is
played out. I shall not deal here with the theory or the history of the
fictional subject in the West, a history whose technical elements, at
least in the present millenium, must be sought in a general history
of dogmatism since the twelfth-century interpretative revolution,
that highly political and highly disruptive moment in the structural
evolution of the West. On the basis of a distinction between theo-
logy and law, or of a reworking of the political theory of images,
and a legal positioning of the distinction between words and things,
and so of the status of proofs of truth (all of which took shape when
Europe was converted to Roman law), the State emerged as a con-
cept which carried all the virtual elements, both theocratic and
laicised, of the modern organisation of Reference. I shall confine
myself to a few observations on this point.
First, we should note the following: a particular logical relation,
one which was produced by the representational repetitions pecu-
liar to the West, welds the industrial legal mechanism to the history
of Roman law as a history of institutional Reason. This relation cannot
be ignored because the ultra-modern industrial system cannot but
repeat it, that is to say transmit this particular form of legal consti-
tution as the principle of Reason. This constitution forms part of the
process of symbolic reproduction, or of the work of representation
in which, through genealogy, the West recognises itself. Taking note
of this, it is possible to extract and reflect upon certain aspects of
this history in order to understand how the complexity of commun-
icational phenomena surpasses the understanding offered by con-
temporary social and managerial sciences, which pay little attention
to the dogmatic construction of the West. The reproduction of the

structures of a Text is not reducible to the calculation of the stages
of an evolution whose presuppositions are themselves obscured by
the spurious standards of current historiography.
Beginning with the particular historical experience of the Text in
the West, the notion of Text as a social structure helps to clarify
some of the issues pertaining to the role of dogma as a structure of
culture. What are the media of its dissemination? How can one
identify the procedures which organise a founding discourse? What
place does the exemplary dogmatic category of kinship, in its tech-
nicallegal sense, occupy within the structure of the communicational
system? I shall address these questions on the basis of a consid-
eration of the core of modern European experience - the theory of
mediaeval institutions.
(A) The elementary function of the two traditional media, exegesis

and the sovereign body: to institute the power of truth
From the perspective of communication, society being understood

as a Text, the textuality of a social discourse - which has a norm-
ative purpose, namely that of communicating an imperative of
reproduction, a social hermeneutics - is reducible to the endlessly
repeated dissemination of a discourse which has the status of truth.
From the structural perspective of the montage in which the meta-
phor of Hermes is located, the principle of discourse is metaphor
itself, or, put differently, it is that of a representation which governs
the totality of any given dogmatic system. To engage, therefore,
with the Text, to recognise oneself as a subject, or to take one's
place in a culture, is to enter into this representation and to parti-
cipate in the discursive truth of the founding metaphor. To employ
a familiar formula, it is to enter into the fiction of the montage, in
the same legal manner that one would succeed to an inheritance.
For the individual subject, who inscribes his being in the Text of
the society to which he belongs as a subject living according to the
Law, the relation to the Text figures as a legal relation to a pre-
existent discourse of truth. As heirs of our culture, we succeed those
who precede us, in such a manner as to take up our place in the dis-
course of truth. This is well captured in the semantics of the Latin
term succedere: to enter under (or in), to subject oneself, to replace.
Carrying the etymological meaning a bit further, one discovers
a meaning that is usually neglected: working according to plan,
succeeding, and so on. This might be summarised in the proposition

that belonging to the Text can be defined as a submission that walks.
These observations allow the apparently abstruse formulae of
mediaeval dogma to acquire their full significance in relation to
what we shall term the great media of the Western tradition. The
naive writing of mediaeval dogmatics - which we consider to be
quite remote, even though it is entirely modern in its dealings with
normative structures - identifies the subject'S bond to the discourse
of truth as a relation to the lineage of those texts which make up
that discourse. Our inscription in culture is defined as a relationship
to the genealogical power of texts. The exegetes thus take their place
as a means of accomplishing a precise function: that of explaining
how a legal text tells the truth.
Consider the following example: A legal text declares that 'power
must not be deferred to blood, but to life'? Further on, the question
of the succession of bishops from Christ arises, and the commen-
tator explains that it is a matter of drawing forth the seed of Christ.
A message such as this, which is lost in the mass of twelfth-century
scholastic texts, can be broken down into the following elements of
a montage: (i) The author of the compilation which records this text
identifies himself as a messenger or transmitter; the commentator
only exists to give value to the text, whose political author is the
text itself. (ii) The express content of the technical legal rule (which
concerns the election of bishops) counts as legal only because it
refers, by way of an accumulation of other texts, to the founding
Name (Christ). (iii) The truth status of the Reference is defined as
founded upon a genealogical reproduction (hence the metaphor of
Christ's seed).
As with naive painting, this scholastic extract suggests that insti-
tutional artifice is without artifice, that the montage is based upon
a natural truth: the discourse of truth is the discourse of the reproduction
of truth. This is the most pertinent definition of the social Text,
which presents itself to the cultural subject as that which is said
because it must be said. We recognise in this the essence of dogmatic
discourse. From this perspective, it is a matter of representational
strategy: the mediaeval system which we are considering is akin to
7. The formula comes from Saint Jerome and is recorded in Gratian,
Decretals, e.8 Q.l e.6 [principatum ... non sanguini deferendum esse, sed
vitae]. The text is discussed in Pierre Legendre, L'!nestimable objet de la
transmission. Etude sur Ie principe genialogique en Occident, 1985, Paris:
Fayard, 180.
a theatrical or pictorial message; it proceeds from the staging of an

original why? It is because of what we see as being its archaic qual-
ity, that it represents for us a very crude illustration of the problem
of truth as a dogmatic message.
The mediaeval practices of the Text, such as that evidenced in the
example discussed, show that the discourse of truth is the result of
a relation to a power of representation which returns us to the
genealogical foundation of ritual. From the perspective of a history
of the varying forms of representation in the Western dogmatic
montage, truth takes on the consistency of a function: its function
is to translate the power of the founding reference into discourse.
This manner of approaching the mediaeval media demands a
methodology that engages in an analysis of liturgical rhetoric and
of the rituals which surround a culture's textuality. It is necessary,
in other words, to understand the idea of a genealogy of the discourse
of truth, and its implication of an order and division of hierarchic-
ally differentiated texts. In spite of the lack of interest in rituals
displayed by the theory of communication, we can still learn a great
deal about the social forms of propagation of power from medi-
aeval elaborations of the theory of a power which incarnates the truth.s
I shall recall here one of the sources of the modern notion of the
State: the representation or staging of the sovereign body as a reflec-
tion of the absolute Image, a role first played by the Roman pontiff.
It is by means of the ritualisation of a discourse of foundational
truth - the truth of a genealogical representation - that the principle
of the State is both constructed and diffused through Europe. The
historical agent of this process was the Christian papacy which the
Middle Ages inherited through the reception of imperial Roman
law, and which the laicised national powers later propagated on
their own account. From this one can easily perceive that the Latin
religion lies at the heart of the montages of dogmatic communica-
tion in the West. The history of ecclesiastical institutions shows us
directly the organisational principle that lies at the basis of what,
following the glossators, we call the State: the rituals of a fictive
space which acts at one and the same time as the place of truth and
as the place of power. Such a space can be called sovereign in that
it serves as the medium between society and its causal or absolute
8. The notion is ritualised in formulae such as 'lex animata' meaning a
Law which breathes. These formulae referred to the person of the Roman
emperor and later to the pope. See P. Legendre, Le Desir politique de
Dieu, 1988, Paris: Fayard, pp. 110, 222, 223.
Object: thus, the place of the sovereign institutes the meeting-point

of Truth and Politics. Various maxims express the absolute charac-
ter of this ritual space: the Pope has all the archives in his breast, he has
all the laws in his hands, and so on. Structurally, the Pope is in the
position of the image of the absolute Object or reflects the absolute
Image. In ritual terms, he is the living emblem of Reference and in
this sense is the sovereign Emblem. I call this ritual technique the
emblematisation of the subject, in that it is here that the subject arrives
through law at the place of Truth and of Politics. In institutional
terms, the subject comes to represent the principle of Reason in the
dogmatic system. Anthropologically, the modern State developed
out of the experience of this vast ritualisation of the Text and out
of the mythical place which stages the theatre of the Messenger
image. As the heir of this construction, the modern State can, in a
very precise sense, be termed hermeneutic because it reflects the
divine or mythological role of Hermes.
(B) Society as a subject which speaks: The fictive Author of

the Text
If there is a Text, there is an Author. The fictional character of dog-

matic constructions is not an unnatural imitation of the observable
forms of individual speech in private or group interactions; it is
rather, to borrow an antique formula which defined the fiction of
adoptive kinship, an imitation of Nature. Addressed from this per-
spective, society is not an agglomeration of groups, but an anthro-
pological transposition of the subject of speech. By this I refer to the
phenomenon of the fictive Author of the Text, a phenomenon which
would be far more accessible if even a slight degree of attention
were paid to legal texts and their elaboration of the State as a legal
subject which expresses itself in relation to other States which are
equally subjects upon the international stage. In the same sense,
when the State legislates internally, its law is not simply imputable
to the majority in parliament who vote, but it also has the status of
a State text. Nevertheless, these facts of discourse and of writing are
frequently neglected and various errant approaches are adopted
to the basic problem of communication, namely who is it that speaks?
If it was deemed appropriate to refer this problem to the general
problematic of human differentiation, to the stake of Interdiction
upon which the institution of the human subject depends, that is to
say the relation of speech to the Third of language, then one would
arrive inevitably at the question of society as a subject: what is it for

a society to speak?
To address the basic question of how to recognise that speech is
founded (that is to say, referred, inscribed in advance in the order of
the instituting Reference) before being articulated, we need to begin
from the primacy of representation. In other words, speech as an
anthropological phenomenon must be understood as bound to the
foundation of life, to the underpinning of life by representation.
What this signifies, for society and for the individual, is the necessity
of referring everything to words in order for there to be things. It is thus
necessary to postulate that there would be no social life, that it is to
say, no politics, no science, no relation to the world, in any society
whatsoever, without its representing itself to itself as a speaking
being or, in other words, without representing itself to itself in
language. We have already considered the figure of Hermes. Here
we should again note that the metaphor of Hermes, which stages
such a representation in the form of a fiction of the origin of lan-
guage, is itself a speech. How is one to conceive of the representa-
tion of language as being itself a speech? The Middle Ages expressed
this principle of human law under a variety of different forms. I
will use one such formula, which was devised in Byzantium in the
twelfth century: the 'logos' which founds the community. To under-
stand this maxim it has to be examined in terms of its two sides:
(a) The 'logos' which founds the community is first of all the dis-
course by virtue of which society, and first of all the human subject,
differentiates the world from words and, in doing this, institutes
the relationship between words and things while manoeuvring the
representation which binds them together. The representation which
creates the bond between word and thing - here, once again, we
encounter the Third of language - can only be understood by ref-
erence to the mediaeval system of dogmatics. To interrogate the
notion of founding 'logos' requires that we address the legal dis-
course of the papacy and specifically a text of Pope Gregory IX
which offered a normative definition of the distinction between
speech (sermo) and thing res. 9 To understand the representation which
establishes the bond between word and thing, requires that attention
9. The basic text comes from the official compilation of Gregory IX (1234);
and it remains the philosophical definition of language upon which the
Western legal tradition is based.
be paid to a representation of the staging of power: the pontiff here

sets himself up as having the power to authenticate (to legalise) the
division of words from things and so also, to draw the relevant
logical inference, to define the categories. The 'logos' which consti-
tutes the community makes a claim to representation, that is to say
it has to take up the position of the image of power, in genealogical
terms a representation of the Father, and its discourse, even if it is
of the highest philosophical acumen, is the bearer, for the indi-
vidual subjects of a culture, of an effect of branding or marking
which institutes their differentiation from the world. This discourse,
therefore, also has the status and character of the emblematic in the
etymological sense of the term, namely something burnt on wood,
something engraved or grafted or inlaid. In short, we have forgotten
in the West that theories have the social and subjective value of
brands, that any constitutive discourse or 'logos' is a dogma that
marks us as subjects.
(b) Recognition of the power of speech and its corollary, the con-
struction of the image of the absolute Other is the second implica-
tion of the maxim. It is necessary to appreciate that the fictive Author
of the Text is the institutional translation of the social principle of
alterity. The importance of the dogmatic elaborations which allow
a society to represent itself, by means of adequate images, as a
subject who speaks, stem from that fiction. By virtue of the relative
simplicity of the normative discourse of the Middle Ages, the work
of the scholastics, which is reasonably well known by virtue of
technical legal terms such as jurisdiction, empire, direct and indirect
powers, can teach us a geat deal about the ultimate meaning of the
structure of Names by virtue of which social power constituted
itself in the form of a fictional subject. Iurisdictio, Imperium, Potestas,
and so on are the elements of the construction of social identity as
the Subject of the Text, in the same way as the pope, the emperor,
the monarch, or the other bodies abstracted in the form of a fictive
person - persona ficta - present themselves as the representatives
of the absolute Other in a highly nuanced discursive construction
whereby, as representatives of this abstract Other, they are the
bearers of symbolic value. If one examines closely the scholastic
manipulation of these politico-legal notions, borrowed wholesale
from Roman law, the overall problem can be defined as follows: the
question of the symbolic staging of the fictive Author (most notably
in its legal form as Author of the body of the law) necessarily implies
the question of Reason. If we address this question with the aid of

psychoanalysis, it is easy to recognise that the elaboration of society
as a speaking subject carries with it the risk of madness (madness
in the sense of the non-symbolisation of the relation to the image),
which translates practically into quite murderous effects, murder
being no more than a perverted form of the dogmatic relation of
communication being substituted for speech. In the institutional
history of the West, Roman law merits its scholastic title of written
Reason (Ratio scripta). It is by borrowing from Roman law, which
was already well Christianised by late antiquity, that European
dogmatics constructed its version of the social bond as a legal bond
to the Text.
(C) From the Author to the Father: the genealogical essence of the
institutional principle
If one understands the notion of genealogy in its broadest sense,

that is to say, as the social and individual translation of a changing
array of laws and other organisational rules directed towards the
reproduction of the species, the principle of institutionality simply
translates the principle of life. The idea of kinship becomes the axis
of culture. This is so in the sense that reproduction resolves itself
into the agency of the elaboration and transmission of a genealogical
message, that is to say it reduces to a system of communication
organised around the logic of the Third. The classical and medi-
aeval legal traditions translated this message as follows: commun-
ication occurs between two levels, that of divine law and that of
human law, which is to say, in anthropological terms, the level of
mythology and the level of norms.
The preceding analysis of the ancient Byzantine legal formula,
the founding 'logos' of the community, provides good evidence
of the workings of a system of enunciation which bears the value
of law and is attributable to the political entity put in position as
the Subject of a discourse. The mediaeval Latinists explained this
mechanics of enunciation as the paternity of laws in society. From their
perspective, all normative messages descend genealogically from
the place of their origin. to Put differently, normativity as such con-
ceals a representation of the Father and that very fact opens up an
immense field for reflection.
10. This theme was developed by the mediaevals in terms of the sover-
eign being the Fatller of tile laws.
Starting from these remarks, we can note that dogmatic commun-

ication can be studied best as the means of conveying, throughout
humanity, the essential representations of the principle of differen-
tiation. Such is to say that through the representation of the Father
embedded in dogmatic exchange, each society faces the challenge
of its relation to Reason. And finally one can observe that reflection
upon the Political in contemporary international affairs would be of
greater interest if it took account of the dogmatic order and specif-
ically of the representation of the Father as the form of political
differentiation, as well as of the division of the world according to
the war of images.
AESTHETICS, CASUISTRY AND DOGMATICS
Every society offers some liturgical or ritual response to the ques-

tion of how to symbolise Reference. No government has ever dis-
pensed entirely with music, ceremony, chanting or holy silence.
Nor can power do without the apparatuses of celebration which
function to screen the symbolic abyss, that is to say that they give
a face to Nothingness, to the opacity of origins: they speak the
unspeakable by means of the ritual message at the basis of dis-
course. Political love is an essentially religious love, it represents by
theatrical means. Analysis of this phenomenon should take into
account not only the pervasive political use of celebrations, but also
a more subtle element concerned with what the scholastic theories
of the image called vestigia, otherwise termed traces or imprints.
How does the modern subject integrate the ceremonial imprint
of Reference? One technique in particular deserves attention here,
the essential symbolic manoeuvre, that of the mute discourse of
emblems which identify and mark the subject.
In technical terms, a dogmatic system of interpretation can be
defined at the level of the social as the hierarchical organisation of
the sites of interpretation. The logic of social reproduction is one of
a symbolic determinism of the speaking being which translates itself,
by means of the social representation of the institution of speech,
into the institution of life.
We return thus to the following propositions: (i) to the staging
of Reference as the theatrical interpretation of foundations; (ii) to
the interpretation of the why? and the normative effects of this in
the form of the corpus of social and essentially legal propositions
- dogmatics, whether in the form of legal or scientific legislation; (iii)
to the casuistry of interpretation as practised by lawyers, admin-

istrators and, contemporarily, by psychiatrists and psychoanalysts.
Everywhere one encounters the same differentiation of the registers
of dogmatic discourse: the aesthetic, the dogmatic and the casuistic.
CONCLUSION: THE IMPASSE OF HUMAN

COMMUNICATION AND THE QUESTION OF THE IMAGE
One approach, albeit a summary one, to the problems demarc-

ated by the concept of dogmatic communication invites a certain
modesty. The excessive simplifications developed by contemporary
scientism around the notion of the message are concerned with
behavioural questions of the flow of information and have distracted
attention from more pressing issues. Most notably they have failed
to inscribe the ultra-modern phenomena of communication in their
proper historical place as part of the montage of cultural life and of
reproduction. This neglect of the dogmatic montage is not only an
intellectual failing, it threatens a much greater cost - nothing less
than the squandering of the symbolic capital of humanity. Put differ-
ently, hasty and superficial contemporary theories of social com-
munication, which ignore the religious foundations of the Political
and the unconscious dimension or space within which each human
being takes their place as a subject of speech, do so at a cost. The
potential horizon of these damaged and unwitting discourses is
quite literally the abolition of the human condition through the
destruction of all instituted relations with language.
The recovery, or simply the recognition, of dogmatic structure,
as it has been understood in this essay in terms of its aesthetic,
dogmatic and casuistic elements, allows for an understanding of
communication as predicated upon the reproduction of complex
procedures of differentiation. Each civilisation institutes its own
peculiar style and procedures of reproduction, and this style is
nothing other than a choice of representation. It follows that each
system of representation is only properly understood when com-
prehended as an interpretation of social structure. Consider the
mediaeval miniature ll (Plate 7) from an early printed text promul-
gated by Pope Clementine V in 1314. It shows the pontiff receiving
11. From Clernentines, 1476, Venice, folio I, discussed in Legendre, Le Desir

politique de Dieu, pp. 376-7.
a gift from a cleric kneeling before the throne. The gift is the book
of the law, which the cleric presents to the living emblem of Refer-
ence, in Roman law the Author. The picture shows the dogmatic
circuit in its entirety. Yet this miniature also symbolises a crucial
point which we moderns tend to misrecognise, namely the loneli-
ness of systems of representation.
The final point of this study is to insist on the impasse of human
communication. At the basis of this impasse is the question of the
image. In the same way that no human being can change their found-
ing fantasm with that of someone else, so societies are incapable of
decreeing a change in their foundational representation. In other
words, communication as a relation between humans and between
cultures is built upon compromise, upon assumed exchanges and
upon negotiated incomprehension, or upon conquest and annihila-
tion. The final reckoning of the reproduction of images is either
bloody confrontation or, according to the new warlike mode of man-
agerial societies, a massive desubjectification. This law of speech and
of disourse signifies, today as yesterday, that dogmatic procedures
of communication remain an essential feature of social life.
8
The Judge amongst
the Interpreters:
Psychoanalysis and
Legal Judgment
The machinery of Interdiction requires certain casuistical applica-
tions. This study has shown that at the very least it necessitates
the differentiation of the levels of interpretation. That is to say, it
requires respect for the forms which preside over the order of
places of discourse and their inscription in the theatre of the found-
ing Reference, or, put differently, that of the social Third. It is in this
sense that rituals can be understood as being an essential dimen-
sion of the judicial function. Before proceeding further, it seems to
me to be necessary to situate this function in the context of contem-
porary culture and to elaborate upon it in terms of a brief reflection
on the institution of forms.
The problem of forms can be understood in a number of ways.
One aspect of the Western theory of the State was that of the intro-
duction of the notion of art as a means of understanding it in the
context of works of art. What was at issue in that notion, as Gaines
Post has shown, was the recognition of the various non-technical
foundations of the State.! It is necessary to take very precise account
of this first version of power as art. I have remarked elsewhere
upon the importance of the emblems of Reference across the whole
range of a societies' aesthetic productions and I will here limit
my comments to certain other developments and specifically to the
effect of certain choices relating to urban planning and architecture
by means of which the game of equality before the social principle
of Reference is played out and whole populations are transplanted.
1. On the state as a work of art, and on the scholastic foundations of this
connection, see Gaines Post, Studies in Medieval Legal Thought: Public
Law and the State, 1100-1322 (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1964).
164
The Judge amongst Interpreters 165
Despite its contemporary intellectual brilliance, architecture lacks

any discourse which could give architects access to an understanding
of themselves as interpreters: such a discourse would allow them to
appreciate that the symbolic tools which they manipulate are not
only a major contribution to the institution of the town, but also con-
stitute a radical dogmatic power.
We need to look to other domains to illuminate the encounter of
institutions and forms. One such domain, which is of peculiar inter-
est to jurists, is that of the modern attitude towards rites. It reveals
a social weakness that is linked no doubt to the great European
confrontations between Science and Religion and to the fear of
appealing to Reason when engaging in rites, despite the fact that
rituality returns by means of art. Translated into social terms, this
fear of ritual has been a significant contributor to the diffusion of
the instrumental and objectivist conception of the State that we
currently suffer under and that constitutes a major obstacle to any
adequate comprehension of the mechanisms of Interdiction. For this
reason the metaphorical constitution of Reference escapes us and
we fail equally to understand the new symbolic procedures by means
of which European societies - societies which are highly fragmented
compared to those of pre-industrial times - indefinitely reassemble
their mythological capital. Nor, for even stronger reasons, do we
understand the artless but also highly destructive character of the
behaviouristic discourses which underpin much of political educa-
tion. To illustrate this point I will make the following observation:
it is in the same sense that we do not understand how great poetry,
despite appearing to be purely private, can be used in the service
of the representation of Interdiction, and so have the value of mytho-
logical or religious innovation. So too managerialism and sociolo-
gical reductionism are imposed upon contemporary organisations
and upon scholarly methods with the effect of breaking the social
link of new generations to the Third, leaving them bound to self-
foundation, to being both teacher and student.
We should insist for an instant on the scholarly problematic
because it is an echo of the massive deritualisation of European soci-
eties and indirectly concerns the function of law. Technocratic dogma,
which treats teaching as the transmission of a product (knowledges)
on the inside of an opaque and confused symbolic universe, not only
threatens economically underprivileged populations with an increas-
ingly imbecilic subjection, but also has the effect of turning pedagogy
against itself by depriving the young of foundational images. In this
regard the allegedly scientific nature of pedagogic relationships pre-

vents the realisation that the school is a transposed instance of the
genealogical function, and not the escape route for dysfunctional
families. In this perspective, the systematic deritualisation of learning
(reading/writing, counting) merits reconsideration. The consequences
of the loss of ritual are immense, and remain opaque to current
methods of analysis, because the price of such phenomena of artificial
feeble-mindedness is paid by its victims in symptoms of all kinds.
Genealogical justice is concerned directly with this pedagogical
debt owed to the young. At the end of the institutional chain, the
instrumentalist conception of subjective liberation from the constraint
of forms simply demolishes the subject in advance. The effect of
instrumentalism is mechanical: the social Third has to revive ritual,
it has to endeavour to avert the disintegration of the subject, by
assuming the mask of the law enforcer, of the judge and the other
specialists who follow in their wake. It simply needs to be observed
that thousands of young people only gain their knowledge of forms
through delinquency.
One point in particular needs to be emphasised. It is that of the
disappearance of the notion of function in our societies with their
systems of supposedly user-friendly Reference. Techniques of per-
sonalisation of social messages, and propagandas of the authenti-
city and sincerity of forms, are discourses which lead inexorably to
the return of sects, and such indeed is the current ritual imperative
of humanity. The modern genres of manipulation have in general
been well studied in sociology (which is certainly not the case in the
psychological disciplines), but the problems they raise have not yet
been approached in their deepest form, that of their anthropolo-
gical nature: how is one to conceive of the relation between between
ritual and the principle of causality in contemporary societies? The
only possible access proceeds by way of a rethinking of Interdic-
tion; or put differently, it is a matter of studying the connection
between the institution of forms and the structuration of the sub-
ject. The State, as social parent, is contemporarily forced to take
over the function of the judge. Furthermore, it is equally upon the
terrain of the analysis of the principle of ritual that we can appre-
hend the significance of scientistic hypotheses concerning institu-
tions. The phenomenon of ritual, it seems to me, is the touchstone
of any genuinely modern debate on the Science of Law.
The function of the judge therefore has to be comprehended as a
cultural phenomenon. The judge does not descend from an Elswhere
which is inaccessible to Reason; the judge is a representative, put in

place by the forms. The judge is the social representation of the cause of
Interdiction. In this respect, the function can even seem somewhat
precarious in that, politically speaking, it is a discourse bound to,
and responsible for, creating faith in society. The occidental world
has never ceased to rely upon radical discourses of foundation,
of which the history of legislation and of jurisprudence are the
necessary echo. Consider the example, drawn from the era of the
first triumph of scholasticism and the theology of a rediscovered
Artistotelianism, of the ideal of a perfect society (societas perfecta>
which inspired the first developments of the militant Christian State;
or again, at our extremity of history, consider the vogue for judicial
management, the ephemeral expression of an efficient justice which
will have conquered the forms. The exercise of the judicial function
cannot ignore variations in the discourses of foundation, nor the
subsistence of the law of forms.
(1) SOCIAL JURISDICTION AND JURISDICTION OVER

THE SUBJECT. ON THE HISTORICAL POSITION
OF THE MODERN JUDGE
To situate the judge amongst the interpreters initially presupposes

that we apprehend two aspects of the function of judging in the
domain studied in this work: its social jurisdiction and its jurisdic-
tion over the subject.
It is a question of paying attention to the classes of interpreters
and the manner in which they correspond to the structural order of
genealogical justice, which is to say, to the levels and functions of
a differentiated interpretation. This organisational process is bound
historically to the evolution of the power of jurisdiction in Europe
after the mediaeval Revolution of the interpreter, a crucial moment
which ineluctably links us even today to Roman law and to Latin
Christianity, the crucial bearers of industrial culture. It is also
important to take account of the great post-mediaeval events of
meaning which have affected the instituted regime of signification,
and most importantly the emergence of scientific representations of
humanity and the general secularisation of norms. But these events
themselves, upon which contemporary attitudes towards the func-
tion of judgment depend, can only properly be understood and
their normative effects within contemporary culture apprehended,
if one is conscious of the difficulty of circumscribing the notion of

judgment in legal matters. It is in essence that of the power to emit
statements from a certain place - the place of the judge - which bears
with it the value of truth in the properly dogmatic sense of the
term. It is a question of the montage of places from which the logic
of this discourse can emanate, and concerns the general construc-
tion of Interdiction. The first problem to be posed can thus be for-
mulated as follows: by what right are there judges? This question
entails another: by what right, occult or acknowledged, do inter-
preters other than judges exercise their power of judgment?
In the era of scientific reasoning and of the non-religious stag-
ing of causality, these questions seem muddled, especially in view
of how little can be gleaned from constitutional and SOciological
accounts of them. Obsessed as we are with not contradicting scient-
istic ideas or the new global model of occcidental individualism,
could it be said that we are now headed towards a complete sclerosis
of the jurisdictional function? The edifice still stands, but is there
any reflection upon its destination? I will not force this pOint too far
at this stage, because the pressure towards constructing a science of
the rules of kinship more and more closely aligned to biomedical
possibilities, and associated with the naive propaganda of the self-
founding subject-King, tend to deny in advance any attempt to
recover the essential questions of Interdiction in terms of a discourse
of human rights which would be comprehensible in our epoch. I
doubt, for example, that in liberalising the case law on transsexu-
alism, the majority of the judges on the European Court of Human
Rights would promote such a recovery. To support the current
a-genealogical stereotypes would be to encourage the diffusion of
such doctrine according to which the order of jurisdictions is noth-
ing more than a simulacrum relevant only to a sociology of the
regulation of pressure groups, and in consequence at the mercy of
well-targeted media campaigns.
If we turn towards Ethics we find nothing but a discourse of
fa~ades without any real relation to the normative system, a dis-
course which has not yet found any theoretical justification and
which, in the absence of any strong thought, finds it hard to resist
a rampant abolitionism. It is in this unprecedented situation, ren-
dered even more difficult by virtue of the absence of any plausible
theory of Interdiction, that the question of the office of the judge is
posed. This context seems to involve a contradiction: the normativity
of formal law would appear to be fundamentally, that is to say at
the anthropological level of Interdiction, anti-normative. We are

forced, therefore, towards an analysis which takes careful histor-
ical account of the jurisdictional function inherited through the
European traditions.
Doesn't the jurisdictional function itself conceal a contradiction
which the confusions of our societies can only exacerbate, to the
point of rendering its exercise either blind or uncertain? On the
terrain of reproduction with which the current work is concerned,
the power of judging is correlated to the following problem: how is
the judge to build a bond between the social categories of judgment
(which sociology can tabulate) and the institution of the subject?
More specifically: what constitutes this doubly marked function,
which on one side acts as the custodian of social legitimacy (and
not that of the subject), and on the other side manages the dimen-
sion of the third face-to-face with the subject or its authorised rep-
resentatives? Here we engage again with the space in which the
two planes of the structure are articulated, the plane of the found-
ing Reference and that of the order of the genealogical subject. The
function of the judge is the nodal point. To illuminate the play of
this articulation, its malleability, in relation to the two classical forms
of jurisdiction, it is necessary to emphasise certain crucial problems.
It is necessary initially to recognise the extent to which multiple
interferences between classes of interpreters who contemporarily
practise law or claim as a matter of fact (without any recognised
relation to the montage of Reference) to exercise the function of
judging, has weakened the meaning of jurisdicition. It is a question
of deciphering this world of interpreters, that of Justice (in its legal
sense), but also that of the various psychological diSciplines, the
practitioners of Social Action and the various interventionist agen-
cies of the Welfare State. How are we to locate ourselves amongst
these forms and dismemberments of the classical function of Jus-
tice? And again: how are we to recognise the practice of the func-
tion of judging in relation to genealogical justice? Put differently:
what is it to exercise a power of jurisdiction over children, and
what does such a power signify?
I can see only one possible approach to this, one that takes as its
point of departure the modern jurisdictional function; by which I
understand the function that derives from the mediaeval Revolution
of the interpreter. It is, in effect, at that precise moment in the his-
tory of European anthropological structure that one can perceive the
complexity of a foreign concept derived from Roman Jaw, that of
iurisdictio (literally the act of stating the law). It was tied to two further
technical concepts of fundamental significance for the development
of the state, imperium (sovereignty) and lex (law), and was funda-
mental to the diverse institutional domains of political action: juris-
diction was legislative power, jurisdiction was the power of the judge,
and jurisdiction was the power of the (Father-)confessor.2 Leaving
aside the political idea of legislation as it has been transposed onto
the idea of a sovereign judge invested with the law of the last word;
we shall take up instead the notions of judge and (Father-)confessor,
in relation to which the scholastic jurists developed a theory which
has been largely ignored by cultural historians, despite its consider-
able significance.
Jurisdiction is a concept which is split in two: one jurisdiction
is exercised by what is called the external tribunal (for externe),
and the other by an internal tribunal (for interne). The interpreter of
the external tribunal is the judge, that of the interior tribunal the
(Father-)confessor. What were the essential features of this now
somewhat opaque division which became one of the political and
religious battlefields of the occident up to and including the rise of
Protestantism? To what representation of the power of judging
did this schema respond in its normative mode of regulation of the
relation between the social categories of judgment and the institution of
the subject?
We shall not here set up an opposition between the two jurisdic-
tions on the false basis of the distinction between Law (which con-
cerned the external tribunal) and Theology (which concerned the
internal tribunal). Classical confession, defined by the Fourth Lateran
Council (1215) and confirmed by the Council of Trent (in the six-
teenth century), was not a simple prolongation of the doctrine of the
pardon of sins, but had the status of a jurisdiction. Such is to say
that the (Father-)confessor is also a judge and that, in consequence,
the function of judging is exercised in two dimensions, according
2. The canon law distinction between diverse jurisdictions raises some
complex historical questions, notably with regard to the interior court
of conscience, namely, the organisation of power over the subject. For
example: was a penitence of the heart, without oral confession, suffi-
cient? What value was attached to public confession? To whom could
the Pope, as the pinnacle of jurisdiction, make his confession? and so
on. For the basic doctrinal arguments on which the juridical organ-
isation of Penitence was grounded (and against which the Reformers
protested), the best introduction remains the Deeretals of Gratian (De
poellitelltia = C. 33, q. 3).
to two distinct montages, which the following schematisation can

illustrate:
(a) Position of the judge in the external tribunal:
the founding Reference

I
the judge
the trial,
drama of three /~
persons plaintiff defendant
prosecutor accused
(b) Position of the judge in the internal tribunal
r
the founding Reference
the private I
confession, auricular the (Father-)confessor
and secret I
the penitent
We have emphasised above the fact that in mediaeval culture it is

possible to discern, in the two instituted forms of the position of the
judge, two autonomous and systematised modes of expression of
the work of the interpreter in all normative systems. This work can
be summarised as follows: (1) to signify Reference or, to recover an
essential Roman term, the origo, that is to say to pay the foundational
debt of the subject; (2) to inscribe the genealogical subject, the child
of one sex or other, in the social and juridical market, thereby also
enfolding it in the instance of the third which mediates all exchange.
The positions of external and internal judge are distinguished and
put in place by these two levels of interpretation, whose nature can
be elaborated as follows.
From our perspective, the internal tribunal is logically primary. I
shall put it thus: the (Father->Confessor as judge is officially charged
with authenticating the subject while reiterating, on the occasion of
each ritual scene of the penitent coming to confess his sins, the
discourse of the Fata or, in another formulation, the discourse by
which Christian society pays its foundational debt to the subject.
Confession, minutely regulated as the scene of sacrifice by the Law
of Penitence, repeats in a Christian style a celebration of the bonding
the subject, by means of which it expresses its allegiance to the

Reason of the Text and the principle of paternity. It is the equival-
ent, in the canonical Roman liturgy, of the biblical scene of the
sacrificing father, of Abraham tying up and then releasing Isaac.
The external tribunal shows us an entirely different scene, one
that is derived from the trial as it was elaborated in the civil law
which the West inherited, via the Revolution of the interpreter,
from Antiquity. Both in civil and penal law, and taking account of
the differences between accusatory and inquisitorial procedures
which distinguish the national sub-systems of European law, the
judge does not occupy a sacramental position. That is to say, from the
perspective of a normative Christianity, and of the ritual order of
initiation (mobilising in this respect the Christian priest),3 the judge
occupies a position of office, or of function. In this position, ritual is
of a wholly different order, and is difficult to grasp if one ignores
the upheaval occasioned in Europe by the Revolution of the inter-
preter (the coincidence of Roman law and of Christianity), and of
what I have termed state-controlled ritual, one open to all imagin-
able forms of the laicisation of Reference. Thus modern States have
inherited the ritualised trial as an 'act with three persons' (actus
trium personarum), in the technical sense of the Roman trial, but
have simultaneously maintained that confession, as an intrinsic
feature of the social constitution of speech, has been abolished. So
what has happened to the position of the confessional judge, to the
judge of the internal tribunal, the position which was destined to
notify the subject of the foundational Fata?
The montage of two jurisdictions, which because of their com-
mon conceptual basis constantly interferred with each other (wit-
ness the immense output of the schools), was one possible response
to the question: by what right are there judges? There are judges
because there have to be authorised interpreters who can stage Ref-
erence for the subject. Thus, at a first level of logic, there are judges
by virtue of a pure theatre celebrating the principle of causality (in
the various forms of the Christian God), and it is from this that the
normative effects of the montage with respect to the subject of
social exchange are derived. At a second level of logic, therefore,
3. The sacramental position, that is to say the explicitly religious order, is
reserved, by theological definition, for the internal judge. On the min-
istry of the confession, see the treatise on Penitence composed in the
entourage of Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae (Supplement), Ques-
tions 1-20.
there are judges by right of the social interactions of subjects who

are equal before the instance of the Third. Why have these two
levels of interpretation taken on the characteristics, in the West, of
levels of jurisdiction?
The reason for this lies in the historical circumstances of the
Revolution of the interpreter which imposed a general conception
of jurisdiction on institutional relations. It is by reference to this
that we can understand the ascendancy of Roman law over all other
normative systems. To apprehend a phenomenon which was so
essential to the evolution and structure of European institutions, it
is necessary to remember this: in any system of interpreters other
than the Christian (in the sense inaugurated by the mediaeval sys-
tem of Roman and canon law), for example those of the Torah or
of the Koran, the levels that I have evoked are equally present,
lodged in the cult of the sacred Text, and without this it would be
necessary to imagine establishing a ritual relation to Reference and
to the Fata in the form of a relation between the subject and a
tribunal. This is the fundamental issue: although bound to the ritual
order of initiation by the theology of the sacraments, the penitential
jurisdiction is above all else a tribunal of the confessional, deriving
from the Roman legal term confessio (meaning confession), and it is
by virtue of this that the liturgy gains its justification. From this
history we can understand that the procedures of confession did
not produce the ceremonial forms destined to mark the body of the
subject (as, for example, could ritual dances), but rather a ritualised
technique of dialogue. It produced the penitential dialogue,4 which is
nothing other than an art of investigation; in legal terms: an inquis-
itorial discourse.
That the entry of the Western subject into the bonds of Reference
be decorporealised and legalised until it became a form of the sub-
ject's self-analysis mediated by the the confessional judge, such was
the meaning of the mediaeval institution of penitence, and it is to
this that we Owe the first outlines of the typical subjectivism of Euro-
pean culture. Beyond the religious battles over the internal tribunal
and the profound opposition, marked out on this terrain, between
the Protestant Reformation and the Catholic Counter-Reformation,
we should also not forget the public reappearance of the confessional
4. Dialogue is treated classically in terms of the unfolding of confession

(can confession be crude, or be made by way of an intermediary or by
writing? etc.) and of secrets.
tribunal during the ascendancy of revolutionary movements (the

procedures of self-criticism, tribunals of comrades, and finally the
attempt to Christianise public confession in Latin America under
the papacy of Paul VI). Finally, on an epistemological plane, although
this aspect of the history of what are called the human or social
sciences is still neglected, and despite a number of preliminary
approaches based upon an infatuation with the concept of mental-
ity, it is necessary to restate the importance of the conceptual and
semantic elaborations of penitential practice. It was from these that
the modern State borrowed its increasingly secularised Christian
morality, in which we can recognise the pre-industrial forms of the
Ethical and the first great attempt to found, through a medicine of the
soul, a psychological knowledge which I shall term dogmatic psy-
chology. If one were prepared to reflect intelligently upon the fact
the (Father-konfessor is simultaneously judge of the internal tribunal
and physician of the soul, one would begin to see more clearly what
precisely it is that constitutes the major obstacle obscuring the func-
tion of judging today: what does contemporary sOciety ask of the
civil judge, most notably in the law of persons, and of the penal
judge, in relation to their institutional position, by order of their
office and its structural place, if not a guarantee? Are they not at one
and the same time judges of the external tribunal, judges of the
interior tribunal and physicians of the soul (in everyday language,
archaic practitioners of the psychological disciplines)? Allowing for
the uncertainties of historical mapping, are judges the domestic
servants of the sciences or simply a social police who assume the
garb of law? Finally, what is the role of the concept of jurisdictions
in relation to the rivalry, caused perhaps by the absence of any
defined normative status, of the political and commercial functions,
of the role to be played by the power of judging? I do not intend to
analyse this immense problem here, but simply offer two remarks:
(1) The problem of jurisdiction over the subject is misunderstood. The

mediaeval conception of the two jurisdictions existed primarily to
isolate the subject's relation to Reference from the social. Confes-
sion put the bond of Reference into play by manipulating guilt as
a central aspect of that relation: to be guilty before God became the
pivot of the discourse of identity. What does that mean?
Here the insights of psychoanalysis, if understood in terms of the
institution of the subject, are invaluable. What, generally speaking,
is at issue is a highly restrictive concept of a foundational guilt
which, since Freud, we have learned to understand in terms of an

unconscious Oedipal desire. My purpose is neither to examine the
function of guilt in the subject's suppression of its own desire, in
the form of the primary incestuous fantasm, nor to reflect upon the
worship of culpability as the mechanism through which the fantasm
survives. I shall restrict myself rather to reconsidering certain argu-
ments, concerning the classical Western staging of the relationship
to guilt.
It is as well to begin by observing that European religion did not
invent guilt: all normative systems distribute and make use of this
leverage. The rationalism of the construction of the doctrine of
Penitence - evident since Gratian's Decretals, which lead directly to
the modern form of psychologism and to its notion of responsibil-
ity 5 - is nothing more than a mode of dress, a mode of speaking the
subject. There could be no guilt without the subject in whom it
inheres: to put forward a man guilty in the face of God is to inscribe
differentiation and individuation, it is a way of posing the question
of the subject as such, the Christian version of the invention of the
subject. The management of this guilt by confession is not itself
comprehensible unless it is reconnected to its cause in the order of
structure, that is to say to the principle of human reproduction, to
humanity as such. In scholastic terms: it is necessary from the
beginning to perceive clearly the principle of the human genre. Just as
the Adamic metaphor serves as the foundational cause of the con-
cept of paternity, so original sin constitutes the bedrock or starting
point from which guilt can be reproduced by means of institutional
representation. We rediscover the two levels of the montage of
Interdiction and of consanguinity: the principle of an inaugural
human guilt is articulated (the sin of the first parents) at the level
of Reference; the guilt of the subject as such organises itself in relation
to the imputation of thoughts and acts (confession) at the level of
the subject and of the familial Oedipal drama. Put differently, the
institution of penitence is to be understood as the genealogy of the
subject in European culture. The sinner is only a sinner when placed
5. See the classic work of Stephan Kuttner, Kanonistische Schuldlehre von

Gratian bis auf die Dekretalen Gregors IX (1935) Biblioteca Apostolica
Vaticana. A central question, one which was abused by the Inquisition,
which also punished the descendants of the guilty: what is personal
responsibility? See K. Pennington, 'Pro Peccatis Patrum Puniri (= to be
punished for the sins of the fathers). A Moral and Legal Problem of the
Inquisition' (1978) 47 Church History pp. 137ff.
within the lineage of the inaugural human sin, and so becomes

himself capable (in the legal sense of capacity) of sin. If, alternatively,
one contemplates a general economy of atonement within which
confession takes its place - oral confession (oris confessio) ends in a
punishment pronounced by the judge-confessor, whose discharge
satisfies God (Oeo satisfacere> - one appreciates that this symbolic
commerce with Reference is a legal form of organisation of a rite of
allegiance to the genealogical principle, it is nothing less than a
ritual expression of genealogical Justice. The institution of Penitence
must be reckoned one of the West's greatest symbolic inventions.
We must now ask a further question: in light of this recentring of
Penitence, and irrespective of its insititutional modification by Prot-
estantism and its near-disappearance today, what constitutes the
final jurisdiction over the subject? More specifically, if the essence
of such a jurisdiction is the management of subjective guilt, what
lesson is to be drawn from this and, further, how does this relate to
the function of judging exercised by judges in the contemporary
secularised context of the State and Justice?
To manage guilt is to become engaged in the authentication of
the subject. If authentication signifies the marking of a discourse
with the seal which guarantees its truth, the order of truth at issue
here returns us to its foundations, to its status as speech, to the
principle of the Father: it is a matter of authenticating the discourse
of the sons, the sons of the Text, the sons of two parents. The ana-
logy between Christian confession and the biblical scene of bonding
shows that the bond of authentication is at the same time a bond of
attachment. This relation between authentication and attachment is
at the heart of all ritual, and it secures the reproduction of all norm-
ative systems. Is this relationship devised so as to legitimate the
living subject, or is it a manipulation pure and simple? Such is a
perennial topic of interrogation, but it is also one of great topicality,
because to wield this relationship - by means of the propaganda of
a generalised release from guilt - is to take control of desire, to
notify the subject of the law of its being, to govern the bonds of
speech. In this perspective, jurisdiction over the subject, understood
as the authentication of the subject in its relation to the principle of
the Father, can alternate its meaning and, dependent upon the nature
of the discourse put into play, can lead either to the annihilation or
the legitimation of the subject. Transposing a formula from antique
Roman law, I shall hazard the following: jurisdiction, in those soci-
eties whose culture is constructed on the idea of jurisdiction and
of the notion of State and Justice, is comprised of the exercise of a

power of life and death over the subject. 6 The idea of jurisdiction, which
we have glimpsed in its two historical branches, those of social
jurisdiction and of the tradition of penitential jurisdiction over the
subject, created a common basis for all those concepts which relate
to the regulation of the subject of speech in the civil law 'civilisa-
tions'. The kind of problem which this history poses is not that of
comprehending the future or fate of confession, but is rather and
more significantly that of circumscribing the elements of the follow-
ing question: in so far as he is called to manage the power of life and
death over the subject, what has become of the office of the judge? If the
function of judging is marked thus, one apprehends simultaneously
that the discourse of de-institutionalisation is a totalitarianism in
reverse, and that the propagandas of non-Reference are devastatingly
fundamentalist in respect of the belief systems of new generations.
It follows from this that the level of the problem posed concerns an
issue of considerable political importance: how does one discern
the position of the judge amongst all those who contemporarily
seek to invest ultra-modern society with the function of judging.
(2) Positions of expertise are not positions of judging. The secularisation

of Western societies, the intrusion of the sciences into all aspects of
life and the individualistic ideas which have promoted the subject-
King have not yet combined to develop any unitary effects within
the normative system as a whole. For this reason the diverse cul-
tural dimensions of the notion of jurisdiction can be left unexamined,
without significant political danger. Let us remind ourselves that
they are not only the ultimate expression of a technique of legal
governance played out in the sociological terms of social regula-
tion, but above all they are the means of staging Interdiction, which
is to say, the dogmatic relation to structure as submission to a Text.
Today, the conflation and confusion of levels of regulation, and the
conceptual decomposition of the civil law, are proleptic symptoms
of a profound alteration in the modern representation of the State
as guarantor of lineage. This obliges us to reflect seriously upon
the office of the judge: to what structural position does this office
6. On the famous ius vitae nescisqlle of the Roman father, which has been
most ignorantly interpreted by legal historians, see the corrective ana-
lysis of the symbolic nature of this power, in Yan Thomas, 'Le pere, la
cite, la mort', Ecole franc;aise de Rome (VU chatiment dans la Cite), 1984,
pp. 499-548.
relate? How does one distinguish this position from the other ever-
encroaching figure upon the horizon of the social scene, the position
of the expert?
I shall restrict myself to recollecting that, within the Western rep-
resentation of structure, the judge occupies a pivotal space, that of
the articulation between the discourse of Reference, or the social
discourse of destiny (the social Fata), and the discourse appropriate
to the subject (the subject of the trial). Taking account of this point
of articulation presupposes recognition of the following: not all social
discourses occupy the same place. The principle of the limit governs
the organisation of Interdiction itself and, in more precise terms, it
demonstrates the practical consequences of such limitation by putting
the differentiation of the places of discourse into play. The social con-
stitution of speech is unthinkable outside this organisational struc-
ture. What is in consequence implied is a very precise regulation of
the order of places, such that the place functionally assigned to
signify the bond of Reference and to rejoin it to the discourse of
casuistry, is given the status of legitimacy and assigned the role of
signalling the function of the foundational 'in the Name of', the
token of office. It follows from this that all positions of expertise,
understood in terms of their goal of restoring subjective truth to the
subject - as is the case, for example, with the psychological discip-
lines - find themselves displaced in relation to the position of the
judge. No psychological practitioner, and I include in this category
the specialists in the social sciences, has the right, that is to say the
structural authority or dogmatic competence, to exercise the insti-
tutional power of the judge.
Psychoanalysis overturned the certainties transmitted by the cat-
egories established in Roman and canon law, and in moral theology.
It thus exposed the symbolic role of the conceptual constructions
which had their application in the two jurisdictions and in the
medicine of the soul. This does not mean, however, that the logic
of places should be taken apart or that the historical foundations of
this logic should today be abolished. Even the venerable Freud fell
into the trap of a psychoanalysis which emanated from the legit-
imacy of his place, as can be seen in the lecture to future examining
magistrates (1906): briefly, Freud showed how, by use of the method
of free association, the charge can manipulate a suspect into confess-
ing their crime? In our day, the capture of dogmatic power by the
7. 'Psychoanalysis and the ascertaining of truth in courts of law', in Freud,

Collected Papers (1946) vol. II, p. 13.
psychological schools no longer has the excuse of naivety, the ana-

lysis of the mastery of a beyond of knowledge has become cynical.
The reader is embarrassed by choice with respect to the means of
apprehending the progress and depth of this fundamentalist phe-
nomenon. Such a psychoanalyst, lost in the exegesis of article 312
of the French Civil Code ('the child conceived during marriage has
the husband as father'), would add to the presumption of patern-
ity that of the marriage (sic): the presumed father, he writes, is
presumed to be the husband of the mother; a ridiculous inference
as jurists well know. Inevitably, the worst often happens, as witness
the following case: a criminal court judge had to take a stand against
a psychoanalytic expertise which, in the absence of witnesses or
other proof had, in the name of nothing more than calculations
relating to incestuous desire, supported the arraignment of a young
man suspected of having killed his mother. 8 That psychoanalysis, in
a liberal democracy, runs the risk of instituting a totalitarian dis-
course, can signal an important lesson: in subverting the legal order
of places, the promotion of confusion not only turns judges into
puppets, but also stipulates a normative principle of non-limitation,
that is to say it inverts the montage of Interdiction. How, on such
a basis can the psychological disciplines found a clinical practice
worthy of the name?
The example allows us to grasp the gravity of the problem posed
by the technical know ledges of the psyche to the normative system
as a whole, or more exactly, to the social constitution of speech. To
judge everything, without either rite or rules, is to claim the place
of the divine, or, alternatively, it is to deny to the principle of the
Third the role of governing the discourse which founds the cat-
egories and demarcates the places. The pseudo-dogmatics of the
psychological diSciplines (as also sociological dogmatics) ought to
be subjected to rigorous critique, one which could help us under-
stand what takes the marked place of the Third in the repetition of
the Western montage of Interdiction. If one reflects upon totalit-
arian techniques, one discovers that they all monotonously depend
upon the elimination of what, in European history, constitutes the
staging of the limit for the purposes of Reference itself: the distinction
8. A young man is accused of murdering his mother; he confesses before
the examining magistrate, then retracts the confession. Then the psycho-
logical expertise intervenes and concludes that the crime was commit-
ted. The case was decided in Bordeaux in 1982: the Juvenile Court, and
then the Court of Appeal, refused to follow the experts in the absence
of proof (the decision will now be published and commented upon).
between what is public and what is private, the central notions of

the theory of jurisdiction around which the genealogical power of
the State was formed, are the guarantee of the reproduction of the
subject. The bond of speech in our culture is lodged on the rock of
the division between public and private, and is given unthinkingly,
as an accessory to political demagogy, and has come to require, as
has militant psychoanalysis - which has come to found a new social
bond (sic) - a break with the entire tradition of symbolic invest-
ment. A world that confuses the rules of discourse and de-institutes
the places of social speech is in breach of interdiction: it is a world
which tends to substitute manipulation for the function of inter-
pretation, and holds the judge to be a puppet.
(2) JUDGES AND PSYCHOANALYSTS FACED BY THE

QUESTION OF RHETORIC: WHAT IS A CASE?
AN ANALYSIS OF THE QUESTION OF GENRE
I shall analyse here the logic of Reference and of Interdiction which

presides over the differentiation of the places of interpretation.
We have already caught sight of the importance of the notion of
jurisdiction within the European cultural tradition. It is around this
question that the normative and learned traditions relating to the
institution of the subject have been formed and played out. It is
also, however, a question which has increasingly confused the pro-
pagation of reductionist scientistic ideas of what is entailed in such
institution: the reproduction of sons - sons of one sex or the other.
It has been forgotten that all the functions of interpretation have in
common the task of organising the relation of the subject to the
social constitution of speech. It is by this right that these functions
participate, according to their specific structural authority, in the
exercise of genealogical power. It is in relation to this that the prob-
lem of clearly situating what is shared by and what separates judges
and psychoanalysts (and more broadly the diverse psychological
categories) is posed.
Equally we have recognised the political, as well as anthropolo-
gical, scope of the distinction, always understood within the histor-
ical frame of our normative system, between public and private.
Under the aegis of a principle of foundations, and the staging of
Reference, it designates two different orders of discourse and so
also two distinct spheres within which the bonds of speech are
forged. These two spheres are fluid, the sources of exchange and
also of illusory effects, and are subject in the last instance to the
specific corpus of legally expressed rules. In spite of the mediatic
doctrines which proclaim the advent of a unitary standard discourse,
the structure of the public and the private is still at work and con-
tinues to weigh upon the most traditional of rhetorical questions:
What is a case?
We shall start from the Latin word casus, which generally desig-
nates chance, but which in the Middle Ages also came to refer to
what Roman antiquity preferred to call cause (causa) and question
(quaestio). By virtue of semantic links, the verb cadere (of which
casus is the past participle) also progreSSively gives us: to fall, to
sink; to come to; to expose; to end; to finish. I shall schematise it as
follows: a case arises, it exposes itself to controversy, and then the
curtain falls. Other cases arise, and then further cases, undefined
and always new, but bound together by a universal principle of
rationality extant across the line of cases. Casuistry can thus be
thought of as a phenomenon of reproduction - the reproduction of
a mode of reasoning to which the very idea of Interdiction is ineluct-
ably bound. The life of the normative structure takes the form of
a succession of images in relations of analogy - cases. It is by virtue
of the work of the interpreter, a labour which Greek, and then
Roman, antiquity called rhetoric, that the technical and concrete
symbolic manoeuvres of the normative system are played out, and
deployed socially in the form of the exemplary. By mode of reason-
ing, I here refer to the Aristotelian notion of epagoge (epagoge), trans-
lated by Cicero as inductio, a word which also has the meaning of
to grasp, by direct intuition, the universal and the singular.9 Such
is the progress of the case, of any case whatsoever. In short, I shall
say that casuistry responds to the individuation of the Law, and
that this occurs in the diverse registers which we have described:
the individuation of Reason and of the principle of the Father.
To enter, as one must, into the entrails of casuistry - the expres-
sion used in moral theology is: to the marrow (medulla) - to enter
that space in a manner which can help us elucidate and understand
the respective roles of lawyer and psychoanalyst, it is necessary to
consider afresh the general problem which faces all interpreters
and in relation to which they situate themselves, each in their own
9. My elaboration is based here upon Quintilian, I11Stitutio Oratio, 5, 11

(on examples).
way, as interpreters of the reproduction of sons - sons of one sex

or the other. This problem touches upon the social staging of the
faculty of judging between justice and injustice, as also upon the
means of using the critical faculties in the process of subjective
differentiation in the instituted practice of speech. In terms of genea-
logical Justice: the interpreter faces the truth of the places of discourse.
I shall take up again and transpose certain formulas which were
much used by the Ancients: there was a customary speech and also
an art of deceit (usus dicendi, ars fallendi). To speak and to deceive,
were they the same thing? It seems to me that all casuistry faces this
question, whatever its register, whether that of the lawyer or of the
psychoanalyst. For this reason, in my reflections upon the classifica-
tion of genres, part of the problem has to be reconstructed by refer-
ence to certain essential features of classical rhetoric and of the art of
speaking. I take as my companions Cicero and Quintilian, the masters
of the techniques of discourse, to which techniques European legal
thought has been inextricably attached, and whose echoes resound
well beyond the sphere of Law.
Is there a science of cases? It would have to be a science which
took the substance of casuistry, the linguistic nature of the mont-
ages of kinship, as its principal subject matter. To approach this
question I shall return to the rhetors, rather than remaining with
the mediaeval and modern scholastics. The reason for this is highly
specific and lies in the need to grasp the essentially linguistic charac-
ter (essence langagiere) of this problem in our epoch. The secularisa-
tion of social representations and the scientification of the discourses
we bring to bear on the basic elements of the constitution of speech,
have been detached from the Christian tradition and at the same
time liberated from the ties of the science of kinship, and therefore
appear to be more accessible or, if I can put it in such terms, more
directly separable and, for this reason, more readily fixable by
jurists and psychoanalysts as a common basis for their work. The
rhetors taught us that casuistry is a science of speaking well (bene dicendi
scientia).10 Applying what Quintilian says of rhetors to the modern
interpreter, I shall propose the following: the interpreter is some-
one who has acquired this science of speaking well. The work of
interpretation is a labour (opus) performed by a labourer (artifex) in
the art of good speech, of the just speech (bona oratio). Casuistry is
10. Quintilian, Institutions, 2, 14, 5 (Introduction to the definition of

rhetoric).
thus the art of just speech. Whether written or spoken, discourse

ought to be just.
What is a just discourse?
I have translated bona oratio as just discourse, rather than as good
speech, because the good which is at issue, from the perspective of
the Latin orator, which is to say of the advocate, returns us to the
idea of justice from which it derives. The term right (in Latin ius),
leads to law, in its classical formulation the art of the good and the
equal. Just discourse is to be understood in its relation to the speech
which constitutes Justice, by translating it into rules and into norm-
ative definitions. In terms of genealogical Justice, what is the value
of the notion of a just discourse as the mechanism that accounts for
the casuistry of both psychoanalysis and law? The interrogation
which I have opened into the classification of these two genres of
interpretation can now be circumscribed more precisely. We shall
try now to bring the analysis to its conclusion and then to derive
certain practical consequences from it.
(a) The status of the places of discourse: on the equality of inter-

preters before the Reference, and on the respective predispositions
of judicial and psychoanalytic discourses
The question of the places or sites of discourse is the central ques-

tion of power which confronts every interpreter: What is her place?
Or alternatively, can he occupy all the places of discourse indiffer-
ently, no matter what their relative power? The question of the just
and the unjust is thus posed again. Is the interpreter the mouth-
piece of the limit assigned to him by the order of structure? How
is the interpreter to avoid falling prey to the supreme abuse of
moral and legal power which the Greeks termed hubris, to the
insolence of a pretension to unbounded superiority? The regulation
of the places of discourse is thus a first line of defence of the subject
against the violence of interpretation. The idea of a just discourse
proceeds initially from this point.
The just discourse is a structural notion. If speaking well, within
the genealogical structure, entails a relation to the principle of Inter-
diction and the montages of kinship, that also implies that what
we term Law - a capitalised Law, Reference (with its recognised
features: the principle of the Father and the principle of Reason) -
imposes upon this good speech that it accord with its nature, that
it be a discourse which refers to its foundations. Why does Reference
express itself by the social staging of the places assigned to dis-

courses, to differentiated discourses? This is what we need to under-
stand first, before we are able to isolate clearly what distinguishes the
places of the judge and the psychoanalyst.
In all societies - I ought to say: in all cultures, if only anthropo-
logists would focus attention upon the division of discourses as it
relates to the production of myths - the founding Reference presents
itself in the form of the institution of the limit at the heart of the very
discourse which constitutes it as Reference. What does that mean?
We approach here a very delicate point, one which has been over-
looked by previous theories of power and of normativity. In every
culture, Reference is exposed, not simply positively, but also negat-
ively, and it is extremely difficult to discover, in the origin of the
mechanism of foundation, this negativity without which humanity,
deprived of the representation of the void which founds speech,
could not invent the techniques of interpretation. For example, con-
sider how Greek tragedy articulates the principle of measure, meson,
against excess: 'god has placed power in the domain of the just',ll by
which it is meant that the gods themselves limited their power in
establishing the principle that, at all times and in all places, measure
would triumph. Thus Reference institutes itself as the origin of the
limit in relation to which the order of discourses and of the division
of the places of discourse is established. It is in this way that the
great distinctions which structure European institutions take shape,
and acquire an anthropological value which we have not hitherto
suspected. Consider, for example, the distinction between what is
public and what is private, which was first formulated in Roman law.
What does this distinction mean? That there are two aspects
(positiones) of law: one is public in character (that which looks to the
Roman State), the other is private in character (that which concerns the
interests of individuals).12 In modern terms, those of legal technicality:
the public touches foundations, the private relates to utility or use.
There would thus be, in the social constitution of speech, the institu-
tion of a limit in the following form, that of two places of discourse,
two positions or aspects of discourse. We shall try to elaborate the
meaning of this distinction with a view to trying to grasp what it
11. Aeschylus, The Eumenides, verses 528-9 (translated literally).
12. The formulation comes from Ulpian (third century), Digest, 1, 1, 1, 2,
repeated by Justinian in the Institutes, 1, 1, 4: 'duae sunt positiones, pub-
licum et privatum. Publicum ius est quod ad statum rei romanae spectat;
privatum quod ad singulorum utilitatem:
means for the judge and for the psychoanalyst. This banal distinc-
tion opens the horizon.
We shall reason in terms of the montages of Interdiction. To what
does the distinction between public and private respond in the
economy of the Roman power to divide? The jurist Ulpian provides
certain indications in elaborating the contents and specifying the
interrelation of the categories of public and private. On the side
of the public: ritual, religious and political functions (ceremonies,
priests, magistrates); on the side of the private: precepts (natural
law, international law and civil law).13 Put differently, the cat-
egories are not symmetrical, but rather relate to a hierarchy of
positions, to which the notion of Reference is the key. How does
Reference - in this case Rome, and the concerns of Rome, which
Ulpian evokes - become a Reference capable of founding something,
that is to say a discourse of foundation that maintains itself, that
stands (hence the status of Reference) and, from that, develops its
normative effects? Reference stands by virtue of the categories which
it is assumed to have engendered, as the category which defines
the order of categories, and above all else by virtue of that which is
public. Without ceremonies, without priests, without magis tates, there
would be neither anything Roman nor any precepts of law. We face
here directly the most extreme point of the institutional montage of
causality, the point where Reference is revealed as negativity,
absence, emptiness, which ritual and other religious and political
functions will give the form of representation, and thereby the power
to serve as symbolic foundation. To misrecognise this phenomenon
of reflexivity is also to miss the paradox of Reference, that it is
called into existence as the foundational representation by the cat-
egories that it has itself engendered. That is to say, if one does not
grasp this mechanism of supposition of the foundational axiom
of normativity, that the foundation of Law is the foundation of
social speech, then such foundations are doomed to remain incom-
prehensible and the logic of discursive places will be made the
object of numerous subversions. Let us continue. Transposed into
modern culture, the notion of that which is public signifies that the
social constitution of speech is at work, that it is constructed on the
basis of procedures and of places of discourse which in themselves
signify the condition upon which language depends: that speech
13. 'Publicum ius ill sacris, ill sacerdotibus, ill magistratibus cOl1sistit; privatum
ius tripertitum est . .. ex naturalibus praeceptis, aut gentium, aut civilibus.'
must have foundations, that discourse must be marked, which is to

say that it must be referred. And what can be seen outlined behind
the montages of Reference has itself already been referred to: the
principle of the Father.
To the extent that it is concerned with the problematic of the
Father, psychoanalysis is in consequence directly affected by this
clarification of the power to divide investigated here through the
distinction between public and private. How does psychoanalysis
address the question of the bonds of Reference, and consequently
the question of the place of discourse in the activity of the inter-
preter? The interrogation can be made clearer if the psychoanalyst
in her turn is inscribed in her relation to the social constitution of
speech, a legally orchestrated constitution within which the judge
traditionally plays the crucial role. It is thus necessary to circum-
scribe carefully the place of the judge in terms of that which is pub-
lic, a place or position in which the psychoanalyst inevitably also
participates.
Conceived as a montage of Interdiction, the State as Father of the
laws or the State as Justice - the secularised version of the Roman
and canon law montage - locates the place of the judge in relation
to that which is public, that which combines ritual and function. By
virtue of this, and according to the mechanism of supposition, or
of the axiom which founds all normative effects, the judge is the
lynchpin that holds up the montage. On the one hand, the judge
is the authority who decides cases, an authority delegated so as to
institute, by means of the science of just discourse, the principle
of Reason. On the other hand, by means of the labour of casuistry,
this discourse of the interpreter returns to, and justifies, the place
of Reference, as being a discourse of considerable importance, as
being nothing other than the discourse which founds all casuistry.
This exchange between the judge and the place of sovereignty is
essential to the economy of Interdiction. Without the judge, Refer-
ence would be an empty discourse. Put otherwise, in underpinning
the montage, the judge as lynchpin gives stability to the power of
Reference. One can thus see the significance of the mechanism: the
interpreter is the bearer of the limit because, by virtue of the rite
and function of office, the judge is subjected to Reference, at the
same time as Reference signifies its dependence upon its inter-
preters. Thus, by order of his place, the judge appears to us to pay
the debt of the limit, and it is by this right that he conducts the
discourse of justice.
The status of this place is equal to that of a discourse. The lynchpin

is the discourse of the mean, that is to say of measure. Returning to
the terms used by Aeschylus, I shall phrase it thus: neither anarchic,
nor despotic, but just. In terms of genealogical structure, and spe-
cifically in relation to the problematic of the Father, the position
in question is clear: the judge is not the Reference, he mediates it;
he is not the Father, just as he is not a species of Redeemer, because
casuistic discourse, which arbitrates upon the relation of the litigat-
ing parties to the Reference, has for its vocation the goal of imped-
ing the delirium of power. The status of judicial discourse, in matters
of kinship, is that of interpreting rights to the Father, on the basis of
structurally instituted places.
Having circumscribed, in relation to the judge, that which is public
as dependent upon interrogations and definitions destined to account
for the differentiation of discursive places in the montage of Inter-
diction, we can now grasp the specificity of the other branch of the
distinction, that which is private, and tie it again to the structure.
From this starting point, the confusion of positions which tends to
disqualify psychoanalysis - by which I understand the imperial,
essentially political and quasi-religious demand which it puts into
play in a social scientific fashion - becomes accessible to study.
We shall return to the path opened up by the Romans. The Jus-
tice from which the idea of law descends, engendered two positions
of legal discourse. The first of these defined the places of discourse
by means of their relation to the principle of Reference. The other
sketched the contours of those discourses which came to man-
oeuvre rules for the benefit of particular parties. With the second
position (that which relates to private interests, and not to the public) we
are in the domain of what the rhetors also called status, a state: no
longer the state of things Roman, but the state of the trial, of the cause,
of the question. 14 The second position of discourse gives rise to this
second meaning of state, that of giving coherence to the outbreak
of a dispute, to the shock of its arguments and to the treatment of
its contradiction. Thus, in so far as it is the treatment of a contra-
diction, casuistry in its turn constitutes a state, not simply in its
dependence upon the discourse of Reference, but also as a distinct
and autonomous discursive position, as the object of the science of
rhetoric. The science of just discourse thus takes the form of a
casuistical science, whose principal function is to organise the state
14. Quintilian, Institutions, 3, 6.

of the dispute; state here being understood literally: to straighten the

contradiction by submitting it to the rules of discourse.
The detour through the Roman notion of status shows us that the
interpreters, in their role of scholars of the case, are engaged in
what, remaining within the genealogical perspective of Justice, I
shall call here the theory of first principles, of principles to which all
casuistry relates. In terms of the question of the judge:
The principle of allegiance to the logic of places. We have already seen,

following the Roman rubric of the public sphere, that this is a
question of opening discourse under the aegis of Reference: the
discourse of the interpreter can only be inscribed once it is sub-
jected to the limit, that is to say, in terms of genealogical structure,
once it recognises the principle of the Father. Such is the political,
or, should the occasion arise, religious dimension of the foundation
of casuistry.
The principle of competence which is recognised in functions. The moment

that the structural places are differentiated - the place of Reference
and the place of the interpreter - differentiation imposes its law. We
have seen already that what is at issue, under the rubric of the Roman
category of the private, is the organisation of a dispute through the
construction of the trial. By this token, the place of the judge is not
only recognised in terms of a delegated authority instituted by Refer-
ence, but is also dramatically framed as the third (tiers) in relation
to the parties to the trial. The judge acts in the name of the social
Third. It is by virtue of this foundational relation between the parties
and the judge as the representative of the Third of speech, that
casuistry comes to play its part in the logic of the dispute. The rules
of discourse, elaborated in rhetoric, define the functions of the par-
ticipants in the trial and mark out the limits of their respective
competencies. The judge interprets the discourses of petitioner and
defendant, while avoiding identifying himself with either one. This
ordering of the discourses of the trial can be depicted best by a term
which the rhetors borrowed from the language of architecture, dis-
position.1 5 Disposition refers to the ordered arrangement of the mater-
ial of discourse, in the same manner, as Quintilian emphasises, as a
15. Quintilian, Institutions, 7. The notion of dispositio in ordinem is derived

from architectural language.
builder who builds. To arrange in the proper order is to qualify the

facts by giving them their legal name, to scrutinise the written text
and its intention (scriptum and voluntas), and so on. In summary, I
shall say: to judge in a just way is to reconcile words and things.
We are now in a position to re-examine the issues in terms of

psychoanalysis. It is a question of focusing upon the particular char-
acter of the psychoanalyst's relation to the judge, and latterly upon
the recognised grounds that differentiate the places of their dis-
course. It is a question of understanding how the psychoanalyst has
access to the representation of the limit so as to be able to manip-
ulate it as an interpreter. If psychoanalysis, in its proper place and
according to its proper discourse, attends to the problematisation
of Interdiction (in its relation to desire) in contemporary Western
societies, the concerns of genealogical Justice affect it directly. The
ability of psychoanalysts to discern these concerns in their discurs-
ive practice determines not only the relevance of their interven-
tions in the massive dramas of our era, but also the destiny of that
genre of Western critical thought which Freud announced in his
discovery of unconscious phenomena. Starting from our earlier dis-
cussion, the most basic question is the following: how should the
psychoanalyst represent his relation to the foundation of all inter-
pretative places, the bond of Reference?
Translated into the perspective of this work, fidelity to the logic
of places, in so far as it is the principle of non-confusion of the
interpreter and the founding Reference, is nothing other than the
recognition of the representation of the Father as the image which
presides over the distinction of the places of discourse and, in con-
sequence, over the disposition of the elements and materials of
interpretation. The psychoanalyst, who is also subject to Interdic-
tion, is equally dependent upon the division of places and cannot
claim to occupy them all. In particular, the psychoanalyst cannot
claim to use analysis to elevate the disillusion of the analysand into
a religious and political principle, into a foundational discourse of
Reference, without abandoning the role of casuist.
This is precisely the breaking point. All the contemporary subver-
sions of the law of discourse, which take the demise of the subject as
their key, circulate just as much in psychoanalysis as elsewhere. I
shall not linger over the ostensibly managerial practices, which under
cover of psychoanalysis or in competition with it (psychiatry, sys-
temic therapy, and so on) paper over the cracks of industrial society
using methods of efficiency, scientifically deployed at an interna-

tionallevel. It is here no longer a question of thinking humanity as
a distinctive subject, but rather a matter of a covert experimentation,
and of bringing a series of methods of manipulation into play.
On the other hand, there is the strand of psychoanalysis (whether or
not associated with psychiatry) which declares itself to be Freud-
ian, and latterly Lacanian, and by this double right lays claim to be
an interrogation of both the subject and of speech. I would be
far more interested in this branch of analysis if it addressed the
question of the subject of speech as a question of the principle of
institutionality, of the principle of normativity understood as the
mark inflicted upon the Oedipal subject - the law of the Father,
Reference.
Does psychoanalysis today address the implications of psycho-
analysis in anything other than formal terms? Has it grasped the
fact that psychoanalytic discourse cannot act as a substitute for the
structural montage of Justice? Does it understand that Freud's work
opened up the second revolution of the interpreter? Facile themes, as
for example, those of the extra-territorial or indefinable character
of psychoanalysis, as well as other militant formulations, have
enabled the discipline to evade the full significance of that line of
questioning which would confront the analyst with the problem of
the limit.
The problems raised by Freud on the borders of clinical practice
and the phenomenology of institutions - those that attach to the
psychological concepts of the masses, the totem and religiOUS illu-
sion - need to be approached as a means of addressing the place
of psychoanalytic discourse in the social constitution of speech. Such
an analysis would allow for the recognition of psychoanalysis as a
casuistical discourse which shares a common foundation with those
of Interdiction and the institution of the subject. In thus taking
account of the historicity of Western institutions it would also pre-
vent the question of Reference becoming mired in the imposture,
ignorance and superficiality of contemporary psychoanalysis. In
short, there has been a general failure to appreciate Freud's work in
anthropological, historical and logical perspectives, and so also an
inability to take account of the situation of the interpreter in the
montages that we call Law. We here revisit the impasse of European
culture which, like all previous cultures and despite its traditions of
critical thought, has not succeeded in freeing itself of the representa-
tions which carry it. This inability prevents us from grasping that
psychoanalysis illuminates the bond of Reference, it is not a reli-

gious or political reform, or even simple abolition of that bond. This
allows us also to apprehend the source of the misunderstanding:
at the level of that which is public, Freud took the place not of the
interpreter, but of the figure of the sovereign, of the icon or Refer-
ence; his work, the Text that devalues all other Texts, now awaits
its own devaluation in the culture of consumption and of master
thinkers. In these conditions in the West, the advent of the second
revolution of the interpreter could only inscribe itself in an uncon-
scious religious and political repetition. This in part explains the
extreme difficulty that analysts face when they attempt to grapple
with the question of the limit, and most notably when they are
forced to face the instituted place of judges, a place that is the equi-
valent, in symptomatic terms, of a demand to occupy the ultimate
place, one that exists beyond the institution, the place of a super
or meta Reference. The problem of boundaries, which Freud raised,
has been left undeveloped; we simply inhabit it. This is why I argue
that despite the noise, propaganda and militant declamations of
the psychological disciplines, this aspect of Freud's work has passed
unnoticed.
Contemporary Lacanians have created a new sovereign figure
with a global mission: Lacan, icon or Reference (often, in imitation
of socialist realism, put forward in a ludicrous manner), Reformist-
Text of the Freudian Text, with his retinue of schools reiterating
an ineradicable Bartolism. 16 The political flexibility of this school
(ranging from totalitarianism to liberalism), its marketability, its
ability to absorb the most foreign of concepts (for example, the theo-
logical distinction between Faith and Reason becomes a fashion-
able theme),17 its fanatical desire to turn Lacan into an axiom of all
thought, both present and future - these are all eloquent indications
of a transformation of psychoanalysis into an unrestrained discourse
16. In terms of the history of dogma, Lacan's promotion of a return to
Freud, is made into a commercial and religious doxa by his epigones
and becomes the equivalent of the post-glossatorial return to the ori-
ginal sources as against the false, a theme that underpinned (in Latin
Europe from the ninth century onward) the phenomenon of Reform of
the Text by reform of its interpretation, the precondition of Reformatio
Ecclesiae.
17. In the manner of political parties which modify their discourse in
light of tactical considerations, contemporary Lacanians manifestly
search to adapt themselves to contemporary social beliefs, and specif-
ically to the return to religion.
of power. This development deserves, at 'the very least, to be con-

sidered, even if it has not become a part of social discourse in
France, which repetitively reinstitutes the codification of thought in
terms of its utility. The pontifical institutional tradition, in this coun-
try which invented the legislative State, marks the reproduction of
structures, and so also the status and always uncertain place of the
interpreter, who was bound at first in France to the praise of power.
Nevertheless, however ruinous it is for freedom of spirit, the codi-
fication of thought - in this instance, of psychoanalysis - forces us
to return to the foundations of discourse. It is very evident that
according to contemporary official psychoanalysis, the problems
that I shall address now - by examining the two discourses of the
interpreter, those of judge and of psychoanalyst - are null and void
in advance because they do not have the status of the already said
within the received Gloss.
(b) The Oedipal scene and the trial. Research into the terrain of
encounter between two casuistries: judging and interpreting
The failure that accompanies all attempts to impose closure upon

domains of thought, manifests itself in a series of highly specific
signs in psychoanalysis, and most notably the following: the failure
to recognise the legal montage and the consequent impossibility of
grasping the clinical effects of law. Managerial practices of cure,
and the Bartolism of the schools, have been highly successful and
have found their justification in contemporary psychoanalysis. So
also the jurists have allowed themselves to be engulfed uncritically
by the social sciences and they therefore also ignore Freud's dis-
coveries. This failure is increasingly difficult to hide in the face of
the institutional credit of new generations.
Before embarking upon this highly difficult analysis of the func-
tion of the interpreter, I shall indulge in a brief exercise. I shall
attempt a theoretical examination of what the judge and the psy-
choanalyst could have in common as casuists, at what point they
meet, and what is the irreducible particularity of each of these two
genres of casuistry.
It is a question of grasping the levels of casuistry, of trying to
discern the gap that separates them, of studying what leads the
interpreter to engage with changes of level as they effect the same
question. Within the scheme of the present analysis, my argument
depends upon the definition of the work of interpretation as ori-

ginating from foundations, namely the first principles referred to
earlier on. Why is this necessary? Because the casuist, having to
work with thought, ought to be provided with plenty of space. I
will put it as follows: a casuist should be free, in the sense that he
ought not to be suffocated by authorities - I use the term in its
mediaeval sense: auctoritates, arguments from authority - but must
be allowed to breathe.
So as to make the argument easier to understand, I will transpose
a formula of Michaux: the first concession is that of breathing, the rest
follows. That the casuist will accept the concession of breathing does
not go without saying. There has always been the danger of suf-
focation, the difficulty that the interpreters face in acknowledging
or accepting their freedom. The liberty in question consists of the
interpreters distancing themselves from all representations of abso-
lute power, which is to say that they must renounce any continuing
confusion of the roles of Reference and of casuistry. For the inter-
preter, to be free is to observe the logic of places, to keep to their
place, a place marked in advance. Thus, everything begins with the
mark, and the rest follows.
I shall begin with this notion of the mark and shall analyse it
with the aid of the Greek language. How is it to be understood? To
orient my response, I shall take the following example. When a
child learning the alphabet writes a word on the board, the teacher
makes the child understand that the word is a trace, sign or mark:
Did you write your voice? The child understands that what is
detached, the written trace or mark - to return to the fecund Greek
term typos, the imprint of the seal, letter or character, but also eidos,
the pure form offered to the eyes of the child - opens for him the
world of distance and difference, and engages him as a subject in
the symbolic universe.
We must further specify the notation: what is the significance of
inscribing the mark? The inscription returns us to the symbolisa-
tion of the void, to the space in between those that are separated,
everything occurs in that distance and difference. But difference - a
presupposition necessary to the phenomenon of writing - organises
itself; a letter calls for other letters. We enter here into a sequential
logic in both senses of the term: a succession of letters and words,
and submission to an order. Such are the constituents of writing: it
obeys a principle of authority which stipulates that the emptiness
of the symbolic cannot be an emptiness without foundation, but is
rather marked by a limit. It is this limit that establishes the human

as a being spawned in close proximity to the difference of representa-
tion and founds the emptiness of the symbolic. It is this that makes
the symbolic subjectively bearable and that institutes the discourse
of causality. The plurality of letters and their combination have a
cause, and writing a foundation.
It is in this way that we conceive of the mark inscribed by the
child on the board as touching him, as marking him as a subject -
he finds himself to be the support of the written, hypokeimenon, an
Aristotelian term designating the subject, literally the subsistent -
while sending him back to the instituted foundations of language,
to the place of discourse (here held by the social mediator, the
teacher who teaches him to write) which institutes difference as dif-
ference for the subject who opens himself to meaning. The problem
now is to envisage, on the basis of this analogy with the teaching
of writing, what it is that happens in casuistry, what the effects are
of the marked place of the casuist.
The scene of learning to write, in which the child learns to separ-
ate himself from his speech (the word is no longer flatus vocis) by
means of the inscription of a trace, also teaches him that this sep-
aration entails an impression of return: the advent of a specified
form of the third - inscription. This forms the boundary of the self,
the symbol of a limited order, based upon which, by means of
repetition and submission, enriched by the limitless play of mean-
ing, a system of communication with the world is created. In what
way are the two scenes of trial that are the object of this study - the
judicial scene and the psychoanalytic scene of transference - to be
reconciled with this example?
In each case the key issue at play in these hypotheses is that of
the efficiency of forms.
One can see that transference is comparable to a scene of writing,
in that the subject in analysis finds himself in the position of separ-
ating himself from his speech by means of throwing his words into
a space which will restore them to him, while carrying within them
the sign affixed by the seal of the listener or the interpretation of the
analyst who has marked them thus. Analogically, interpreted speech
has the status of inSCription for the subject, and makes him turn
to himself as his own assumed limit, as a void open to meaning.
At the same time, we can see that interpreted speech remains the
creation of the subject, the determinate form of the third laid down
before him, in the manner of the ascription of letters which integrates
all subjects into the world of symbolic communication. In other

words, the patient in analysis, like the subject who writes, is working
on his subjective differentiation, that is to say, on separating him-
self from the world by means of words, and separating words by
means of meaning. But what is the source of the credibility of the
work of transference? It is in essence the following: it is respect for
the pure formalism that institutes respect for the places assigned
by the logic of differentiation. This logic is nothing other than the
foundation of the relation of the subject to the law of speech, a law
that imagines the imputability of discourse: every discourse of a named
subject is imputable to the subject of this discourse. From this we
can infer an essential precondition of cure, namely the legal charac-
ter of places in analysis. The subversion of forms (the conflation of
these places) is a transgression of transference by the analyst. It is
highly damaging to the patient whose representation of the places
of discourse, the necessary frame within which she can put her
fantasms and desires into speech, is attacked. This is nothing less
than the meeting point of psychoanalysis and the principle of insti-
tutionality, which I shall call again the principle of the taboo.
What is the scene of judgment? If the judge is socially invested
with the power to manipulate forms, it is imperative that the nature
of this power is made clear. Generally minimised, in the last in-
stance by the champions of managerialist Justice, the function of
forms should be approached by means of a theoretical reflection
which reconstitutes the scene of the trial in anthropological terms:
it is the transposition of a scene of writing.
Psychoanalysis, by virtue of the radical character of its strategies
and the relief that it provides for the subject in the game of differ-
entiation, allows for certain generalisations on the issue of the foun-
dations of the phenomenon of inscription. Consider the following:
where it is a question of Interdiction, the casuist takes the position
of the Third. The relationship to law is at stake in this scenography.
The judge takes on the role of a function which, following the pre-
ceding analogy with the teacher of writing, and by virtue of the
interpretive place of a purely formalist order, institutes the space of
division where words are inscribed with the status of words that
constitute causes. The judge as interpreter here enters into the space
of power and, by right of this, opens anew the distance necessary
to the work of meaning.
From the perspective of genealogical power, the problematic of
the relation to law, escapes the cliches of regulation seen in terms
of a judicial function of terrifying social ambiguity, and comes to be

understood as a casuistic enterprise primarily concerned with the
drama of subjective differentiation. Looked at from this point of
view, the legal relation is bound fundamentally to the phenomenon
of inscription of that which is in question, which is to say, that which
is in search of meaning, for the subject brought to trial. It follows
that the judge takes the place of the interpreter, in so far as, by
virtue of his place as guarantor of forms, that is to say of the prin-
ciple of non-confusion of places, he guarantees also the imputabil-
ity of the discourse of the subject on trial. To borrow a rhetorical
formula, the subject has a status, it can be termed the state of their
cause, or more exactly the state of the controversy, within which their
discourse sounds. It is upon this guarantee that the clinical effects
of justice, and more specifically of legal practice, depend. This is
because the terrain of the differentiation of the places of discourse
conceals a primordial symbolic function: allegiance to the principle of
the taboo. The reconciliation of judge and psychoanalyst, however,
stops at this point. We have now to pursue what, on the basis of
this common element, most radically distinguishes the two places:
the mark of the taboo.
In the economy of the system of interpretative places, the notion
of taboo returns us to the inalienability of functions, that is to say,
to their foundation in the logic of categories. In the culture of con-
temporary European modernity and its normative tradition, the
taboo has to be reinvented and restaged. The inalienability of func-
tions is reducible to the task of making the cultural representation
of Interdiction, of a certain historical relation to Reason, symbolic-
ally efficient, for the subject, at the level of the social.
Thus in the West, between the thirteenth and nineteenth centur-
ies, the erudite construction of external and internal tribunals, at
first abused and latterly reformed for their own use by the Prot-
estants, finally disappeared. From the perspective of my study, the
Freudian discovery that the subject is not one, devalued the idea
current in dogmatic psychology, and crucial to both mediaeval and
later scholastic legalism in their formulation of moral and juridical
foundations, that the subject bears responsibility for its acts. If the
functions of the internal tribunal and the external tribunal can be
understood as the separation of the powers over humanity (as a social
jurisdiction and a jurisdiction over the subject), this separation rests
upon a static conception of what we call subject (see, for example,
the notions of will, sensual appetite, and so on), 100 leagues from
Tlte Judge amongst Interpreters 197
Freud's discovery of the unknown key to the speaking being. For all
that, however, psychoanalysis did not fall from the sky, and in
consequence we have still to reflect upon the implicit axiom that
required the development of the two tribunals. I shall summarise
the argument in topical terms: genealogical Justice supposes two
different institutional levels of symbolic power.
The second Revolution of the interpreter destroyed dogmatic
psychology and, in consequence, devalued the ancient order of
jurisdictions. The power to institute humanity was built up again
by other means, but in conditions that were so confused that it is
difficult, when faced with judges who theoretically have a jurisdic-
tional monopoly, to situate the multitude of experts, and amongst
them psychoanalysts, who are called to exercise a casuistic func-
tion. The confusion becomes more explicit in direct relation to its
cultural irrelevance. Psychoanalysis has installed itself as the ulti-
mate discursive power preSiding over the explanation of every-
thing; it becomes a thought that is without thought, that is to say,
in more concrete terms, the manager of the human will to ignor-
ance. Symptomatically, this new religious discourse claims to set
itself above any interrogation of the foundations of the power of the
interpreter, foundations which also form the basis of the power to
judge in the name of sufficient Reason. From the space of this meta-
position, classically that of the divine essence, these analysts are
naturally drawn to ,the theme of that mysteriously autonomised
entity the Social. Rather than being attracted to the study of legal
phenomena, they want to ignore what brings the judge and the
psychoanalyst together, and also illuminates the Freudian discov-
ery: the exercise of a power of life and death over the subject. Mean-
while, whatever may be the historical circumstances that explain
this situation things cannot be left there; critique gradually imposes
a less complacent view.
We can now see the basic problem. Freud's exposure of the Oed-
ipal problematic as the province of Interdiction and of kinship is a
crucial feature of the genealogical power of States and cannot be
ignored. The casuistic function, therefore, must be revived, a fact
which poses the central question of Europe's cultural heritage: How
are we to think the institutional treatment of symbolic value in novel
terms? The traditional supposition of two modes of genealogical
Justice again becomes a reality, because psychoanalysis, in our soci-
eties, participates in tlte governance of the subject (whether or not this
structural fact is recognised by analysts). The problem is that of
beginning a general interrogation of the power to judge and to

interpret, in order to promote a somewhat less blind operation of
these institutional sites or levels.
My remarks will endeavour to state precisely the exact functions
and respective casuistic modes of the judge and psychoanalyst. They
are at least clearly definable in terms of a common trait: the mark
of the taboo. The functions are registered in the order of exchange
which founds the logic of the system of Interdiction. Put otherwise,
each in their own sphere, both are submitted to the logic of the
relation of credit to debt, to a symbolic Justice which binds the
subject and the interpreter alike. All casuists are subject, by virtue
of their structural place, to the obligation of reddere, in the strict
sense given to the term in Roman law, he must render, that is to say
meet his debts, or pay what he owes. We can attempt to capture
some of this in the following brief observations:
(1) The judge and the psychoanalyst, and the two levels or modes of genea-
logical justice. It is possible to translate into socially understand-
able terms what initially and radically distinguishes the casuistry of
the judge and of the psychoanalyst when they address the stakes
of kinship.
The Oedipal problematic is always at issue, because we live with
images that we indefinitely work and transpose in the symbolic
labour of life. Reproduction, in conformity with structure, entails a
double exigency. On the one hand, to enter into speech, a person
must be instituted in their place as a subject, that is to say as a child
of the Text; it is a question of inserting the subject of kinship into
the foundations of discourse, into the principle of the Father, into
Reference as such. On the other hand, the human being's connec-
tion with the principle of the limit gives rise to relational practices,
which are themselves also subject to the law of discourse, through
which the bonds and the controversies of social exchange are organ-
ised. Here, in short, we have two schemes, two levels of institution
of the subject, which correspond to two modes of expression of the
structure of kinship.
The staging of the subject refers to what I shall call the mixing of
images, the primary Oedipal substance, which takes the form of
access to desire. The obligatory point of passage for this access is
well known, it is that of narcissism and of guilt. All cultures invent
transferential rites by means of which the subject is conveyed by
mediations (and most notably celebrations) destined to give form to
representations of the principle of the Father, for which the institu-

tions of transference act as a guarantee. Technically it is a question
of the various modes of treating the fantasm, if I can put it thus, at
its roots. The examples within European culture are numerous, the
most familiar being the theatrical rites of tragedy, and the great
vehicle of classical morality and of psychologism, the Christian cere-
monies of penitence (the internal tribunal). The basis of these themes
lies in the need to inform the subject of the necessity of disengaging
itself from the fantasm of incest. In other cultures the inscription of
the subject into the scene of Interdiction is played out differently,
as, for example, in displacing the tranferential bond to the master
of initiation ceremonies, or, as in Indian Vedic culture, to the spir-
itual teacher.
Psychoanalytic transference, an invention born of the discovery
of the unconscious, is quite another matter. It is neither a tie to the
tragic oracle, nor to the confessor, nor to the master. Contemporary
theory is inadequate to the task of undoing this knot of uncertain-
ties and examining Freud's warnings. As a remodelling of the inser-
tion of the subject into the social, tranference relates, here as well,
to the institutional structure of the whole within which genealogical
Justice takes effect. Psychoanalysis must interrogate the supposed
isolation of the analyst, who does not know how to be assimilated
to the non-bond of the structure, to the place of the despot. If
analysis was nothing but a response to the breakdown of religious
forms of transference and to the recovery of these breakdowns by
mass political movements, this could only be achieved by virtue
of the casuistry made possible by the Freudian discovery - the casu-
istry of the fantasm. Finally, it is precisely from this point - that of
the recognition of psychoanalysis as a casuistry of the fantasm -
and after having taken account of the fragility of psychoanalysis
itself, which is threatened not least by its failure to analyse its own
intitutional position, that it is possible to open a new inquiry into
the difference of the casuistic modes or levels of modern society.
The advent of psychoanalysis precipitated a new frontier between
casuists.
Granted, as we have seen, that the Oedipal problematic is at
work everywhere, it is not difficult to perceive in what direction we
need to move to analyse this question of a new frontier. Like the
scene of psychoanalytic transference, the trial scene is also an Oed-
ipal stage. But one element changes everything: recognition of the
institutional perspective, that is to say, of the structural levels of
Justice, necessitates a distinction between two modes of speaking

of the question of the subject - legal and non-legal - and in con-
sequence two specified places for the casuist. The trial over which the
judge presides touches upon the Oedipal subject to the extent that
it is the subject of social exchange and the controversies relating to
it. In this recovery of relational economies, one enters by means of
conflict. If analytic transference is the trial of the bond of the Third,
a trial in which the psychoanalyst serves as the site of projection,
the instituted rite and its translation into speech by the analysand
is inscribed in the mode of the subjective economy; the subject enters
into it by way of the fantasm.
(2) The judge and the psychoanalyst before the debt of the interpreter. One
can again advance critical inquiry into the distinction between the
two positions of the interpreter, by studying each one's relation to
the Third. How do casuists enter into their respective functions,
in such a manner that the science of just discourse would be the
instrument of their function, that is to say neither misappropriated
nor subverted? In terms of the structure of Interdiction, if the inter-
preters hold to the discourses of their respective domains, and rep-
resent the principle of the Father or the principle of Reason, how is
the judge or the psychoanalyst to be made to submit to the sym-
bolic obligation to pay the Third its proper dues?
To conceive what is at issue here - not simply the debt due on a
monetary loan by way of analogy with a contractual debt (which
here would be interpretation), but also a debt of representation (in
the relation between the casuist and their foundation), the abstract
debt of the bond to the Third - it is necessary to remember that
neither of the casuistic places is the place of the sovereign, the
hermeneutic place of the original Author, the absolute place of the
staging of Reference. Put differently, neither the judge nor the ana-
lyst incarnate the foundational axiom of interpretation; or, to recol-
lect the mediaeval metaphor for the State, neither can pose as living
writing. I8 Their position relates to that which is public, in the tech-
nical - functional - sense of this formula. Such are the demands of
the office of interpreter in the theatre of genealogical Justice. If such
is the first condition of non-perversion, there is still the question
18. The living writing, following the imperial Roman formula applied by
the mediaevals to the Pope: holds all the laws in the archive of his breast
(omnia iura habet in scrinio pectoris sui).
of how the median place thus defined is organised so as to include

the obligation of a debt - the genealogical debt payed by the cred-
itor Text.
In view of this one must stress the danger of current maxims
within psychoanalysis. The proposition which has come to be codi-
fied is that the analyst authorises himself. Such brings us close to
the adages of the ancien regime on the position of the monarch: 19 it
has as its corollary the imputability of interpretation to the desire
of the analyst, and concretely to his fantasm. The obvious risk is
that of promoting a casuistic duel: fantasm against fantasm. For it
to be different, it would be necessary to relativise the emblematic
formulations, and in opening up rigorous disputes, in the manner
of the bitter classical controversies concerning the office of the judge,
would provide the sole means of creating an instituted system of
interpreters who would be neither anarchistic nor despotic, but rather
capable of promoting the rhetoric of just discourse, and in this
context the possibilities of the discourse of the analyst.
How is one to think of the casuist's freedom as a legitimate, that
is to say instituted, liberty? By comparison with the judge, we shall
see how divergent the possible responses are, but at the same time
there is a point of convergence between judge and analyst: the idea
of the function.
One can observe judges in the Western tradition, modern judges,
in terms of their being bound to their function and, by virtue of this
fact, put in the position of interpreters, adapted to their specific
mode and making use of their casuistic freedom. I shall not engage
here with the historical and dramaturgical technicalities of proced-
ure which, according to the variant political systems of common
and civil law, regulate every aspect of the judge's behaviour in a
trial: matters of immense interest such as the principle of cross-
examination, the relation of the judge to the facts of the case, and
so on. 20 To understand that the judge pays a debt to the Third, to
the Text, it is necessary to look upon interpretation as the interpreta-
tion of forms, in the interior of which the technical discourse of law
19. I recall here the foundational Roman adage: Quod principi placuit legis
habet vigorem (that which pleases the prince has the force of law), the
model of formulae such as 'if the King wants it, the law wants it', 'the
King answers to no one'.
20. In French law, the essential text is the Code of Civil Procedure, ch. 1 on
the guiding principles of the trial; as, for example, art. 14: 'No party
can be judged without having been heard or called'.
202 LAw and the Unconscious
takes place (on the basis of precedent, doctrine, legislative texts,

customs, and so on). The forms are safeguards of the function and
of the person who exercises it, they organise the exchange, the com-
ing and going of the interpreter between the parties to trial and the
principle of the taboo. The judge is only judge by virtue of forms
that he both respects and requires to be respected. In this sense, a
legal system is an empty structure, a system of forms, which are
the price of speech in this exchange with the Third, the exchange
which we call a trial.
An example will illustrate the radical nature of this problematic
of forms which underpins legal exchange. A classical Roman text
describes the office of the judge as a process of rendering, or giving
back (reddere): one says that someone renders justice, even when
they decide unjustly, because one does not address what the judge
has done, but rather what he has done in so far as he ought to have
done it. 21 In this exchange of speeches, the judge gives in return what
he owes, in the form of exercising his function. It is not the content
of a decision which makes the decision, but rather its inscription
in the forms, which gives it an oracular status. It is important to
understand that the function exceeds the person that exercises it and
that, in consequence, discourse in the function is the discourse of
the function, or in the words of another jurist, it is the living voice
of the civillaw.22 It is by this right that, with respect to function, dis-
course can be termed unjust and, so as to create obstacles to injust-
ice, can be the object of specialised procedures of appeal. The judge
does not exercise his function at his discretion; it is imposed upon
him in the form of a rite, which Roman commentators explained
by means of a thousand scholastic anecdotes, as for example, that
the judge cannot judge disguised as a slave or as a woman.
How does this responsibility of reddere, of giving back what one owes,
present itself to the analyst? In so far as she works with symbolic
21. See the text of the jurist Paul, Digest, 1,1,11: 'praetor quoque ius reddere
dicitur etiam cum inique decem it, relatione scilicet facta non ad id quod ita
praetor fecit, sed ad illud quod praetorem facere convenit' (the praetor is
also said to render legal right even when he makes a wrongful decree,
the reference, of course, being in this case not to what the praetor has
done, but to what it is right for a praetor to do). What is said of the
praetor [the judge who presides over the trial) would in modern terms
be true of the judge.
22. See the text of Marcian, Digest, 1,1,8: 'Nam et ipsum ius honorarium viva
vox est iuris civilis.' (For indeed the jus honorarium itself is the living
voice of the jus civile.)
stakes and participates in the government of the subject, we have

seen what this position implies in structural terms: like all casuists
in the exercise of their function, not being sovereign and so respect-
ing the law of the places of discourse, the analyst keeps to the
discourse of her occupation. It follows from this - a point held in
common with the judge - that the speech of the psychoanalyst in
the transference is above all else the discharge of a debt, the pay-
ment of what is owed (to borrow a term from Freud) to the exi-
gencies of analysis, for want of which the analyst can, like the judge,
be termed unjust (inique). The scene of transference, however, is
not the scene of judgment, and the iniquity of the psychoanalyst
remains without appeal: the debt is returned to the patient. I refer
the reader here to Freud's remarks on the dangers of analysis, nota-
tions which have today been thoroughly eclipsed.
The central problem for the psychoanalyst, faced by the exigen-
cies of the casuistic function, can now be circumscribed: it is that of
adapting the casuist to the debt of the interpreter. The various forms
of misappropriation of this debt, the abuse of power which Freud
so clearly warned against, takes its character and its copiousness
from the subversion of the genealogical principle in the discourse
of foundations. It is pointless to rebel against certain contemporary
practices, because they are no more than symptoms and cannot be
separated from the discourse of misrecognition of the debt, which
itself amounts to the analytic overthrow of Interdiction. It is, there-
fore, rather a question of examining the institutional foundations,
the official universe, of psychoanalytic interpretation.
What is lacking in this fragile discipline, if I may put it thus, is
a patristic self-reflection, which would put the succession of inter-
preters, of controversies, and the numerous and insufficiently recog-
nised contributions made since Freud, into perspective. With respect
to Freud, he should not be held up as a legislator of the human con-
dition, but simply appreciated for what he is, a discoverer whose
work engendered the second Revolution of the interpreter. The
historical development of psychoanalysis is marked by a series of
reformulations, one of which, sometimes successful and sometimes
unfortunate, is that of Lacan. For my own part, I have added a stone
to the edifice in drawing the attention of clinicians to the institu-
tional side of speech. What is finally in issue for analysts today is
the status of the cause, in the rhetorical sense of the expression, and
consequently the status of the argument (that is to say, the status of
the speech of the analyst), in so far as its casuistic practice is invested
with a normative force. If psychoanalysis promotes itself into a

sovereign power, either in a conscious or unconscious way (at pre-
sent by means of a cult of images under the sovereign image of the
master thinker), it takes hold fantasmatically of the place of the
absolute, and in consequence it puts interpretation to flight before
it begins. In Oedipal terms, the sovereign analyst is the tragic, but
unpunished, tyrant. He does not interpret, he practises a caricature
dogmatics and produces followers, who are at best liberated slaves.
This loss of the freedom of interpretation is paid for heavily by
the patient, and brings with it a network of effects, of which post-
Lacanian thought offers a striking and often absurd example: the cor-
ruption of Lacan's most significant clinical formulations has been
the end-point of all creativity. At the base of the problem outlined
we find again the question of the relation of the psychoanalyst to
Interdiction, in the form of the bond of the text, that is to say in relation
to the genealogy of writing.
(3) The casuist and the principle of sufficient Reason. To continue with
the examination of the notion of reddere, for the casuist this means
to give back what is owed. We here encounter again the principium
reddendae rationis sufficientis isolated by Leibniz, the principle of a
sufficient Reason adequate to what must be given back. What can
one derive from this formulation, on the terrain of the two casuistic
forms evoked here, that of the judge, and that of the psychoanalyst?
What should one understand by rationem reddere? We shall discover
another side to casuistry, the problem of argumentation, which is
familiar to jurists who are traditionally trained in the theory of rhet-
oric. Psychoanalysts will also recognise the practical significance of
these considerations, granted that their professional duty is to give
reasons or to provide arguments.
I have already indicated how the question of the principle of
sufficient Reason should be set up in terms of the two structural
levels of Interdiction. This principle operates at two levels, that is
to say, it works simultaneously to stage the social representation of
the principle of the ultimate Reason and to make the dialectical
relation of the subject and the Third possible. Leaving to one side
the social theatre of Reason, we shall return to the second level, that
of instituting or symbolising the subject's relation to the Third. It
takes the form of giving legal status to what, remaining with the
perspective of the European legal traditions, I shall call the right to
object which all subjects recognise. What is this right to object? I
shall simply say that it is a subjective power of self-inscription into

all forms of social analysis or inquiry, in the form of the question
why? Traditionally - by which I mean prior to the second Revolu-
tion of the interpreter - we know that Western culture founded this
inscription upon the science of the trial and specifically its formal
procedures. At root Western legal culture is a culture of the trial
and it is by virtue of this foundation that the two jurisdictions of
internal and external tribunal developed. It is within the confines of
this structure that the institution of giving of reasons - the institution
of argumentation - takes its place. It is also through this structure
that the classical order of casuistry took form as an order of rela-
tions between the principle of the Third, or historically and socially
staged principle of Reason, and the right to object. How does this
order of relations, upon which our social and subjective sense of
meaning and our techniques of argument depend, present itself
today?
The classical situation has been radically transformed, but with-
out the interior scope of this change being properly understood. We
belong to a homogeneous tradition of interpretation, in the sense
that the common manner in which States construct the normative
guarantee of causality upon the terrain of kinship has allowed the
casuists to reason, at the diverse stages of the system and according
to the recognised order of their jurisdictional competence, in a rhet-
orical form which has never undergone any significant rupture.
The different interpretative discourses were infiltrated by procedures
or techniques of argumentative knowledge or reason inherited from
the Roman and canon law systems. The mediaeval Revolution of
the interpreter gave birth to two coexisting legal forms, that of the
lawyers properly so called, and that of the law of Penitence, the casu-
istry of the confessor and of moral theology. I have shown that the
law of Penitence is closely connected, on the one hand, with crim-
ina I law, and on the other with the civil law of responsibility. I have
further shown that it instituted the public form of dogmatic psy-
chology, in relation to which modern scientific psychology, although
it has secularised and modernised the classical discourse, increas-
ingly takes its bearings. The ecclesiastical origins of psychologism,
as a form of subjective reasoning as well as of reasoning about the
subject, cannot be doubted.
Psychologism, as an emanation of the history of Western dog-
matics, can be understood best as an unconscious expression or
manifestation of the legal form. It is, therefore, also imperative that
we should further grasp that everything at play in the centuries of

dismemberment of the exegetical tradition is only today coming to
light. The secularisation of places and functions, and the scientific
gloss placed upon the discourses which represent what is to be law
for the subject, are superimposed upon classical constructions with-
out greatly altering their principles or stability. I shall take up this
theme again in the following terms: the modern elaboration of such
principles begins with the encounter between the Roman law form
of interpretation and that of Latin Christianity (whether or not sup-
ported by the militant scholasticism of moral theology). Such is to
say that its origins lie in an explicit opposition to the Jewish mode
of interpretation. It is through this opposition that the history of the
choice of form of representation has been played out in such a way
as to lead to the normative culture of the State. This is expressed,
in one aspect, by a rationalistic and disembodied relation to the text,
by an interpretation that is classically termed non-somatic, by way
of reference to the quarrel over the meaning of the Holy Scriptures
in relation to circumcision. All these debates are now illuminated
in new ways by psychoanalysis, and it is upon the problematic of
this terrain of interpretation that Freud initiated the second revolu-
tion of the interpreter. To fail to recognise this essential historical
point is to abandon the possibility of understanding the novelty of
the terms in which the contemporary problem of the techniques
and status of interpretation is posed after Freud's discovery. Psy-
chology, in so far as it has followed in the path of traditional dog-
matics, is theoretically dead. In the absence, however, of the critical
historical questioning briefly recalled here, psychoanalysis tends to
repeat the same error; it reproduces ecclesiastical and theological
forms that have become defunct. If psychoanalysts refuse to under-
stand what is at issue in the Western institution of casuistry; if they
fail to note the peculiar character of their continuing and essential
function as casuists descended from the European tradition - with
the character and function of the contemporary lawyer - they will
be sucked into an unwitting and pretentious legalism and all that
it implies. Most strikingly, with regard to the role of judge, they
covertly and dogmatically subvert the places of discourse, to the
considerable harm of the subjects affected.
I would like here to contribute to cleansing psychoanalysis of this
unconscious legalism, specifically by drawing the attention of ana-
lysts to the judge's rationem reddere (or rendering of reason) and
teaching them to observe it. It is a question of the notations which
seek to specify what radically distinguishes the analyst from the

judge, in so far as both are casuists working within the same ter-
rain, namely kinship. Each is engaged in the logic of Interdiction
and in allegiance to the principle of the taboo, but they have to
work at different levels of genealogical Justice. Having earlier dis-
tinguished between two modes of speech, two specified places of
casuistry, in sum two sides of the Oedipal trial, which form adja-
cent parts of the problematic of Reason, it now falls to us to trans-
late these dual forms into the terrain of the principle of sufficient
Reason. It is a question of taking an interest in the boundaries of
argumentation conceived rhetorically in terms of what I have called
the Oedipal trial. We enter thus into a comparative question, which
dislodges the analyst from her imaginary place of mythical legis-
lation and forces her towards a more rigorous thought. At the
same time it offers the judges, within this domain of genealogical
justice, the opportunity to think of their freedom as casuists in a
new light.
To begin with the rhetoricians: What is a style? What constitutes
the distinction between a point to be judged and a question to be
debated? These unique questions articulate and allow us to under-
stand the comparison to be made between the two casuistries. If all
casuists are required to go through certain formal points, the judge
in judging and the psychoanalyst in interpreting, respectively open up
separate universes of thought, subject to protocols of speech, which
should never be intermingled. For all that, these two modes of
speaking and judging are not without their ties, since they both
affect a relation to Interdiction.
This makes for a very interesting problem, and forces us to try to
compare the two roles. The power of a rhetorical analysis of the
ways in which a case can be argued lies in making visible, through
the discursive games appropriate to each field, the levels of func-
tioning of the giving of reasons. Take, for example, a case of violence
between father and son. Can the father turn the son out? The lawyer
will ask if it is legitimate for the father to deprive the son of his
inheritance - as in the disinheritance (abdicatio) evoked by Quintilian.
The analyst will ask: What is the value of this gesture as a notifica-
tion of the relation to the Law - is it a narcissistic revenge or the last
resort of a father who attempts to make his function prevail?
Such a confrontation between law and psychoanalysis develops
out of the recognition that there is a bond of principle between the
casuists, which is to say that there is a common appreciation of the
unity of the symbolic order. Reflection upon the function of argument

defuses the fantasm of an outside to the institution, a notion which
sometimes gains acceptance as a result of pychoanalytic militancy,
and, with respect to law, thwarts those ill-considered doctrines of
a functional justice stripped of all rituals. The rhetoricians compel
us to rediscover, for example, through the theory of external evidence
(artificiales), specific modes of argument (ethical, logical and emo-
tive) which underline that it is initially language which is instituted
and that the use of arguments presupposes a knowledge of words
and of their articulation in discourse. It is here that the analyst can
most easily discover, in her own work, the play of distinct psychic
instances; or again, one can observe that legal analysis of the dis-
tinction between what is certain and what is uncertain (the question
of doubt, or of dividing: duo, double from which we derive dubia,
things that are doubtful) turns into the problematic of the subjective
relation to certitude.
Another interesting point, in terms of understanding the way in
which the rationem reddere, the giving of reasons, works in rhetoric, is
the selection of hypothetical cases, of boundary cases such as are
used in the schools. I have referred elsewhere to the case posed by
the Renaissance jurist Charles-Antoine Lucques, who asked the
following question: If God left a father and a daughter alone on the
earth, would incest be permitted? Making a case of this kind, as
Lucques imagined or as an echo of practice, sometimes makes the
limiting point of genealogical justice come to view: Why laws? And
why this why? Put differently, the question of establishing the limits
of logic is raised again.
This observation yet again indicates the benefits of comparative
study, in that many of the hypothetical cases studied in the rhetorial
tradition are themselves precisely the questions around which psy-
choanalysis, from the beginning, has developed its own pedagogic
reference-points. Another example is the famous case of Orestes,
who kills his mother to avenge his father. The case is well known
in psychoanalysis, which studies it through the work of Aeschylus
(The Eumenides); but here again, so as to be able to apprehend better
the precise forms and methods of casuistry, it is useful to know
that, according to Quintilian, this case is also a case used by lawyers
in the schools. The analyst can use the case to grasp, in a striking
manner, the similarities and differences between the two methods
of casuistry in their treatment of the same case, even if each ana-
lysis is directed to the same end: the reproduction of sons.
The significance of these expositions of boundary cases is that of

endeavouring to trace the fluctuating relation of casuists to the two
levels of structure, that of Reference and that of the subject. Legal
education and training rely heavily upon the study of hypotheticals,
which in varying degrees challenge the boundaries of law, while in
practice case law similarly and incessantly works these limits. Ana-
lytic training, for its part, is far from clear as to what use is to be
made of the reconstitution of such cases, either in the form of rhet-
orical exercises or as practical problems. In psychoanalysis, where
each case and treatment is in principle unique and not to be gen-
eralised, one should address every case as an instance of the limit.
For this reason, it should be easier for the analyst to find the correct,
that is to say ethically appropriate, starting point for dialogue.
The great casuistic works of Freud and of some of his successors
constitute an inexhaustible source of critical rhetorical reappro-
priations of psychoanalysis by newcomers to the discipline. The
movement of the interpreter between the two levels of the structure
(as in the hypothetical cases already mentioned) facilitates the devel-
opment of argument or the giving of reasons. Outside that work,
analysis or questioning of the case seems, if I can put it like this, to
have lost its horizon. The analysts report their exploits and recite
the received glosses of their school, without situating themselves in
any structural perspective, as casuists subject to the obligation of
reddere, of giving back. For such to happen it would be necessary
for the analyst to come to terms with the meaning of Interdiction in
relation to their professional function. Where can this understand-
ing come from, in contemporary psychoanalytic organisations, unless
from some plausible teaching of the relation of the analyst to Inter-
diction, which is to say, following the proven methods of rhetoric,
from casuistry itself? A casuistry of transference can be understood
in terms of a moot case which inscribes the obligation of reddere as
the form of the analyst's bond to Interdiction. Hypothetical cases,
or cases which mimic adversarial practices, provide important
material for clinicians as well as for lawyers.
Finally, from a broader perspective, it should be observed that
the rationem reddere in psychoanalysis is not limited to the analyst's
problem of inscribing his interpretive speech in the transferential
scene of the cure, but entails something else quite specific: the neces-
sity of returning to the case. Why? Because psychoanalysis, in so far
as it is a corpus of texts and of clinical practices to which the analyst
must refer, is a figure of the Third. The analyst applies neither a
code nor a case law; she is constantly engaged, in her function as

a scholar and a practitioner, with the question of foundations, and
also with her own relationship to psychoanalysis as the representa-
tion of the foundational Third. We here encounter again the logic
of Reference, which is why the analyst has to give reasons for what
she does, at least in so far as what is at issue symbolically is the
speech of the interpreter: outside the space transference, the analyst
has to confront her own discourse with the principle of institution-
ality. On this privileged terrain, one can see the historical division
introduced into the Western system of interpretation by the sec-
ond Revolution of the interpreter: as an elaboration of transference,
analytical practice cannot, without destroying itself, arrange for any
court of appeal from one interpretation to another, nor for any
inspection of the quality of interpretation. These would be legal
forms of organising interpretation. None the less, in the absence of
any rigorous or adequate admission of the rationem reddere, psy-
choanalysis becomes entangled in a number of paralegal practices,
and occasionally in a pure self-justification, which fails to recognise
the obligations of its function.
9
Introduction to the
Theory of the Image:
Narcissus and the Other
in the Mirror
(1) THE SUBJECT AND THE INSTANCE OF
REPRESENTATION
The youth dies, lost in the lovelorn contemplation of his own reflec-
tion in the water's surface. He exhales his despair at being unable
to reach this 'shadow of a reflected image', namely, his own face. 1
Then, according to the poem: '0 utinam a nostro secedere corpore
possem!' A literal translation of which might be: 'Oh! that I am not
able to separate myself from our body.' Note that the text says 'our
body' rather than 'my body.' In other words, Narcissus addressed
his own image as though it were another person with whom he
nevertheless shared the same body. In so doing, he established the
indissociable, indestructible, bond between body and image.
The modern mind is so throroughly attuned to the calculative
sciences that it is difficult to accept that the body is made present
for the subject by means of an image. Even if this is accepted, it is
difficult to take the further step of admitting that the status of the
body is thereby modified, that in its translation by representation
the body loses its status as a biological object and becomes some-
thing fictional. In other words, the body is not the body. Its con-
struction has been transposed into the domain of the image; the
body which we inhabit is indissociable from the grip of the image.
At the same time, however, the elaboration of human speech
takes into account the peculiar fact that the body cannot be said
except in so far as it is in the grip of fiction (fiction here being
1. 'repercussae ... imaginis umbra . .. ' Ovid, Metamorphoses, 1985 edn, War-
minster: Aris and Phillips, Book III, verse 434, p. 110.
211
understood in the sense of the Latin verb fingere: to mould so as to

represent). The body can only become sayable if it makes itself an
image. The basic axis of meaning - the bond between word and
thing - is indissociable from the subject's structure of representa-
tion. Once in the grip of the image, the body can be captured by
language.
It seems then that the knotting of body, image and word pre-
supposes an instance of representation. The difficulty initially is
to conceive the articulation of the image between body and word,
while at the same time recognising the privileged relation between
the image and the notion of the instance of representation.
My use of the term instance plays on two aspects of the word
which can be derived from its Latin etymology.2 On the one hand,
'instance' indicates a way of remaining constantly present, in the
manner of something that holds someone relentlessly, gripping them
tightly, perhaps even so as to constitute a threat. On the other hand,
'instance' also includes the notion of an insistent demand which
requires satisfaction or which has to be addressed to a particular
place. From this, the idea of a place in which the instance is the
element of a topical differentiation can be derived. 3
The subject is gripped tightly and unrelentingly by the image,
which, to recall Ovid's formula 'he did not know what he was
seeing' constitutes the enigmatic stake in the story of Narcissus. 4
After some false starts, which were finally overcome by Lacan's
study of specularity,5 psychoanalysis has managed to address the
imaginary substance of man's being. That conceptual elaboration
should now be developed by recasting the whole question of the
specular. Since Freud, the institutional dimension and stake of sub-
jectivity has been neglected, much to the prejudice of clinical prac-
tice. Also, specifically in relation to images, as in so many of the
questions which it initiated, psychoanalysis is in danger of selling
itself short, or of becoming nothing more than the exercise of writ-
ing glosses on particular authors. Consequently, the study of the
2. The verb insto (the present participle of instans), derives from sto. See
Ernoult and Meiller, Dictionnaire etym. de la langue latine, 1979, Paris:
Klincksieck, p. 653.
3. A differentiation which in the circumstances relates to the trilogy of the
image, the body and the word.
4. [quid vident, nescit], Ovid, Metamorphoses, verse 430, p. 111.
5. 'The mirror stage as formative of the function of the 1', in Jacques
Lacan, Ecrits. A Selection, 1977, London: Tavistock, pp. 1-8.
Introduction to the Theory of the Image 213
image has to proceed by means of certain detours. Principally, it

has to begin again with the familiar process of interrogating tradi-
tions, and in particular those that are contained in poetic, mytho-
logical and religious works. The path to the unconscious dimension
of the image and of speech - or, more simply, to the foundations of
the subject - remains in rebellion against the line taken by scientific
doctrines and glosses. The unconscious dimension of the life of the
speaking being becomes plausible only when the enigmatic and
opaque trace of our relation to images is replayed to us directly, as
a structure that is at first sight impervious to the human condition.
For that reason, and given that it holds us so relentlessly, the image
will be approached progressively.
The same approach will be taken to the other aspect of the in-
stance of representation: the idea of the place to which the image
addresses itself. From this perspective, the image is taken as a mes-
sage, because it bears a demand. In asking what demand, or why
the message should be construed as such, I shall make use of the
corpus of classical texts.
(1) The meaning and the despair of Narcissus. Remarks on the

image and the category of nothingness
To begin at an elementary level, one should first gather some sense

of the idea of representability, without which the concept of the
image crumbles into nothing. The story of Narcissus offers just such
an introduction. How might the despair to which the lovelorn youth
succumbs be seen as a sort of prototype of despair? Having arrived
in the resting place of the dead, Narcissus continues to gaze at the
surface of the Styx,6 which suggests perhaps that death is only a
transitory point in the journey taken by his absolute desire to be
joined with himself. What is at issue in this dual relation between
subject and image for it to lend itself to such extremism?
Narcissus wastes away, and eventually dies, because of the
impOSSibility of rejoining his image, an impossibility that is clarified
and emphasised by something that we have already seen in the text:
the bond which separates a subject and an image sharing the same
body. In aspiring to embrace his image physically, Narcissus exhausts
himself in the attempt to erase the boundary which separates self
6. 'postquam est inferl1a sede receptus, In Stygia spectebat aqua', Metamor-

phoses, verses 504-5, p. 112.
and image - leaving his delirium he cries, 'I am that one! I realise
it and my image does not deceive me.'7 In effect, Narcissus under-
takes the path of humanisation in the wrong direction, a direction
that leads to the abolition of the image and so puts an end to the
disembodiment of the body upon which the future of human
representation depends. Reasoning in terms of the category of
Interdiction it can be observed that the basic law of the speaking
being is one of division, and the most basic division is that between
word and thing in respect of the body. On pain of death, the human
subject must give up any attempt to undo this basic division of
human life. The first point, therefore, is that Narcissus' suffering is
that sorrow which accompanies our terror at being confronted by
the necessity of this division, which requires that we absent our-
selves from ourselves and then master the resulting absence.
Ovid's poem also helps us to conceptualise the relation between
image and absence. The significant lines are these: croceum pro corpore
florem inveniunt Joliis medium cingentibus albis. 8 In place of the absent
Narcissus, the story places 'a saffron-coloured flower surrounded
by white petals' which to this day we call the narcissus. What does
this floral memorial tell us about the relation between subject and
image?
At this point, and for good reason, the image is no longer held in
the gaze of Narcissus. The image is offered instead to the gaze of
thought, and it enunciates or witnesses a truth which is no longer
corporeally present but exists only as a trace, or as the mark of
what was. In other words, it represents an absence. The truth of
Narcissus' desire for his image becomes a commemorated truth.
The reader of this poem in praise of inextinguishable desire sees
that desire represented at the end of the story. Our relation to the
image, in other words, is quite different from the relation through
which Narcissus saw himself. We see the image as the trace of an
absent presence, or to use a phrase which Schopenhauer borrowed
from Jacob Boehme, we see the image as signatura rerum, the signa-
ture of the thing. 9 How should one read a trace, mark or image
which testifies to an absence?
I shall return first to the conclusion of the myth of Narcissus, to
the moment when the poem uses the metaphor of a floral memorial
7. 'Iste ego sum; sensi nee me mea fallit imago', Metamorphoses, verse 463, p. 112.
8. Metamorphoses, verses 509-10, p. 114.
9. This notion returns us to the long history of the theme of the book of
nature. A classic passage from Schopenhauer, The World as Will and
Idea, 1907, London: Kegan Paul, at pp. 284-97.
Introduction to tlte Tlteory of tlte Image 215
to capture the notion of the representability of absence. What is at

issue in that notion of absence? Most immediately the question is
that of the subject's relation to disappearance, to the plausibility of
loss, and, beyond this, to death as the precondition of life. The
flower is present in the name of [au nom del an absent cause. In the
space of the story, it effects a recurring delegation: the flower is
present in the name of the youth Narcissus and in the name of his
image; in the name of an absent body and also of a subject which
has withdrawn into death; and, finally, in the name of his name.
The narcissus as floral memorial does not restore the lost object but
instead testifies to its irredeemable loss.
Translated to a space outside of the story of the death of Nar-
cissus, the conclusion introduces the subject to the relation to noth-
ingness which is implicit in the life of images. The subject has to
dialecticise the alternation of presence and absence which makes
the object, and the bond between word and thing, representable.
The basic question is how to make that which is absent present in
representation without denying the status of the absent object as,
precisely, an absent being. Ovid touches on the question of a dis-
tance [teart], on the very essence of the image, and the phenom-
enon of the delegation of thing to image and of image to word. The
story of Narcissus stages the impossible absence of the object, the
impossibility of acceding to the category of nothingness and so
to self-annihilation. Each life is lived in the face of the following
problem: in order to enter into speech, the subject must live the
constantly reiterated loss of the object, and the commemoration of
that loss as it is indefinitely reiterated in the order of what we call
symbolic life.
I have dealt thus far with two different meanings of the image:
first, the narcissistic image - a description which follows Freud's
attentive reading of certain poetic texts - and secondly, the image
understood as trace. It is essential to distinguish these two mean-
ings if we are to appreciate the importance and complexity of the
stakes manoeuvred by the institutional structures of society. How-
ever, although psychoanalysis now offers us the tools needed to
deal with such a question, it should be noted that the legal, theo-
logical and philosophical traditions with which the civilisation of
civil law has been associated since the mediaeval interpretative
revolution had already foreseen the importance of distinguishing
image and trace. In doing so, they followed the Roman distinction
between imago (image) and vestigium (a foot, and thence a footprint).
Classical scholasticism made brilliant use of these two terms, not
least in problematising the relation of man to the Imago Dei and to

images in general. lO
(2) The image is bearer of a demand. Remarks on the image as

message
One aspect of the idea of an instance of representation is that such an

instance is an element of a topical differentiation which is itself
organised by a logic. The particular style of Ovid's poem itself sug-
gests this differentiation by representing Narcissus' alienation in
an image which he contemplates from afar and to which he speaks.
The entire dramatisation of this scene depends upon the concept
of the gap or distance which duplicates Narcissus, which divides
him by splitting his being, but which remains unrecognised by him:
he speaks to himself as he would to another. Here, some rather
banal or naive questions come to mind: Where does this structure
come from? What place is invoked by it? What place is it that is
echoed by the image?
The point that the image is an echo emerges if one reads carefully
the passages of the Metamorphoses which lead up to Narcissus' fatal
embrace of his image. Take the conversation with the nymph Echo:
'he got back just as many words as he had spoken.1ll If one relates
this to a non-poetic text of Isidore of Seville, the logic of this topical
differentiation becomes rather clearer. Isidore refers to a rock which
creates an echo by the Latinised Greek term icon: 'in answering a
voice, it becomes the image of another's speech.'12 This observa-
tion can free us from the pervasive modern idea that images are
necessarily associated with vision, and can lead us towards a more
important issue, namely the profound relationship between image
and speech.
It is relevant here to emphasise the dramatic intensity of the truth
represented by Ovid's poem: the ineluctable tearing of the subject
away from an attachment to animal opacity in order to enter into
10. Most notably, the fourteenth-century scholastic Albert Ie Grand, Summa

theologiae sive de mirabili scielltia Dei (Libri I Pars I, quaestiones 1-50A)
volume 34 (I) of Opera Omllia, 1978, Aschendorff.
11. [totidem, quot dixit, recipit], Metamorphoses, verse 384, p. 108.
12. Isidore of Seville (deceased 630) transmitted a great deal of Latin anti-
quity to lawyers in particular, in his Etymologiarum sive origillum libri
XX, 1911 edn, Lindsay.
speech is a movement which has nothing to do with any merely

mechanical access to reality. Rather, it can only be achieved at the
price of splitting the being of man, not only through the image of
himself as another but also through the image of the speech of
another. To translate this into the economy of language, when a
child begins to speak, or to inhabit language, it is inevitably the
image of the speech of another, which might indeed be one way of
defining a proper noun. This division of the subject prepares its
approach to representation and to the relation of signification; in
short, it enables the subject to attach itself not to things but to
words. The treatment of images is essential to this subjective work
of abstraction.
The idea of an instance therefore enables us to understand bet-
ter the logical structure of the fabrication of the subject, which is
necessarily a question of the institution of images. We can usefully
propose the notion that the instance of representation is a place, a
place in which image and word originate, and in which representa-
tions of self and other are born. Ovid's poem identifies this place as
a place which is addressed, namely the place addressed by Narcissus'
demand for love. This is what makes Narcissus' image so vivid for
him: the demand which, paradoxically, he addresses to himself bears
witness to the existence of this place. This raises an unforeseen
problem: the message which is unwittingly addressed by Narcissus
to himself constitutes a circuit. The poem directs us to the essen-
tial issue: behind the recognition of the minimal reality which veils
the representation of things - what he thought was his body was but
water 13 - there lurks an enigma which has to do with the principle
of Reason. How can I ignore the fact that the other to whom I
address my message is none other than myself? For the reader of
the poem the problem is to understand Narcissus' illusion in relation
to the message, and to draw out the implications of this illusion.
Message and messenger are confused. One might here refer to
Lacan's judicious observation that this is a sort of structural cross-
roads at which one has to take one's bearings. 14
In order to understand the strange idea of a message-messenger
it is instructive to recall Rimbaud's line, 'I is an other' (Ie est un autre),
which well expresses something that psychoanalysis, in adressing the
13. [corpus putat esse quod unda est], Metamorphoses, verse 417, p. 108.
14. Jacques Lacan, Ecrits, at pp. 8-30 'Aggressivity in psychoanalysis'.
narcissistic phase of the subject's development, has clearly brought

out by means of the theoretical notion of the imaginary structure of
the self. As Ovid's fable makes clear, in a mythical register, the sub-
ject does not confuse itself with its self. The drama of Narcissus
instantiates, within the mythical space of the narrative, the formula
I am an other. The formula message-messenger is apt because Nar-
cissus is the messenger confronted with his own message. There is
no real dialogue, only a form of reflexivity. The text reads: 'each
time that I have stretched my lips down to the limpid waters, each
time he has strained towards me with upturned mouth ... when I
smile, you smile back, ... I have seen your tears flow, when I have
cried.,tS The message consists in the very presence of the messen-
ger, a presence which captivates him.
The capturet6 of the subject by the image - as is suggested by the
fragment from Isidore describing the rock 'which captures the sound
of the human voice' - seems on this basis to be the central element
of the division of the speaking being which structures its entry into
discourse, both at the level of the indivdual and at the level of
society. Human communication is attained not through a maieutics
of dialogue but rather by way of an image, and, therefore, a sort of
formalism. The concept of the message-messenger identifies a prim-
ordial structural impasse which is linked to the phenomenon of
language. At the social level, it is left to the normative structures of
a culture's symbolic order to perform the anthropologically essen-
tial task of manipulating the instance of representation in such a
way that the narcissistic impasse might be taken up by the subject
and so form the basis of social exchange.
(2) THE OTHER IN THE MIRROR AND THE

SUBJECT'S SPECULATION ON SIMILARITY.
THE NARCISSISTIC BASIS OF SOCIETY
It is now necessary to address the myth of Nacisssus in terms of

its role in the cultural structuration of identity. The human would
be unthinkable without the bonding of body, image and word, or
15. [quotiens liquidis porreximus oscula lymph is, His totiens ad me resupino
nititur ore . .. Cum risi, adrides. Lacrimas quoque saepe notavi Me lacrimante
tuas], Metamorphoses, verses 451-2, 459-60, p. 110.
16. Etymologariu11l, 'humanae vocis sonum captans .. .'
without an instance of representation. It follows that society itself

would be unthinkable if this wager, which is essential to life within
the species, were not made. It is important, therefore, to develop
the study by asking how the mechanism at work in the mythology
of Narcissus, and which psychoanalysis has carefully brought to
light, is accounted for within the structure of a society. How does
it perform its role in a manner that is intelligible to the subject, and
how does it achieve the stability appropriate to an organisation
based upon speech?
From an anthropological perspective, the essential issue is that
the subject's point of greatest vulnerability is also the point of its
meeting with the institution. In all cultures the principle of insti-
tutionality necessarily has to do with the imaginary constitution
of the self, the alienation of the subject in its image, and the love
of the self as the embrace of another, all of which constitute what
I describe as the material of narcissism. We are confronted with an
ineradicable fact whose importance is hard to gauge because the
link between social function and representational logic has not yet
been established. This is not in itself surprising. The belief structure
presupposed by modern scientism has sought to close off inquiry
into this problem. There are, therefore, good reasons to begin again,
at the basic level at which we left it, with the phenomenon of nar-
cissism: how can the classical impasse of narcissism be transposed
so that it might be assumed by the subject and form the basis of
social exchanges?
In order to grasp in what sense the narcissistic structure of a
society is essential, it is important to appreciate that the subjective
mechanism that underpins Ovid's myth serves an essential require-
ment of life: that something should be preserved even as it is tran-
scended. This is not a reference to some sort of psychologism, but
to the Hegelian notion of Aufhebung,17 or, more straightforwardly,
a recognition of the symbolic character of what is in issue in the
17. This term returns us both to the idea of gathering together, conserv-
ing, and to that of suppression or abolition. It plays a very important
role in the development of Hegelian thought on negativity and the
dialectic. See the remarks of Hyppolite, the translator of The Phenom-
enology of Spirit into French (Paris: Aubier-Montaigne, I, pp. 19-20);
and also A. Kojeve, Introduction iI la lecture de Hegel, 1968, Paris:
Gallimard, pp. 554-9. J. Derrida addresses the question of Narcissism
and specularity in terms of the problematic of Aufhebung in Margins of
Philosophy, 1982, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, at pp. 283-8.
phenomenon of representation as such, and which is normally pro-

cessed by an institutional dialectic.
What Narcissus finds senseless - 'he did not know what he was
seeing' - relates to the source or origin of his image. But what then
is this source for the subject, or for Narcissus, who alone can be
present before his own image? It is an origin which is pure; or, to
adopt Derrida's phrase, it is 'the non-reference to the self./IB To cite
Derrida again: And if the source has no profile for itself, it is like
I
an absolute glance which being always opened wide and thrown

toward the visible, cannot itself perceive itself, never emerging from
its night.,19 This brings out the idea that the scene constructs the self
as an external object which it interrogates, not in a causal mode -
why is this object here? - but rather according to a mode of suffer-
ing consciousness: why am I not an unseparated presence?
There is an important lesson to be found in this scene. It is the
model or mould of all the scenes of origin encountered by men; it is
the original gaze, or the structural point of the logic of representation
which founds the subject's sense of being in the world or its sense
of the being of the world, a being which is supported by speech.
Before being summoned to inhabit what modern jargon, in its
unwitting dealings with the structures of Interdiction, calls parental
images, human beings enter into an elementary form of knowledge;
namely, that of the instance of specularity. How is this instance to
be presented in the absolute form of narcissism?
A mirror is an operation of division which necessarily transforms:
it presents an origin as an outcome. It transforms an origin into an
outcome, or into something from which it derives, much as in Ovid's
story the image comes from Narcissus. The elements of his opera-
tion can be set out by asking three essential questions.
First, what is an origin within the phenomenon of representation?
Or, more precisely, how does the origin come to be manifested
to the subject; how does it become an effect of representation? The
I [Ie jel must be identified as the point to which any presence is
related, including the presence of this I in the world, the image of
the self in the world, and the words which it utters. This source or
origin, however, only knows itself by means of that which is given
to it in its presence as object and according to the different modes
of this object. Moreover, it only knows itself as the one who sees
18. [l'irreference a soil, Derrida, Margins, at p. 283.

19. Derrida, Margins, at p. 284.
this object, not as a gaze upon the gaze which sees. With regard
to the theory of the relation of representation in the story of Nar-
cissus, it becomes apparent that the knowledge which the I has of
the I is a falsely reflexive knowledge: the I as a point of origin of its
own presence in the world is discovered only through this other as
object, namely its image. In strictly Hegelian terms, the source or
origin is here a result. 20
Second, what is the essential lesson of Narcissus' oscillation
between the recognition and non-recognition of his own image? The
problem is that of pure identity: how can one coincide with one's
mirror image, and who or what warrants this coincidence? This
essentially philosophical problem - and here some reference should
be made to the scholastic problematic of id cujus est imago (that of
which the image is an image)21 - gives us a clue as to the being of
the image for the subject. By this I mean that a transcendental ele-
ment is at stake in the relation of resemblance, an element which
has to do with something other than the concrete relation of resemb-
lance for a given subject or if I put it like this, the subject of the
face. This transcendental stake refers the subject - any subject - to
a guarantee of coincidence, or, more precisely, to the Reason of
signs, to pure alterity as the guarantee of the presence of the world
as a relation of meaning which is taken to be true. In other words,
the object of Narcissus' oscillation between the recognition and non-
recognition of his image is the guarantee of his divided being, the
foundations of truth, or the presupposition of the instance of the
third [tiercel which founds any relation to the object, the other-than-
self, and which, as we shall see, undoes any dual relation with the
object. This suggests that the structure of the human subject is a
structure of representation. Narcissus is faceless for Narcissus:
because he has no guarantee he is denied access to the mirror which,
in representing the Reason of signs, is always a transcendental
theatre. Narcissus is thus, ultimately, in the untenable position of a
20. Derrida, Margins, at p. 281. [The source results here.)

21. Thus Albert Ie Grand expounds a doctrine of Reference through the
image for the human animal: the creature which possesses a truth
copied from the divine truth ('creatura ... veritatem habet exemplatam a
divil1a veritate'). In the same way that the oath of the juror refers to
God, so also a person who worships an image of a saint refers, through
the image, to the truth of God. Commentary, Super Matthaeum, chap-
ter 5, verse 34 (Neque per caelum =Do not swear at all, not even to the
sky ... ), Opera Omllia, 1987, vol. 21, Part II, p. 112.
divine creator, for whom the question of the mirror or of the guar-
antor simply does not arise.
Third, what makes the mythical circuit of speech work? A proper
understanding of the original scene of communication at the highly
abstract level at which Ovid places it, suggests that the answer is a
division or a cut rune coupure). In using this term, which was much
favoured by Valery,22 and which has enjoyed much success in con-
temporary philosophy and psychoanalysis, I take it to designate what
is at work in the reflexivity of the relation of self to self, namely
the division of the subject, which implies its presence in the world,
or, as I have already suggested, the mechanism of objectification
of the I as another for the I that sees itself. This presence of the self
as an effect, as an origin that is a result, is unavailable to Narcissus.
The mirror is a structure, or montage of speech and division. It
is a logical presupposition of human representation, and it signi-
fies for the subject. It signifies in two senses. First, it mobilises the
machinery of meaning, and constructs the subject hermeneutically
as the interpreter of its own representation. Secondly, according to
the juridical meaning of signification, division notifies the subject
of an irremediable loss, or, according to the Hegelian category of
negativity, the torment of origin. Indeed, a Hegelian phrase summar-
ises the subjective status of the dividing cut: 'separation from origin'
[Trennung von dem Ursprung).23 In these terms, Narcissus' futile des-
pair expresses the horror that follows in the train of non-separation.
The material of narcissism is therefore an ineradicable given of
the organisation of all social bonds. Again, Valery is instructive:
22. 'It is an extraordinary fact that we talk to ourselves and that this
discourse is indispensable to us ... Who speaks? Who listens? It is not
exactly the same person ... This voice can become (morbidly) a com-
plete stranger. The existence of this speech of the self to the self is the
sign of a cut. The possibility of being several is necessary for reason,
but also used by it. Perhaps we take the image as other to the impulse
of the mirror', Valery, manuscript edition, 1958, Paris: eRNS, 1918-20,
vol. 7, p. 615.
23. The formula relates back to what Hegel says of the relation of parents
to children: 'the piety of the children with regard to their parents is in
its turn affected by the emotional contingency of their having become
from themselves, or in themselves, in the form of an other who dis-
appears so as to attain a being-for-itself and a conscience proper to
itself through its separation from its source - a separation in which
this source dries up.' Phenomenologtj of Spirit, VI, A, vol. II at p. 24.
One could say that the origin suppresses itself.
Because I love myself! ... oh ironic reflection of myself!

Oh my kisses! flung at the calm fountain ...
Must I give my life to your love, oh sweet shadow?24
When at this point in his movement of oscillation Narcissus says 'I

love myself', he situates his image as other than himself, as the
object of his gaze. We know, on the basis of the preceding observa-
tions, that this situating of what is other than the self, at the most
basic level of representation, does not lead to any expropriation of
the subject, but constitutes a movement of delegation of the sub-
ject towards the image. If we analyse things in this way, that is,
by analysing the grammatical phrasing of the 'I love myself' as a
reflexive form, the movement of delegation appears as the construc-
tion or assembling of the elements that constitute the mirror. This
delegation of self to self presupposes the following: the emergence
of the object, of the image, or, in other words, of the source as effect,
of the origin as outcome; the assumption of a guarantee of coin-
cidence, or a relation of resemblance; an irremediable loss, a sep-
aration from oneself, the assumption of negativity. We have here,
therefore, in the formula 'I love myself' the elements of the composi-
tion and transposition of the material of narcissism, and we can in
this way understand the movement of delegation when Narcissus
recognises his own image. Narcissus is transported, literally trans-
ported. The constitutive alienation of the subject in its image finds
its greatest accomplishment in the transport of love. And, to the
extent that there is transportation, we are referred to the concept of
metaphor which, as its etymology suggests, is defined as a transport.
The moment in which Narcissus recognises his own image can be
defined as an instance of metaphorisation. Let us return to the basic
elements: the origin as outcome, the guarantee of resemblance, neg-
ativity. We find that they are assumed by the relation of self to
self in the phrase 'I love myself', which we now know to be sayable
only if the self is seen as an other. 'I love myself' presupposes that
'I is an other'. The moment in which the image is recognised is a
metaphorical moment in the sense that it is the metaphorisation of
24. [Car, je m'aime! ... 0 reflet ironique de Moi! 0 mes baisers! lances a la
ca/me fontaine . .. Faut-il rna vie a ton amour, 0 spectre cher?) Valery, in
one of the versions of 'Narcisse parle' [Narcissus speaks], in Oeuvres, I,
1957, Paris: Gallimard, pp. 1558-9.
the other to the self, and of the other as self. The material of nar-
cissism is the pillar of both subjective and social identities.
The question of the image is not only a question of the alienation
of the self. Alienation, which is only one aspect of the problem-
atic of specularity, is an articulation or transposition. It makes the
articulation of subject and institution - the symbolic - thinkable. The
symbolic has to be representable; and, given this necessity, it has to
reproduce the original scene of communication - the divided sub-
ject's relation to the other of the self - in order to modulate and
develop it at a level which transcends or exceeds the subject. The
metaphorisation of alienation is the foundation of symbolic organ-
isation. There is more to the image than the impasse of the self
because the instance of representation, which has to do with the
image and which might be termed the imaginal, constitutes the basis
or the starting point of this transport of metaphorisation. In other
words, for the imaginal the symbolic is already there.
If identity emerges from the elaboration of the narcissistic
impasse, this elaboration, which creates the similar as a term of the
dialectic of the mirror, would be inconceivable for the subject as
such were it not for the cultural use of the mirror. Focusing on the
structures of Western culture, my analysis will develop two themes.
First, it reveals the fate of the narcissistic structure by looking at its
encounter with the principle of institutions, that is, with the sym-
bolic order of a particular society. It then returns to the question of
the mirror as a presupposition of metaphorisation, the aim being to
define the contradiction which requires us to think of the mirror -
or, here, society as it presents itself as a mirror - as being capable
of fulfilling the function of representation, or of holding an image
up to the subject.
(A) The narcissistic process and the differentiation of the other.

Observations on the institution of the similar
The aim of this analysis is to grasp the process of identity in its

unavoidable stage of transition, what might be termed its element-
ary narcissistic structure. One of the difficulties of embarking on
such a study is that in contemporary Western society, which claims
to have neither totem nor taboo, this narcissistic structure - the
transition of the questioning subject towards dialecticisation by the
mirror of culture - is no longer perceived. We fall back instead on
ersatz versions of the mirror, which are in essence totalitarian even
though they are supposed to shelter the structuration of the subject

- the liberated subject which identifies with advertising images. In
these circumstances, the metaphorisation of the other of the self,
and of the other as self, is no longer understood to involve institu-
tional structures. My observations run contrary to contemporary
cliches about the sovereign subject which, because it denies its own
division, is supposed to have no similars. What then does similar
mean? What does it mean to represent similarity to oneself or to
identify oneself with the similar?
When he recognises his image, Narcissus says, 'I am he who is
over there ... I burn with love for me.'25 To recognise oneself, to
identify oneself with the other of the mirror, is to know oneself to
be divided and referred to that other, the status of the mirror being
that of a dividing third instance or the inaugurator of a relation
which I have elsewhere termed the separating bond. 26 It is by virtue
of this distance, by virtue of the very fact of the dimension of divi-
sion, that the image of the self always bears the stamp of the other.
This irreducible aspect of alterity, which stamps the image, founds
the subjective question to which institutional interventions give
shape and status. Thus the question of a relation to alterity is at
once intra-subjective and institutional. On the other hand, to accom-
modate oneself to the alterity of one's image by symbolising divi-
sion is the basis of the subject's relation to culture. Our problem is
to envisage by what means and in what mode the metaphorisation
of the other is constructed by the social order of images.
I shall return to the idea of transport that I raised in connection
with metaphor. The mode of the discourse by which Narcissus
addresses the other of the self is that of the transport of love. This
gives us a valuable clue in dealing with those cultural constructions
which are based on the material of narcissism. The representation
of alterity, to which the amorous subject refers, is a universal con-
dition of humanity. This representation or staging inevitably con-
structs the image of otherness that it holds out for the world. And
it is at just this point, where it is at its most fragile, that the speak-
ing animal anchors itself to institutionalised alterity, using the
multiple links which it offers to the figure of the other. At the level
of Narcissus's other, we reach the level of another sort of other, the
absolute Other rather than the narcissistic other, the former enabling
25. Metamorphoses, Book III, verses 463, 464, p. 84.

26. Le Desir politique de Dieu, 1988, Paris: Fayard, at p. 132.
the subject to assume identity and alterity in one movement. The

absolute Other therefore signifies the point of opening which the
subject uses to organise its narcissistic bond, not only by referring
to itself but also by reference to all others. It is important to illus-
trate this mechanism in order to grasp its nature and to gauge its
significance in the unfolding of the institutional order.
In dealing with the Western universe of representation, we can
appropriate some traditional elements. The theme of the divine Face,
is one of the most interesting of these because of its links with
theology, philosophy and the arts. It shows us quite precisely the
nature of a society's imaginal instance, and how the representation
of the absolute Other, that is to say the Image of the principle of
alterity, comes to playa metaphorical mediating role for the subject
at the same time as it makes the idea of culture possible. By that
I mean to say that it makes possible the government of the empire
of narcissistic images which constitute what we call the human
community. Of course the theme of the Face of God is only one
manifestation of the European theatre of images: nevertheless, the
richness of expression that it provides allows it to be invoked as a
representative discourse.
The theme of the divine Name and the divine Face emerged from
the Jewish tradition before being taken up, enriched and amplified,
by Christianity. I am most interested here in Latin Christianity, and
its iconographic and theoretical developments. Since the mediaeval
revolution of the interpreter which opened the era of institutional
modernity, Europe has had at its disposal a vast corpus of schol-
astic texts in which the interrogation of man's encounter with the
image of the Creator (Imago Dei) finds its natural place. But, to
follow the fable of Narcissus, and to grasp the fact that all theories
of the image are structurally moored to the debate about the image,
we shall give some consideration to one form of the cult of the Holy
Face, which inspired a devotional literature and an almost unin-
terrupted exercise of the plastic arts, from the end of the Middle
Ages up to Matisse. This concrete example suggests how the non-
correspondence of self and other - the impossibility of the subject
ever joining its image - opens on to the dimension of absolute, irre-
mediable, alterity, a dimension which engulfs any relation to the
similar other.
The problematic of the Holy Face emerged from a complex legend
whose basic elements are common to the Eastern and Western tra-
ditions. According to the Latin tradition, it is linked exclusively to
the legend of Veronica, who in one old version is said to have met
Jesus, who asked her for a piece of cloth, pressed it to his face, and
gave her back the cloth imprinted with his image.27 In another, medi-
aeval, version, which is concerned with the suffering of Christ and
which has taken over the modern tradition, Christ's self-portrait
is presented rather differently. The story tells of a woman from
Jerusalem who wiped Christ's face as he ascended Calvary; the
image of Christ remained imprinted on the cloth. This produced
the true image (vera icona) of the Saviour. The name of the legend-
ary heroine of this episode of the Passion is taken from the anci-
ent tradition, Veronica, which according to Greek etymology means
bringer of victory, is also the name given to the veil bearing the
image of the Holy Face (the veronica). Notice the semantic shift,
from the name of the legendary saint to the Effigy of Christ (Effigies
Christi), to the prodigious image which was imprinted on the veil
and venerated by pilgrims in the Middle Ages.
The representation of alterity - in this case the Holy Face, the
figure of the absolute Other which was invented by Christian soci-
eties - organises the offer to the subject for which it metaphorises
the other of the self and the other as self. For each subject who is
of this culture, this representation founds the second order of the
image, and it is by means of these procedures that the institution of
images is inaugurated. Liturgies and rituals bear witness to this
shift in register. We are no longer in a relation of symmetry, or a
point for point correspondence with Narcissus' impasse with his
image; we are dealing with the advent of the other, not of the self
as an other but of the great Other who bears the imprint of the
divine, which pilgrims came to admire. We should attempt to define
the terms of this change of register.
(B) The staging of the absolute Other
There are three essential points here:

(a) In the representation of the absolute Other invented by Chris-
tian societies, the recognition of distance literally makes the image
prodigious.
27. On the history of this legend, see J.A. Robilliard, Dictiollnaire de spiritual-
iM ascetique et mystique, 1964, Paris: Beauchesne, sub Face, cols 27-8.
Numerous other indications can be found in A. Chastel, 'La Veronique'
1978, Revue de rArt, 71-8.
The holy object, the divine self-portrait, the true icon, or painterless
painting, is given the Greek term acheiropoietes, or works made
without the intervention of the hand, the term which in Byzantine
Christianity was used to designate the most important icons. We
may leave to one side for the moment the works of classical paint-
ing, and remain with the reliquary of miracles which was exhibited
in Saint Peter's in Rome and venerated by the tradition throughout
the Middle Ages.
The ritualistic or liturgical staging of the subject presupposes a
primary element which is often overlooked. This element is the sine
qua non of the prodigious image, the precondition withot which it
could neither come into being nor produce its effects; namely, the
construction of an uncrossable distance, an irreducible gap, or a
void which cannot be filled. In common with all holy dialectics, the
believer's veneration of the Holy Face presupposes a separation
from something incommensurable. The metaphorisation of pure
alterity by the representation of an absolute Other, which there-
by acquires for the subject the status of a transcendent image, is
effected by assuming that which tore Narcissus' in two: a separation
from self. The representation of the Holy Face is first and foremost
an apologia or defence of the gap, and it is on the basis of this
rhetoric of division that the divine can work subjectively as a meta-
phor for the void and for the gap.
What follows depends upon the demonstration effected by the
Veronica as a mirror in the second order of representation. What
is this demonstration? First, that the overcoming of Narcissism is
nothing other than a form of accession to a limit, or more exactly
to the principle of limitation. In cultural terms this is precisely what
was at issue in the veneration of the divine portrait; it was a means
of setting the subject on the way to a recognition of this principle
of the limit. Reasoning in modern terms, one might say that to
admire oneself in the divine image gives the key to the image of the
self as an unattainable image. This mode of subjective access to the
limit, to socialisation through an essentially religious structure, is a
condition of subjective life; it institutes the separation between the
self and its image.
(b) The representation of the absolute Other constructs the subject's

relation to the similar: Narcissus is stuck at this point, preserved yet
superseded.
To return to the divine image gathered by Veronica, a hymn com-

posed in the fourteenth century in honour of the Holy Face contains
a phrase noted by Chastel: Dataque Veronicae signum ob amoris (Given
to Veronica as a sign of love}.28 If Narcissus' quest is sustained by
the transport of love, then we find the same discursive stamp in this
ritual scene. The problematisation of a relation to the other in the
representation of the absolute Other is conceivable only on the basis
of desire. Veronica's veil is a mirror which is offered to the subject
of the phrase 'I love myself'.
The persistence of the narcissistic 'I love myself' cannot be doubted
and finds an echo in classical art, as, for example, in Diirer's 1513
engraving of the veil. The artist created a Holy Face which reproduced
his own features, in virtually the same form as they appear in his
self-portrait of 1500.29 Nor are the mystics, in this regard, far behind.
Consider, for example, the amorous passion of Therese de Lisieux
for the divine face: 'Your Face is my only fatherland', she exclaims
in her poem 'To live for love'. At the level of montage where the
absolute Other emerges, we re-encounter narcissistic desire. 3o
Having taken note of the distance between subject and image
which is instituted by the ritual representation of the principle of
alterity, and which figuratively symbolises the absolute Other, the
basis of the operation becomes clear: there is a transfer of narciss-
istic desire - the desire of the other for its image - towards this Other,
the absolute Object which is made present through the agency of
ritual. This transition from Ovid's fable to the social theatre of the
Holy Face venerated by the believer, institutes the metaphorisation
of the other at two structural levels, that of the subjective and that
of the cultural. The principle of alterity acquires the status of a
metaphor, or a specular object. Hence, the social construction of the
distance which makes the cultural entry of the subject into alterity
possible, should be analysed as the transposition of the logic of the
mirror, a phenomenon upon which the entire normative system is
dependent. Law itself, as a representational effect which civilises
the subject; in other words, law understood as a symbolic struc-
turation, depends upon this logic. It is therefore no exaggeration
to say that in bringing to light the production of the other as a
28. Chaste!, 'La Veronique', at p. 72.

29. Chaste!, 'La Veronique', at pp. 75-6.
30. Robilliard, DictiOll11aire , at col. 32.
specular object, we are isolating the social mechanism of identity

within the Western cultural tradition.
The motor principle of this mechanism is of importance to anthro-
pology and its fragility has been identified by psychoanalysis. In
order that the metaphorisation of self and other should take shape
in an institutional perspective of differentiation, that is to say,
one which founds the relations between subjects in the distance
which is essential to recognition of the other than self, identity
can become intelligible only if it is constructed as a mediated rela-
tion between the self and itself, mediated, that is, by a principle
of alterity which is posited as being itself identical with itself. The
possibility of the subject assuming its own division, which founds
its identity and from which its entry into a relation of alterity pro-
ceeds, is played out on this basis. The construction of the principle
of alterity as it is produced by the scene of the Holy Face, has
meaning only because the absolute Other which is made metaphor-
ically present coincides with itself, or is itself identical with itself.
The metaphor of the absolute Other should be understood as the
representation of a relation of identity for the divided subject. Here
we can locate the vast theological reflection on the Holy Trinity,
which from this perspective resolves itself into an attempt to
dialecticise an identity thought in the mode of a ternary division
which constitutes a unity. In other words, Western culture does not
conceive the construction of a pure void, or Nothingness, but rather
the absence of an Object which is indefinitely destined to attain a
rediscovered presence.
Identity is therefore a relation of identity. According to this pro-
position, we can appreciate that the operative mechanism which
mobilises representation is based upon the formula 'I is an other.'
Any socialised relation with an other bears the stamp of narcissism,
or, more precisely, the stamp of the relation of the subject to its
image of the other. It therefore becomes easier to understand that
the recognition of the other - what I call the moment of metaphor-
isation - is at once the metaphorisation of the other than the self and
the other as self. From this perspective, culture is a generalisation
of the logic of the mirror.
That is the lesson to be learned from putting Ovid's fable and the
legend of the Veronica in perspective. We discover the most basic
stage in human communication: the absorption of the other, any
other, in the imaginary constitution of the I. We also establish,
through the institution of a distance, or a separation from self, that
the construction of identity, or of the relation to self and the relation

to the similar, is a three-part scene. This doubled ternarity was
quite remarkably set out by Matisse in his 'Study for Saint Ver-
onica'. He departs from the preceding pictorial tradition, in which
the veil carrying the image of the Holy Face is painted, by includ-
ing the gaze of the viewer: Veronica shows the veil to a believer
who contemplates the Holy Face, the God in whose image he him-
self is made, and the whole of this scene is offered to the spectator
of the Study.
Identity as a relation, or the construction of a relation between
self and similar, involves placing the subject under a reference to the
absolute Other which guarantees a necessary distance or gap; it is
placed under the banner of the principle of alterity, the Other which
is beyond any foundation, the Other which founds all bonds with the
other. This is the kernel of institutional differentiation. We can there-
fore define human society as a generalised mirror and the indefinite
multiplication of mastered specular objects, which are mastered
because they are referred to the dimension of the Third (Tiers).
These observations make the terms of our starting point, Nar-
cissus placed before the enigma of the image or the other of the mir-
ror, even clearer. For each subject the other is a supposition. The
problem is to make that supposition plausible and viable: that is the
basic principle of the enterprise of instituting images. The question
of Narcissus allows us to decipher the relation to the world as a
process based upon the subject's constitution of the world for him-
self, and to measure the effect of representation which normative
systems have to deal with permanently: others are first and fore-
most specular objects, or a collection of other symmetrical 'I's'. If
we have properly understood this primordial fact, juridical struc-
tures of differentiation become logically referable to the representa-
tion of the absolute Other, which I term Reference. Structures of
kinship, if they are seen otherwise than according to platitudinous
theories of social regulation, lie at the heart of those great man-
oeuvres of identity which institute the human subject as a living
incarnation of a relation to the similar.
(c) The representation of the absolute and the problem of instituting

Reason.
The legend of the Veronica shows how the divine image was intro-
duced into the narcissistic relation. In constructing the void through
the very fact of its own instituted place, the absolute Other is the
figure that guarantees the principle of alterity and the procedures
for the metaphorisation of the image of the other than self and the
other as self at the level of the institution. The example of the Holy
Face allows us to identify what is in issue for the subject in the
scene of division which is thereby projected on the social stage. We
can now develop this explanation so as to grasp the extremity
involved in the power of staging the absolute Other, or of presenting
the absolute specular Object to the subject.
The logic of representation is such that the various elements or
indices of the problematisation of the mirror which we have just
invoked, once they are mobilised at the social level, are referable to
this scene of division. In particular, if the status of the absolute
Other is one of specular -presence, this mode of presence suggests
the way in which culture manoeuvres the origin or the source of
what presents itself as the image of the subject, of the outcome
which the structure of the mirror produces as origin. The question
of origin is therefore an effect of representation, a question which
puts the seeing subject in relation with the enigmatic presence of
the other as being, according to Ovid's formula, 'that which he sees
but does not know'. To echo the language of the Metamorphoses, I
shall summarise what is in issue for the subject in the scene of the
Holy Face by reference to an extract from one of Borges' poems: 'the
mirrors of the Eternal. _. That which has neither when nor why.,31
What this means is that the operation is one of reversal. The
absolute Other of division becomes a figuration of the original Other,
it is, yet again, an origin as a result. It is an effect of representation
which is configured as a scene of origin. This observation takes us
back to the foundations of the question of narcissism; the problem
of representing the self for the subject, in which the origin is no
more than a supposition which makes the image of self plausible.
More precisely, the problem of an unrepresentable representation
of self - a problem which Louis Marin's study of the Veronica
laboriously revolves around32 - is not the problem of working out
whether the unrepresentable can in fact be represented, but rather
that of working out what is so unattainable for the subject in this
31. From a poem of Emmanuel Swedenborg, reprinted in J.L. Borges and

O. Ferrari, Ultimes dialogues, 1988, Paris: Zoe/ Aube, p. 85.
32. Louis Marin, 'Figurabilite du visuel: la Veronique ou la question du
portrait a Port-Royal', 1987,35 Nouvelle revue de psychanalyse 51-65.
representation: namely, the point of origin, the source of the subject's

own image, locked in a gaze in which it cannot see itself. This gives
a new and rather unexpected slant to Pierre Nicole's observation
that 'bit by bit we will create so detailed a portrait that we will be
able see in each moment everything that we are.,n I can think of
no better way into the problem with which we are concerned here,
namely the question of how to conceive of the radicality of the
power wielded by social organisation in its manipulation of the
absolute specular Object, towards which we address our desire to
see 'all that we are' in every moment of our lives. This is the prin-
cipal lever which power uses and abuses in its role of instituting
Reason.
We can see quite clearly in the example of the ritual construction
of the Holy Face just what the representation of alterity ordains in
relation to the institution of the similar for man. Narcissus' sense-
lessness is reincorporated in the service of life, or transformed into
Reason. By virtue of distance the unrepresentable is relativised and
the subject's absence from itself is no longer an abolition or annihila-
tion of the subject: the other can come to being as the similar and
this similar is instituted because it receives the mark of Reason. In
these terms, Reason is the representation of the specular object
itself, or the structural or anthropological function of giving life to
representation, of causing the speaking animal to live and to repro-
duce according to the law of the species. Reason can therefore be
called the Reason of representation, the Reason of signs and categor-
ies, the Reason of the subject. Three brief observations might help
to elucidate the institutional aspect of this concept of reason and its
role in representing the principle of alterity and the way in which
it introduces us to the political signification of the absolute specular
Object, the image in which, as Nicole's formula has it, we are sum-
moned to see all that we are.
First, the religious representation of the principle of alterity in the
form of the specular Object shows religion's role in guaranteeing
Reason by giving the subject a way of putting an end to the infinite
regress of causation. In other words, the fact that the specular object
serves to mediate the subject's access to the world allows us access
to a representation which makes of the original Other a causal Other.
33. Extract from Traite de la cOl1l1aissal1ce de soi-meme, which is cited from

Marin, 'Figurabilib~'. [Nous formerons peu a peu un portrait si ressemblant
que 110US pourrol1s voir a chaque moment tout ce que no us sommes.]
This dimension of instituted distance fabricates the specular Object

as an object which is at once caused and causal, and allows any sub-
ject to come to presence in representation: the realm of the visible
becomes a universe of objects which is outside the subject, but which
is nonetheless still attached to the theatre of narcissism and hence
to the question of all that we are.
Secondly, lying behind religion there is a pure Politics, a power
over the most basic principle of humanity, one which manoeuvres
the specular object and which by this means governs the narcissistic
relation. Power, therefore, is in a direct relation with the Reason of
representation. In order to institute the similar, a society constructs
an image of all that we are. Politics, therefore, is eminently reli-
gious,34 which is evident if we attend to the etymology of the word
itself. Politics occupies the structural position of the rheos of anti-
quity in the sense that Herodotus gives to that term - it posits things
and the universe35 - and which may be translated as follows: its
function is that of posing and exposing a mode of presence of the
world, and of the world for the subject, through the theatrical rep-
resentation of the specular Object.
Thirdly, it can be observed by way of the religious staging of the
principle of alterity, that the symbolic absolute Other is intangible.
No one can touch Reason, the Reference, or the absolute Mirror.
This is the core meaning of all those legal manoeuvres which are
designed to protect the social representation of foundations. Among
those manoeuvres, which lie dormant in a secularised Western
culture which has invented more modern normative methods of
socialisation, there is one quite essential technique, namely those
doctrines of blasphemy which have now become so obsolete and
incomprehensible, despite their renewal in twentieth-century total-
itarian empires. If, however, we remain with the religious tradition
34. See Emile Benveniste, Le Vocabulaire des institutions indo-europ/ennes,

II, pp. 267-72, which shows that the derivation of the Latin religio, is
not from the verb ligare (to bind), but from legere (to collect together,
bring back to oneself, recognise and, by extension, to read). It is for
this reason that I have tended to understand religion as the assem-
blage of montages and procedures which put human beings in the
position of collecting together, bringing back to oneself recognising
and reading the discourse of Interdiction.
35. The vocable Theos can be linked here to the development of the Greek
verb tithemi, to pose, establish, to found, as Herodotus in his text relates
that the ancient Greeks invoked 'the gods' without ever choosing a
personal name for them. Herodotus, Histories.
rather than with its totalitarian appropriations, we can see that
blasphemy is both a matter of (criminal) social jurisdiction and a
question of (penitential) subjective jurisdiction; in other words, it
has to do with both dimensions of western practices of power. It
institutes an absolute crime, in a form that is very similar to the
Roman notion of laesa majestas or treason. Because it involves an
attack on an indestructible divinity, it is a victimless crime. The
crime is considered absolute because it infringes the specular struc-
ture - the montage - of a given culture; in a sense the blasphemer
pretends to take up the place of the Mirror, he claims to invert the
order of the world. This makes it easier to understand what is in
issue in the canonical tradition of blasphemy: the equivalent of a
patricide perpetrated against the founding Name, against the found-
ing Other and the symbolic principle that founds the linguistic
structure of what is law for man in any given society. According
to classical European analyses, blasphemy was related to idolatry,
sacrilege and, more generally, to crimes against Reference which
touched upon the problem of madness (God and Reason): these
weighty questions have such resonances in contemporary mani-
festations of fanaticism that some further exploration of them is
in order.
(3) THE SYMBOLIC DIMENSION OF THE ALIENATION

OF THE SUBJECT IN THE IMAGE. THE QUESTION
OF THE STATUS OF THE MIRROR
Narcissus saw no mirror at all. There can only be a mirror where

the image is recognised. This aphorism communicates an essential
theoretical proposition: identity is a relational construct and the
relation in question is itself representational.
Identity is the effect of a triangular structure in which not only
the subject and its image, but also the mirror which produces the
split between them, are located. Given that the individuation of
speaking beings - or, in structural terms, the accession of the sub-
ject to speech - is a work of the cultural system as a whole, this
point gives some definition to the question of narcissistic alienation
and to the mechanisms through which it is revived so as to thwart
the logic of the subject's debt to death. It will be seen that this
revival on the social scene - the revival of the imaginary within the
symbolic order - is supposed to fashion the discourse of identity
as a discourse of separation, and that a society can only fulfil its

anthropological role by doing just that: by producing itself as a mir-
ror; or, in other words, by deploying itself as a representation of the
third element in a narcissistic relation.
What then of this mirror? What role do the preceding mytholo-
gical and religious references suggest it might have? In Ovid's
fable, there was in fact neither a mirror nor an image. Narcissus
barely glimpsed the impassable frontier which separated him from
the other who vanished upon recognition. Durer's genius enabled
him to give artistic expression to something which is latent in the
recognition of one's own image: the mediating role of the Other
(the absolute Other symbolised by the Holy Face) in the constitution
of the other whom Narcissus misrecognised - the other whom one
recognises as an image of oneself. Durer took the essential model of
the mirror and developed it at another level; he rendered its sym-
bolism by transposing narcissistic adoration into a love for the face
of Christ. Where Narcissus saw an other whom he did not know to
be himself the believer sees an Other who cannot be himself. Nar-
cissus falls short of Reason; the believer is beyond Reason, in the
mythical foundations of Reason. The theatrical space of the social is
located somewhere in between. In these terms the mirror testifies to
a double play of representation. It indicates the paradoxical and yet
inevitable transition to which the subject must submit in fashioning
an identification. Seen in these terms the specular principle is a
place which, within the institutional construction of culture and sub-
ject, binds and unbinds a contradiction. The bond to the mirror is
a bond which separates.
This notion of the mirror must be developed consistently with an
examination of the basic elements of the symbolic apparatus, within
which there is an infinite cultural diversity of the phenomenon which
is here called the mirror. If symbolism does indeed symbolise or
sublate the narcissistic relation, the difficulty here is to position the
mirror in the deployment of the symbolic order and so to consider
its linguistic character. The mirror - the water's surface in Ovid's
poem, or the veil in the drama of the Holy Face - is a bearer of mean-
ing. It has metaphorical significance, it represents a function woven
by speech. It is necessary to attempt to define the difficulty which
emerges here: What is the place of the mirror in the universe of rep-
resentation, and how does it occupy that place? What, in terms of
a general perspective on the institution of those images through
which society lives, is the point of this theoretical investigation?
I would begin with a painting by the Spanish painter Zurbaran,

the author of a Holy Face which is reproduced in Plate 11. The face
of the suffering Christ is only sketched; the image itself is in the
process of dying. One might even expect to find the veil drawn
with no lines whatsoever, a veil which represents the void of the
image. In this case the veil would play simultaneously the role of
both mirror and image - the image of Nothing. Our question is whether
the image and the mirror can then superimpose themselves on each
other to the extent of representing a void, the category of nothing-
ness. Might this be the function of the instituted mirror? - to cancel
out plenitude, detach the subject from the opacity of the self, to
introduce a representation of the absence of self, of a negativity
essential to the play of language? When the question of the mirror
is transposed to the terrain of identity, the question of the mirror
makes it possible to conceive of the necessity of a subjective void -
a distance, interval or separation through which identity is organ-
ised as a relation of identification.
On this basis, it is possible to delimit the field of inquiry with
regard to the theoretical question of the mirror. What is in issue is
the notion of the assemblage of images or montage which institutes
identity. We should return, therefore, to the subject, that is to say,
we should take account of the space opened up by psychoanalysis
in the form of the question of identification. It is on the basis of this
that the question of the relation of identity becomes accessible, and
the way is opened to a horizon oriented by the genealogical stake
of the mirror. This leads to the following observations:
(1) It might be said that one of the important benefits of psycho-

analysis, at least if Freud's work is taken seriously, was to help the
culture of scientific technology to return to the path of humanity by
reflecting on the representation of the foundations of Reason. Now,
as much as in the past, we question ourselves in mythological terms,
through words which found our life, which through the ages have
had in common the task of bringing the bond between subject and
mirror to life, or to question the principle of aiterity, the absolute
Other which is the founding instance of images. This description of
the ritualisation of the gaze offers a valuable clue to the mechanism
of identity which psychoanalysis has done so much to clarify. The
history of the veneration of the Holy Face and its post-mediaeval
artistic representations brings out the two levels of the mechanism.
The first level is that of the subject's recognition of distance.

Through the figuration of the face of Christ - the divine self-portrait
- the principle of alterity takes on the symbolic aspect of a staging
of the Other, from which the subject is separated by an instituted
distance. We can therefore establish that the principle of alterity is
recognised and the Other is identified.
The Other is identified not only as the presence of that from
which the subject is absolutely separated, but as an operation which
springs from the proof of truth in the representation of identity.
Identification must here be understood in a transitive sense, that of
recognising the principle of alterity or of the Other as a metaphor
of separation which founds the identity of the subject. One must
also understand the relation of identity as such, at its most abstract
level, namely, that of the represented Other. The Other figured by
the Holy Face presents itself as a pure relation of identity: it is self-
identical with itself. The divine self-portrait is veiled by the essence
of this 'with': the relational nature of the principle of identity, is
itself the same with itself. The truth of identity and the question of
the relation of identity are inextricably involved in the representa-
tion of the Other through the question of this 'with', which is an
immense question in theological and canonical studies of Christ,
the second divine person in the staging of the trinitarian Other.36 At
the level of the pure relation of identity, separation presents itself
as a logical aporia.
The second level of the mechanism is that at which the subject
assumes the relation of identity. What is important in this is the
meaning which clinical psychoanalysis gives to identification. Any
informed analyst knows that this concept, which is essential to the
whole architecture of the psyche, refers to the operation by which
human beings form themselves. 37 The subjective processes of iden-
tification are inscribed as the effect of a narcissistic intrication, and
the deployment of the image of the Father which is the key to the
whole symbolic system is based upon this narcissistic structure. This
cannot be overemphasised, for if one does not understand that the
symbolic level carries over and displaces the imaginary constitution
of the subject, one cannot understand the psychic importance of the
question of identification or its full social and political implications.
36. One of the traditional treatises in which the problem of the relational
character of identity is well formulated is Saint Augustine's De Trinitate,
especially that part of the treatise which deals with images.
37. See the general discussion in J. Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis, The Lan-
guage of Psychoanalysis, 1978, London: Tavistock.
Before introducing this fundamental Freudian notation, that of a

primary identification with the father, I shall make one further appeal
to mythology.
It is reported that the neo-Platonic philosopher Iamblichus, who
taught at the beginning of the fourth century in hellenised Syria,
agreed to perform a wonder for the edification of his students. On
the occasion of an excursion with them to the hot springs of Gadara,
the following occurred: He asked them first to find out the name
that in former times had been given to two of the springs. Once
the students had discovered that two of the sources had formerly
borne the names of the two opposed figures of Eros, namely Eros
and Anteros, he touched the first of the sources with his hand
while pronouncing a brief invocation. A beautiful and perfectly
proportioned young boy appeared from the bottom of the spring.
Iamblichus then went to the second source and performed the same
ritual, making another Eros, identical to the first, appear. The text
reads as follows: 'The two boys clasped him and, just like children
in relation to their real father, they did not loosen the grip of their
embrace. He then returned them to their natural element and after
having taken a bath, he left.'38
The purpose of this demonstration of the powers of the philo-
sopher is to render intelligible the presence of the gods in nature. We
no longer pause to consider what the story of this marvel suggests,
nor do we appreciate the sense in which the narcissistic embrace
recounted in the myth has a lengthy future which ends contempor-
arily in the symbolic, in the love of the Father. There is also a reversal
of the narcissistic process: in the scene from Ovid, Narcissus is
fascinated by the enigmatic other on the surface of the water, while
here, on two occasions, it is the image which becomes flesh and
embraces Iamblichus as if he were a 'real father'. This scene of nar-
cissistic doubling can be used to assert the following: identification is
organised around the narcissistic depth - the innermost being - of
the subject.
What the story brings out is the significance of Freud's model
of a primary identification with the father: behind the psychic
instance of the Ideal of the self (the superego) - an image of cultural
demands - there is hidden the individual's first and most signific-
ant identification, namely that with the father of personal prehistory,
an identification which makes possible any investment in an object
38. The story is related in M. Tardieu, Les Paysages reliques. Routes et haltes
syriettnes d'Isidore a Simplicius, 1990, Paris-Louvain: Peeters, p. 12.
and hence in the real father. Therefore, the cultural representation
of the Third, or, in other words, the Father, is a prior offer of iden-
tification, an offer which is made to all subjects of the culture in
question. What stands out in the process of identification is the role
of a Third which serves to mediate subject and image. The story of
Iamblichus reminds us of the binding of the subject and of the social
construction of the Father, as well as of the central role of identi-
fication that the Father plays in the complex Oedipal prehistory of
the subject, a prehistory which, it should be emphasised, is inscribed
in language and for this reason mobilises the cultural resources of
representation. In the story of Iamblichus' miracle, knowledge of
the name was necessary before the apparition of the gods could be
invoked. What this means is that we are faced here with the articula-
tion of the subject of language and society, with the relation between
man and culture, an articulation which literally carries life, and
gives a symbolic foundation to being.
The structural function of the father in the anecdote of the philo-
sopher allows us to glimpse a further stake of these identifications,
namely that of Reason. Ovid begins the story of Narcissus by evok-
ing the onset of a delirium (novitas furoris).39 This is precisely what
is in issue. Consider the Austrian poet Georg Trakl, the author of a
text which, in the context of the narcissistic scene, evokes the mad-
ness and impending apocalypse of the subject: 'But as I descended
the rocky path, madness seized me and I cried out loud in the
night; and when I bent down with silvery fingers over the taciturn
waters, I saw that my face had left me. And a white voice spoke to
me: Kill yourself!,40
This poetic fragment brings us to the most extreme point in the
question of the mirror, the atomic core of the constitution of the
subject. This is a question of Reason, or of the principle of life in
and by representation.
(2) The relational nature of identity and the mirror. Observations on the
symbolic status of the mirror. Any reference to the image or to the
mirror refers to something which is embedded in that obscure space
of the known in the unknown, or what, since Freud, we have come
to call the unconscious.41 Whatever has to do with the phenomenon
39. Ovid, Metamorphoses, book III, verse 350, p. 80.

40. 'Revelation and Anihilation', in G. Trakl, Crepuscule et deciin, 1990,
Paris: GaJlimard at p. 210.
41. The most familiar formula is that 'we are not without knowledge'.
of representation and its symbolic translations, and first of all lan-

guage itself, has to do with the unconscious. If we remain with this
point, the question of the status of the mirror can be fully unfolded;
in particular, we shall avoid the common temptation of treating the
mirror as a thing, and through this the linguistic essence of the struc-
tural place of the mirror becomes comprehensible.
Having established the importance of the concept of identification
- in the dual sense of identifying and identifying oneself - we can
deepen the analysis of identity. We might begin with the principle
which underlies identification: the distance or interval of a void
which notifies the subject of its alienation from itself and which, in
so doing, makes the articulation of subject, image and institutional
logic possible.
Given our current propensity for representing the domains of
subjectivity and society in terms of totality and conflict, it is diffi-
cult for us to recognise that the maintenance of an interval, distance
or void is essential to institutional logic, or that it might be a con-
sequence of the linguistic character of all human relationships (not
least the relation of the subject to itself). Nevertheless, if we wish to
develop our understanding of the life of representation so as to try
to decipher the mystery of the instituted subject, the mystery of the
subject lodged in its institutional or linguistic habitat, we must learn
to reconsider what the classical, pre-industrial, societies recognised
and made each subject recognise in relation to the constitutive void
of speech. They knew this not in terms of a definitive knowledge,
but in the theatrical mode of a representation of the void itself, as,
for example, was achieved through using the resources of sacred
architecture.
One example is the closed esplanade of the great mosque of
Kairwan in northern Tunisia. This vast quadrilateral space with
colonnades, which separates the minaret, the place which calls the
faithful to prayer, from the the mosque, the place of the adoration
of the sacred name, is the absolute Void, Nothingness as a prepar-
atory to the inspired Word. In secular terms, one might say that
this sacred space represents the function of the void to each of the
persons to which Islam gives birth; in Sanskrit, this was called the
shunya; Arabic culture took it up and transmitted it in the form of
the number zero. In other words, the mosque's esplanade, through
a metaphorisation of a dumb, closed space opening itself to the
infinite heavens, reinstitutes the zero function for each Muslim
believer. Equally there are Western Latin examples of this theatrical
mode of knowledge which translates the unknown foundations of
discourse. One such example is the cloister of Mont Saint-Michel, a

sacred quadrilateral which performs just the same function in the
setting of the Christian tradition. This space stages a void which
represents the celestial vault. In secular terms, as with Islam, this
represents the essence of the institutional function: the creation of
a representation of the void that constitutes speech.
To return to the subject, that which the subject encounters as a
void in the elaboration of its identity is equivalent to these architec-
tural examples: The void is enclosed by speech so as to become the
source of speech; the void has a meaning. This means that, for man,
nothing is outside the field of discourse, and the maintenance of
this essential void is itself a linguistic function. Consequently, one
might say that if this void holds its tongue, it does so in the sense
of that peculiar silence which in antiquity was represented by the
messenger-god Hermes' invention of a speech, represented by a
finger pressed to the lips. The void is therefore replete with the
language which brought the subject into the world, and with all the
speech that it has yet to use. Thus, the void is something which for
the subject remains unformulated. At a general level, one might
establish the following: without this logical category of the unfor-
mulated, speech would be impossible.
Returning to the narcissistic core of the subjective economy, or
the vital lesson of the story of Narcissus' confrontation with his
image (the other of himself which he misrecognises), these com-
ments on the unformulated nature of the void acquire their full
significance. If all human life, its sense of self and its place in the
world, does indeed approach its destiny by overcoming an original
opacity - the biological stake which we call the body is inscribed in
representation, the subject accedes to words - this means that
man has to come to inhabit the division between words and things
by entering speech, which in turn depends upon the subject's abil-
ity to divide itself, or to be present to itself and to the world by
representing division to itself. The subject must be able to inhabit
the division in representation so that, on the basis of a play of the
self and the world as images, the bond of speech can be formed.
This is what the phrase I is an other so clearly expresses:42 it is a
metabolisation of narcissism, which is at once a representation of
42. Arthur Rimbaud, in a letter to G. Izambard (May 1871): 'It is false to
say: I think; one ought to say I am thought. - Excuse this play of words.
I am an other. Too bad for the wood that turns out to be a violin, and
laughs at the unconscious ones who quibble over things of which they
are completely ignorant'. Oeuvre-Vie, 1991, Paris: Alea, pp. 183-4.
division and a discourse about division; it is the subject Rimbaud's

way of poetically inhabiting the question. In terms of our non-
poetic mode of questioning, the phrase is a translation of the rela-
tion of identity as a relation of self to self. The question could be
addressed by using other resources such as scholastic doctrines on
the movements of the soul or more modern theories of perception.
The essential element is a point of transition between terms, the
space of a distance or void which allows logic to speak of a rela-
tion between terms. The fable of Narcissus reveals a breakdown
in the relation of identity: the void is not recognised, and the sub-
ject regresses to a point which is prior to any relation to self.
This allows us to formulate more exactly what is at issue in the
elaboration of identity: the ternary place of an instituted distance,
the locus of that which holds a being of speech indefinitely at a
distance from itself and at a remove from the world. The myth of
Narcissus sets us on the way to an understanding of the point of
transition between the terms of this relation. All that advances
towards man, and first and foremost man himself, is inevitably
submitted to the test of the specular. The task then is to discover
the nature and function of what we call the mirror.
The essential question is that of the status of the mirror in a
discursive construction which institutes the speaking animal. If this
question can be asked, it is because the mirror is at the heart of the
function of identification and because it is not only a purely instru-
mental function but a vital element in the mechanism of subjectiv-
ity. The mirror intervenes in representation as a representation. In
representing the third space of an instituted distance it acquires a
status which allows the division of the subject, or the separation
from the other than self, to take effect.
If identity for the subject can be defined by a relation in which it
is self-identical with itself, the mirror is then the support of the
with; it is the message-messenger of that 'with'. Our study concerns
narcissistic alienation, and therefore attempts to identify the sym-
bolic significance and role which should be ascribed to the mirror
in the elaboration of the subjective identity of a subject. The object
is to envisage the mirror both from a very general perspective which
covers all the modes in which it manifests itself to the subject, and
in terms of the specific mediating role of the mirror as the support
of the with. Some observations will help to set the scene.
(a) The mirror and its relation to speech. The mirror exists only for a
subject of speech: it presupposes the universe of speech. The mirror
244 LAw and the Unconscious
is an empty and mute figure, but it is replete with the discourse

which produced it and which causes it to be there, and with the
future speech of the subject who questions it. It is present to the
subject in an unformulated form. What does this mean, and what
implications does it have for our understanding of the symbolic
place of the mirror or of all manifestations of the mirror?
The mirror is there for a subject which questions it, it is there for
a subject which questions not the other than self but an unformulated
presence, or a void or distance as such. The mirror represents the
void to the subject by staging a pure alterity which speech alone
makes bearable. In these terms, one might say that the mirror's
summoning of the gaze is a summons to see a principle. On this
basis we can better appreciate the function of the mirror which is
revealed in Durer's engraving: the unwitting entry into representa-
tion which is offered by the principle of alterity is a condition of
emergence from narcissistic alienation. Moreover, the recognition
of the other than self can logically only be a consequence or effect
of symbolisation: the presumed relation of self to self is the unwit-
ting effect of entry into representation of the distance which sus-
tains speech.
The point might be illustrated by reference to Lewis Carroll's
notion of 'the other side of the mirror': the story of Alice shows that
no one can pass through the mirror (Through the looking-glass) with-
out the help of an inspirational or poetic speech. This offers a valu-
able clue as to the foundations of the mirror's presence for the
subject: the operation is one which tames, domesticates or humanises
both void and separation by representing them through adequate
words. In other words, they have to be cast in terms of an adequate
myth, in the technical sense of 'myth' as a discursive arrangement in
which the ternary space of separation, which emerges from language,
is symbolically presented as a mirror, thereby initiating the institu-
tional and subjective mechanism of identification.
From the perspective of my study, the symbolic status of the mir-
ror coincides with the symbolic status of mythology to the extent
that the latter frames an unknown representation of the void, of the
distance or separation which all societies have to represent. Each
culture constructs a discourse of the mirror which represents the
void, distance or gap in such a way as to make the construction of
the subject possible. The West has produced a number of texts which,
although they are not presented in these terms, take on a new sig-
nificance if seen in this light. What, for example, do theological
pronouncements about the soul as the prisoner of the body - the

symbolisation of the division of psyche and soma in terms of a
theme popularised by the baroque iconography of the body as the
habitat of the soul - have in common with the house of the mirror,
Lewis Carroll's looking-glass house? It undertakes the same work
of representing the structural void. From the classical European
religious era up to the present secular era, the same work of rep-
resentation has been undertaken in quite different ways in order to
constitute the mirror and the mythological function as a function
which is addressed to a subject. An understanding of these Western
constructions facilitates an understanding of cultural eqUivalents in
other societies. One typical case is the Taoist notion of an interior
country: 'the body of man is in the image of a country,.43 Taoist
discourse on the freedom and unity of the individual, a discourse
which acts in a manner loosely equivalent to the courts of con-
science within the Western tradition, includes a construction of the
relation of self to self. As with Western discourses, it constitutes
the context of speech by which the distance essential to the elabora-
tion of this relation is presented to the subject as a mirror which is
already there. A culture addresses the subject by presenting the
mirror to him through a mythological discourse, instituting a dis-
tance or structural void by speaking it in advance for each subject.
In other words, the function of a myth can be compared to the
opening of a symbolic credit account in favour of the the subject of
the culture in question.
(b) The mirror as a cause of images. I would like now to draw atten-
tion, at the most banal of levels, to what can be gleaned about the
phenomenon of the mirror from the words of Narcissus who sud-
denly recognised that 'I am that one; I realise it and my image does
not deceive me.'44 It should be noted both that the mirror produces
an image, and that we love this image. What should be understood
from this is that at the level of causes the image has a double mean-
ing: it evokes both a relation to the principle of causality and a bond
of love.
Thus the story of Narcissus can serve to clarify certain essential
features of the notion of an image, but only on the condition that
43. K. Schipper, Le Corps taoiste. Corps physique - corps social, 1982, Paris:
Fayard, pp. 137ff.
44. [Iste ego sum; sellSi nee mea laUit imago], Metamophoses, verse 463, p. 112.
we recognise the role of the mirror as mediator. Its role, as we have

seen, is that of alterity or, more precisely, it is that of the unconscious
representation of alterity. TIlis otherness cannot be understood except
in the terms of that loss and separation which accompanies or which
constitutes the human cost of the entry into language: the division
with oneself is the necessary condition of assuming the division
between words and things. The concept of the image thus implies
the question of division for the subject and can only be addressed
properly by reference to the structural status of the mirror.
To say 'I am that one' while staring into the mirror, or to recog-
nise oneself in the image which the mirror reflects, is to imagine
that something unsayable has been overcome or mastered, so that
the relation of identity can be inaugurated. A specific semantic
effect can help to clarify what is at issue. It derives from the homo-
phony of the Latin terms imago and vorago, the latter referring to
a whirlpool, abyss or chasm. In the brief instance when the image
no longer deceived him, this recognition tore Narcissus away from
the void, he escaped the abyss. The image became a support offered
to the subject in the form of a metaphorisation of the abyss. In
short, we cannot talk of the image except in terms of that which
organises the separation of the subject from the whirlpool and
opacity of the drives, and in so doing prepares its access to repres-
entation. The institution of images is based upon this human con-
quest of its own being. For the subject to divide itself, is for the
subject to separate itself from the abyss, or, to continue the play
upon the word vorago (from which vorax, or voracious, is also
derived), it is to escape devouring oneself.
The other than self is only recognised by the subject by virtue
of a relation to the mirror, to what I will call the first mirror. It is
primary in the sense that the speaking being cannot have access to
the relation of identity unless he is also projected into the field of
institutional alterity by means of the institutionally constructed
mirror. This enclosure of discourse is culturally circumscribed and
can be termed the second mirror, or Mirror with a capital M. It is
only a mirror for the subject by reference to the speculary principle
of culture. In other words, the structural principle of the mirror is
the following: it is the place of pure alterity by means of which, by
a variety of stages and mediations, the subject is separated from the
cause of his image.
The following should be noted: where the idea of cause or the
concept of causality come into play, in terms of the representation
of the subject, they necessarily imply both Madness and Reason. In

political terms, we are dealing here with the anthropological sources
of fanaticism, with the instance love of the Absolute cause.
Returning to the analysis of the two levels of structure, namely,
the level of the institutional construction of the Reference which
carries culture, and the normative stage of reproduction (the Oed-
ipal or familial frame which reproduces the subject) the following
can be observed: the mirror is the place where the cause, be it Imago
Dei, the social image of the Father, the Taboo or whatever, is rep-
resented, because it is the function of the mirror to produce images
of foundation. Put differently, the mirror is the logical space upon
which each culture, according to its own modality, represents the
absolute Image. The mirror is equally the space which, at the level
of the social, mediates the representation of the foundational Image.
From the perspective of the principle of institutionality, the sym-
bolic status of the mirror thus becomes apparent by virtue of the
logical place which circumscribes it. This structural place is carried,
at the level of culture, by the mythological function and is under-
pinned at the level of the subject by the various linguistic mediations
- and in the West most notably by the normative instances of law
- which establish and strategically define a historical and social
locus or place. The reference to strategy is not accidental in that
what is at issue is a place of confrontational self-inscription and, in
contemporary terms, it is a space in which the war of representa-
tion unfolds. At the everyday level of the social and subjective life
of the generations this space is one of a symbolic confrontation
which revives the Oedipal myth in the memory of the west.
(c) The identification of the other in the mirror. Towards a notion of

reflexivity as a symbolic effect. The question of reflexivity can be
addressed best in terms of the ternary structure of the speculary
order. It is a question of further pursuing the preceding remarks on
the concept of causality so as to approach the subject's relation of
identity with himself by reference to the interactive effect of the
mirror: the subject sees himself. I repeat: he sees himself, according
to the law of thought. It is necessary, therefore, to make a link
between the technical working of the mirror and its much fuller
symbolic scope. From the point of view of the preservation of the
materials of narcissism in the same moment that they are super-
seded, the lesson of reflexivity is that what is at play in the speculary
order is a matter of thinking. To recognise the other than self, is
already to think. We think upon the basis of specularity and it is

only by virtue of this that we can understand the subject's grasp of
the world. Over there, where man searches for his image, he thinks.
In other words, the problematic of the mirror recoups the process
by which a person begins to think.
It is essential in this respect to discern that the mirror function,
articulated at its two structural levels <the story of Narcissus and
the scene of the Holy Face} rejoins the problematic of the relation
to causality. Thus the question of narcissism opens up towards the
problematic of thought. I shall put it as follows: if, following Ovid's
formulation, this 'shadow of a reflected image which you look at'45
is the image of the self only because it is recognised as other than
the self, then the subject has entered into its proper division, which
is to say that it exists as a caused subject. It is possible, therefore, by
virtue of this relation, to conceive of the mirror as being the cause
of man himself. Certain consequences follow from this:
First, the relation to the mirror is a reflexive one, such that the
mirror itself becomes inscribed in it, as the history of the Holy Face
well shows. The gaze can only possibly return upon itself by virtue
of reflexivity. The necessary route of a gaze which sees itself is a
reflexivity which orchestrates the dialectical schema of the causa-
tion of the subject. In a cultural context, or at the subjective level of
the speculary relation, the subject is caused by an image which
makes him return to himself. Reflexivity, in other words, is the
agency of a schema in which the constitutive principle of the Third
takes its place. It is from this, by way of the metaphor of the mirror,
that the relation of identity emerges and man is introduced to caus-
ality as the externality of the subject.
Second, it is necessary to specify, at the level of the speculary dia-

lectic, that reflexivity is distinct from reciprocity. Reflexivity pre-
supposes the detour by way of a third place and it is played out in
two distinct registers; whereas reciprocity is not ternary, but on the
contrary presupposes the interchangeability of terms based within
a homogeneous register. Remarkably well expressed in a childish
observation that 'my father looks like me', the relation of recipro-
city is severed from the problematic of the Third and sets up two
45. [Isla repercussae, quam cernis, imaginis umbra est], Metamorphoses, verse
434, p. 110.
interchangeable pawns. Within contemporary contractualist ideo-

logy, reciprocity, thus understood, has become a political value in the
discourse of the subject-king; its effect is to undo the representation
of the principle of alterity, and to obscure the foundational distance
that acts as a limit for the subject.
Third, to the extent that it includes a reference to the place of the

mirror as third, reflexivity refers the causality of the subject to the
level of an interrogation of the origin; to the level of the discourse
which founds the human subject as a caused, which is to say divided
subject. With respect to reflexivity, the mirror makes the origin
appear as a result. The origin takes on the status of a symbolic
effect in the montage of representation. This observation is crucial
because it underlines the fact that for the subject the discourse
of origin - the image which he receives from the structure - has
nothing to do with any scientific content. The origin is pure repres-
entation. More precisely, it is the pure effect of the representation
necessary for the construction of the subject, with the result that the
content of discourse operates metaphorically and not scientifically. It
may also be noted in passing that this also allows us to glimpse
how in this scientific age man comes to use the discourse of Science
as Imago Dei, that is to say as mirror, and so use it in the same
manner as a theology or a mythical representation.
Finally, it is important to observe that the study of reflexivity opens

up a crucial problem of language, that of understanding the bond
of signification as a relation of correspondence between word and
thing. It should be apparent from the foregoing that the mirror
paves the way for entry into the bond of signification. Using the
classic example developed by Saussure, when we say 'tree', the
word refers us to the representation of the thing named 'tree,.46
How does the bond of signification guarantee the truth of the thing
in the same way as the mirror, the word or representation? This
question touches upon our understanding of structure as a legal
relation between discourse and the instance of representation; it
is nothing less than the key to an understanding of the institution
of speech.
46. F. de Saussure, A Course in General Linguistics, 1966, London: Peter

Owen.
(3) The mirror as a metaphor of the limit. The mirror - or what I call
a mirror - is an integral part of the arrangement of the principle of
life in and through representation, and it opens into a process of
symbolisation which is linked to the phenomenon of language.
Institutional systems constitute the normative frame within which
the human being encounters the social structures of Reason: at the
same time, in assuming the risk that this structure might collapse,
the human being encounters the possibility of its own negation as
a subject of the Reason of images or of Reason in general. In these
terms, if we relate the symbolic status of the mirror to the principle
of Reason, we cannot fail but encounter the problem of Interdiction,
of 'speech between' or by interposition. And, in those terms, the
mirror can be studied as a discourse of separation, that is, in its
relation to the problematic of Interdiction, which is nothing other
than the overcoming of narcissism, the mirror is the form of acces-
sion to the limit.
This leads us to a question that the mirror can illuminate in terms
of the play of Interdiction at the two levels of representation. On
the one hand, the mirror organises the subject's asymptotic point:
the subject, separated from its other than self, can never return to
its image; Narcissus' tragic demand is doomed to failure. On the
other hand, at the Oedipal, familial, level, this means that, on the
basis of the narissistic division (the separation from the other than
self), parents serve as the mirror for their children in that they
represent the principle of division by means of language.
We also know that the mechanism of identity is such that in
representing the subject, the symbolic third - that is the third of
division, the representation of the principle of alterity - arrives
(according to the Ovidian formula 'himself the same with himself')
at the place of the 'with', that of the mediating third of the narcis-
sistic relation of the subject with the other than self. As the example
of Durer well shows, the identification of the subject requires a
subjective inscription, or inscription in the non-knowledge of rep-
resentation, of the mediating Third itself, and in this instance
the Figure of the Saviour. In other words, the constitutive Third
of division can only operate on condition of also being the place
of the image.
At a subjective level, clinical experience in psychoanalysis readily
confirms the intensity of the identificatory stratagem: to the extent
that they are objects of love, parents have a narcissistic vocation,
and are called to the place of the narcissistic image for the child. We
touch there upon the subjective economy of the limit and upon
problems of treating narcissism which the social translations of
Interdiction are charged to resolve through the unending work of
the interpreters. At an institutional level, as Freud demonstrated in
relation to the phenomenon of group identification with a leader,
the person who occupies that position is in the place of the ego
Ideal for each of the members of the group. Finally, the parental
function - by which term I refer to the generic genealogical func-
tion common to all adults who come to this place - is founded on
the structure of representation, on the montage of the Reason of
images. The parental function is at one and the same time both a
form of relationship to the child, and also plays the role of the nar-
cissistic image for the child so that the process of identification can
be put in motion. Adapting a formula of Lacan's, 'a man's desire is
the desire of the Other', we can say that 'a man's image is already
the image of the Other'.
Parenthesis: on the use and misuse of psychoanalysis in the interpretation

of the the question of images. Freud's discovery of the phenomenon of
unconscious representation allows us to clarify and complicate the
problematic of the mirror. It should be noted that such a disclosure
is somewhat bizarre. What I mean is that this knowledge of the
other scenes of subjective being does not fall easily within the gen-
eral schemata of knowledges of either the subject or society. It
returns us rather to what, within the highly humanising contours
of classical religion or mythology, had the status of knowledge of
interdiction, that is to say knowledge of interposition, which was
only accessible by means of the circuitous route of poetry or other
ritualised mediating discourses. All knowledge of the mirror and of
images is knowledge of interdiction. It touches upon the very founda-
tion of the human, on what has to be veiled or repressed in order
that the mechanism of identity can organise itself and function.
(4) THE BEYOND OF THE LOGIC OF THE IMAGE.

OBSERVATIONS ON THE INSTITUTION AND BOUNDARIES
OF REASON: THE FANTASTICAL DIMENSION
It is perhaps appropriate to supplement these observations with a

general chapter on logic. I use logic in the sense adopted by lawyers
of the European tradition after Isidore of Seville defined the term
as a form of philosophical discourse which defines, questions and

argues about and around Reason (philosophia rationalis).47 When we
speak of the subject or of the image and of the principle of institu-
tionality - precisely those themes which we introduced in our study
of the image - what role do we attribute to logic in this analysis?
What path do we open up in defining, questioning and arguing
about and around Reason? We should now cast an eye upon the
Reason of images as my observations have attempted to recognise
and to understand it, and then we shall sketch a preliminary the-
oretical conclusion.
The essential point is contained in the term alienation, which figures
in the phrase formulated earlier in this discussion: the constitutive
alienation of the subject. We have seen what is implied in such a
formulation. I have suggested that a study of the image in its rela-
tion to subjective representation was a matter of the rationality, the
life and the death of the subject. In other words, it has to do with
the supreme stake of humanity: to make Reason prevail and to
thwart madness. Reason is a conquest whose outcome, both for the
subject and for the society which institutes it, is nothing other than
an indefinite renewal of allegiance to what we in the West call the
symbolic order. What then is the symbolic order? Nothing more
and nothing less than the fate of the image and of its cause, the
discourse, in any culture and for all subjects, of the mirror.
How does the fate of the image and of the discourse of the mirror
relate to logic as the discourse of Reason? Our way into this ques-
tion is eased by the preceding observations about structure; these
observations showed the alienation inherent in the two dimensions
of the process of identification or recognition of the other than self
and the other as self. At the level of the narcissistic drama of divi-
sion as it is depicted in the story of Narcissus, and at the level of
the social intervention of the Third as it is represented by Durer,
there is a dialectical relation which constitutes the very condition of
life in the speaking species, and which is tethered to the instance
of representation. Hence, to interrogate the dialectic of alienation
through the play of images, to analyse identification in both of the
preceding senses, is to interrogate the order of life which is proper
to humanity, and which is itself founded in the Reason of language.
More specifically, we discover the relation between alienation and
47. Isidore of Seville, Etymologiae, II, 22: ['Ipsa est philosophiae species, quae
Logica dicitur, id est rationalis definiendi, quaerendi et discerendi potens'].
the discourse of Reason. We need to take note also of the structure

of alterity, which in turn means taking account of the instituted
distance which is essential to all speech which is articulated in the
logical space of Reference and which is socially communicated by
a representation of the absolute Other. This is the essential point in
any study of the Reason of images and language; this instituted
distance is a logical condition of the alterity which founds identity.
There is a phrase in Heraclitus which makes this rather clearer: to
ignore this point would be to put oneself in the position of one who
forgets where the path leads.
There is an essential distinction to be made at this point. Once
one recognises the condition which governs both the subjective and
the social construction of the principle of alterity, the problem of
the fate of the image and the discourse of the mirror in its relation
to logic as a discourse of Reason can only be addressed in a one-
dimensional manner. To symbolise images is to put Reason in play
and to be obliged to mark the logical place in which the representa-
tion of instituted distance is inscribed. We are therefore dealing
with two levels of the discourse of reason, or rather with the logical
beyond of the image.
This might be explained by invoking the order of ordinary insti-
tutional reasoning, which depends upon Aristotelian causation and
which underpins family psychologies of all kinds, as for example
in the formula 'the father is the cause of the child'.48 Were it not
imprisoned in the contemporary social and political predilection for
dual relations, this logic might show that institutional reasoning
does not function by dual relations, but under the auspices of a
third instance or ternary montage. In other words, a system of bin-
ary relations which acts as an effect of representation is legitimated
by a discourse of foundations which presents itself as a symbolic
effect. This is the level at which the genealogical order is located
and at which it has its effects, it is the level of interpretations, and
of diverse casuistries.
There is, however, another, more specific, level at which these
foundations are elaborated. This is the level of Reference. It is the
level at which representations of the absolute Other or of the prin-
ciple of alterity unfold. The weak point of traditional European
societies, which are contemporarily in the grip of a generalised nar-
cissism, is that they do not make a link between these two levels,
48. Aristotle, Physics, Book 2, 194b.

and thereby claim that life can live in ignorance of the institution
of distance. This is a crucial point: the institution of distance has
abandoned the West. This accounts for the considerable theoretical
difficulty, not to say impossiblity, of recognising the logical beyond
in which the reason of images and of language is founded. In this
beyond, there is a logic which is not Aristotelian; in it, man con-
fronts a category of nothingness, the void, negativity. Here we reach
the most extreme point of the question of representation, at which,
one might say, it is subjectively incandescent. What is in issue is the
construction of a discourse on the cause of causation, the construc-
tion of a principle of causation as such so as to make society perform
its anthropological function in relation to each and every subject.
It is possible to represent what is at issue schematically. Human-
ity confronts the speechless void. To establish foundations is to erect
a screen to protect us from the void. Upon this screen are inscribed
all the historical and mythological stories of the world. This is the
dimension of the fantastic; the logic which operates at this level can
be understood as the fantastic beyond of institutions. Western his-
tory is full of attempts to delineate this logic. Two examples in
particular stand out: Pieo della Mirandola's project for a poetic
theology, and Vico's attempt to restore to law the poetic dimension
which sustains it. We have now, using different means, to discover
what this fantastic dimension and its structural principle hold for
USi that is why we have to rethink the question of mythology.
Bibliography of Principal
Works by Pierre Legendre
BOOKS
La Fenetration du droit romain dans Ie droit canonique classique (The penetra-

tion of Roman law in classical canon law), 1964, Paris: Imprimerie Jouve.
Histoire de l'Administration de 1975 a nos jours (The History of the French
Administrative State, 1975 to the present), 1968, Paris: Presses Univer-
sitaires de France.
L'Amour du censeur. Essai sur l'ordre dogmatique (Love of the Censor. An
Essay on the Dogmatic Order), 1974, Paris: Editions du Seuil.
Jouir du pouvoir. Traite de la bureaucratie patriote (Enjoying Power. Treatise
on patriotic bureaucracy), 1976, Paris: Editions de Minuit.
La Passion d'etre un autre. Etude pour la danse (The Obsession to be Another.
A Study of Dance), 1978, Paris: Editions du Seuil.
Paroles Poetiques echapees du texte. Leqons sur la communication industrielle
(Poetic Phrases Run Astray from the Text. Teachings on Industrial Com-
munication), 1982, Paris: Editions du Seuil.
Leqons II. L'Empire de la verite. Introduction aux espaces dogmatiques industriels
(Truth's Empire. Introduction to the dogmatic spaces of Industrial Civil-
isation), 1983, Paris: Artheme Fayard.
Leqons W. L'Inestimable objet de la transmission. Etude sur Ie principe genealogique
en Occident (The Priceless Object of Transmission. A Study of the Prin-
ciple of Genealogy in the West), 1985, Paris: Artheme Fayard.
Leqons VII. Le Desir politique de Dieu. Etude sur les montages de l'Etat et du
Droit (The Political Desire for God. A Study of the Structure and Imagery
of State and of Law), 1988, Paris: Artheme Fayard.
Ecrits juridiques du Moyen Age Occidental (Writings on Mediaeval Law),
1988, London: Variorum.
Leqons VIII. Le Crime du caporal Lortie. Traite sur Ie Pere (Corporal Lortie's
Crime. Treatise on the Father), 1989, Paris: Fayard.
Leqons VI. Les Enfants du Texte. Etude sur la fonction parentale des Etats (Chil-
dren of the Text. A Study of the parental function of the State), 1992,
Paris: Artheme Fayard.
Tresor Historique de l'Etat en France. L'Administration classique, 1992, Paris:
Artheme Fayard.
Dieu au mirroir. Etude sur !'institution des images (God in the Mirror. A Study
of the Institution of Images), 1994, Paris: Artheme Fayard.
La Fabrique de l'1lOmme occidental (The Fabrication of Western Man), 1996,
Paris: Arte Editions.
255
SELECTED ARTICLES
'La Phalla-cieuse: Le roman du feminin dans Ie Texte occidental', in

Armando Verdiglione, LA Jouissance et la loi, 1976, Paris.
'Le Droit et toute sa rigueur', 1977, 26 Communications 3.
'Administrer la psychanalyse. Notes sur la dissolution de I'Ecole freudienne
de Paris', 1981, Pouvoirs. Revue Franl;aise d'Etudes Constitutionelles et
Politiques 205.
'Les juifs se livrent ades interpretations insensees. Expertise d'un texte', in
La Psychanalyse est-elle une histoire juive?, 1981, Paris: Editions du Seuil.
'L'Espace genealogique du droit', 1986, Rechtshistorisches Journal 177.
'L'Ordre juridique a-t-il des fondements raisonnables?' in La Folie raisonnee,
Nouvelle enCljclopedie Diderot, 1989,297.
'Revisiter les fondations du droit civil', 1990, Revue du Theorie du Droit Civil
639.
The Lost Temporality of Law', 1990, 1 Law and Critique 3.
'Communication dogmatique (Hermes et la Structure)" in Dictionnaire cri-
tique de la communication, 1993, Presses Universitaires Franc;aises.
'Revenir a l'essentiel', in Cesure, 1993, 115.
'Ce que nous appelons Ie droit', 1993, Le Debat, 107.
'L'histoire du droit comme theatre de verite', 1995, Rechtshistorisches Journal
203.
The Other Dimension of Law', 1995, 16 Cardozo Law Review 943.
'Id Efficit Quod Figurat (It is the Symbol which Produces Effects)', 1997,
Legal Studies Forum 233.
An Abbreviated Glossary
The work of Pierre Legendre has consistently drawn upon an esoteric

vocabulary developed from the history of Roman and canon law, mediaeval
legal and scholastic texts and from contemporary psychoanalysis. Added
to this extensive use of archival and interdisciplinary sources are the
idiosyncracies of what Legendre self-consciously calls his barbarous style
(style barbaroide). In that his style, his rhetoric, is avowedly heretical, it
tends to ignore conventional academic criteria of blandness or lucidity in
favour of a more poetic and wavering texture. The unconscious of institu-
tions is evoked and analysed in a style that frequently replicates that uncon-
sciousness at the level of syntax. It is unlikely that a glossary of theoretical
terms will greatly aid in interpreting Legendre as subject or as text, but it
may be hoped that it will at least lend a certain air of familiarity to some
of the language used.
Casuistry. The casuistic tradition developed in parallel in mediaeval moral

theology and jurisprudence. Most simply, casuistry is the normative logic
used to resolve specific cases or causes. Both in theology and in law, the
first meaning of casuistry thus concerns the question of the subject and of
jurisdiction over the subject. In theological terms spelled out initially by
Gratian in the Deeretals (and specifically in the treatise On Penitence), casu-
istry was the art of addressing the transgressions of the subject by referring
them to the discourse of Christian doctrine. CaSUistry thus dealt with a
case or cause, and both in theology and in legal rhetoric this cause had to
be both addressed and judged by reference to written law and its doctrinal
interpretations. In a secondary sense, casuistic reasoning was a rhetorical
exercise and, particularly in the mediaeval schools, was used as a theoretical
discipline for the development and resolution of quaestiones disputatae, ques-
tions of conflict, uncertainty or moral ambiguity in the texts of the law. As
a theoretical discipline, casuistry was the means of training the interpreter
and its goal was the art of just speech. Whatever the specific details of its
practice, the casuistic tradition necessarily attached legal thought to the
ethical tradition and in elaborating the rules that governed rectitude and
transgression, legal and illegal acts, casuistry spelled out the terms within
which Western culture instituted subjectivity.
Dogma/dogmatics. Dogmatics refers technically to the disciplines of

medicine and jurisprudence and has as its object the institution of the body
as a subject of law. More broadly, the term dogma refers to the articles of
the Christian faith (sanetorum apostolarum dogmata) and the axioms or the
truths of Roman law. In an initial and reasonably familiar sense, dogmatics
is thus the study and reproduction of the founding norms of the Western
institution. The axioms or undying dogmas of the tradition are part of the
theological structure of the legal institution and have both an emblematic
257
(or loosely, symbolic) and a prosaic meaning. In Legendre's account, dog-

matics is used in a radical meaning to refer to the ritual and theatrical or
non-legal scene of legal reason. Even in a prosaic sense, dogma does not
die, it is a reason which belongs to the institution and not to its human
bearers or mere office-holders: dogma also belongs to the shadow zone, the
long-term or unconscious structure of institutions. Dogma thus has a trans-
historical quality which is well captured in a secondary connotation of the
term, which refers to dignity, honour and embellishment. Dogma is here
explicitly the reason of visions and of dreams, and it functions aesthetically
as a logic of attachment, of fascination or fixation, which binds the subject
to law. Dogmatics is thus the discourse of 'heavy commentary' or of legal
interpretation in which the texts of law are aligned with a transcendent
truth. Dogmatics or the institution of commentary depends upon faith as
well as reason, upon the ritual or theatre which stages the truth as much
as upon the content of specific norms. Dogmatics, in Legendre's terms, is
the poetics of power.
Fates. The latin Fata or Fates, the daughters of necessity, designated a life
lived before the law, a life spoken in advance by the discourse of truth, the
destiny of the subject captured by the institution. In classical terms, the
Fates (Lachesis, Atropos and Clotho) were born with each individual and
dictated the course of his or her life from birth to death. The discourse of
the Fates was the speech of the oracles, the portentous speech of a destiny
opaquely and irredeemably spoken in advance. In Legendre'S terminology,
the discourse of the Fates is the founding speech of the law for each and
every subject. The Fates dictate both kinship and sociality, they determine
in advance that we are born into a family and into an institutional order.
The function of the Fata can thus be divided into two aspects or levels. The
familial fates are those that institute the subject within the normative order
of institutions, they dictate the paternal power of the father and the com-
parable authority of the sovereign. The familial fates inscribe a genealogical
law, the institution of the family, into the soul - the imaginary - of the
subject. The legal fates are those that bind the institution to the order of a
divine truth, they are fate in the sense of fatality or foundational speech
dictating the limit of what is human in relation to the divine. Fate in this
context refers to the normative social discourses which institute subjectiv-
ity: it is the western subject's fate to live in relation to legally designated
origins and authorities.
Image. Both state and law, in Legendre's definition, are 'montages' or com-
plex assemblages of images. The political order, in other words, depends
upon the manipulation of subjective attachment through the play of images.
Because attachment to political and legal authority is a matter of desire -
of 'love of the censor' - it is most successfully generated through uncon-
scious forms, through images and other fictions of an author of the laws or
sovereign figure of power. The image is thus crucial to an understanding
of the authority of law, because it is the image, the speculary structure
of authority, which generates the subject'S submission to law or, to use
Legendre's terms, the capture of the subject by the institution. To understand
An Abbreviated Glossary 259
law it is therefore necessary to understand the aesthetics of law, the erotics

of attachment to the institution. The order of law is an iconic order; it
represents authority through licit images and binds the subjects of law to
their likeness or semblance within the insitution. In political terms, Legendre
depicts the legal order as an order of representation which depends upon
the successful staging of truth through a series of rites, symbols, emblems,
images and other metaphors or figures of normative governance. It is in
this sense that the order of law is an iconic order, a theatre of images
aligned with the truth. In more technical Freudian terms, the image should
thus be understood in a dual sense: it is the mechanism of subjective
attachment to identity, and so it is also the most appropriate or success-
ful means of instituting law. The image is thus to be understood first in
a narcissistic sense as the mechanism which founds individual identity
through a specular reflection or mirroring. It is upon this narcissistic mech-
anism of self-identification that the political order plays when it represents
the social 'as if' it were a subject. The image is also a trace or vestige of an
absent source or cause, it represents something that is not present, or in
Pliny's terms, it is the shadow of an absent object of desire. In its strongest
sense, the Image founds the social by representing its absent source or
cause, namely God or some other mythic figure of whom there can only
ever be an image. The social is thus in Western terms quite literally Imago
Dei or the Image of God from which all other images flow. The image is
in consequence an absent presence, a vestige of the divine or, to borrow
from the glossa tors, it is a false truth (veritas talsa).
Interdiction. The term illterdit, translated here as interdiction, is used by

Legendre as a legal refinement of the Freudian notion of the Taboo. Inter-
diction does not refer simply to prohibition, but rather to a more funda-
mental and essentially mythological representation of the origin of law.
Drawing upon the Latin etymology of the word, inter-dicere, meaning to
speak between, interdiction refers to the symbolic foundation of the legal
order in an authority or space of power which precedes and exceeds the
normative order of positive law. In terms of symbolic function, every legal
utterance refers not only to a norm or written rule, but also to a space of
authority that passes beyond the letter of the law, a space which makes law
possible and legitimates its interpretations. Interdiction thus refers to what
could be called the transcendental quality of legal interpretation: the art of
judging is an art of interposition in which the judge or some other inter-
preter acts as an intermediary between the mythic sources or 'spirit' of the
laws and their secular or positive application. The speech of interdiction
is the means by which the judge 'speaks between' the space of foundation,
the space of dogma or of the institutional unconscious, and positive law.
The discourse of interdiction gives law its sacral and affective power, while
for the legal subject, it represents the limits which law imposes upon the
meaning of words and so also upon the possibilities of speech.
Narcissism. Using the work both of Freud and of Lacan, Legendre inter-
prets the myth of Narcissus in terms of the centrality of the image to both
individual and social identity. At the level of the individual, the story of
Narcissus, the story of a youth who falls in love with his image, is inter-
preted in terms of the institution of subjectivity in the form of semblance.
In recognising him or herself in the mirror, the subject identifies with a
likeness or image that both represents the self and is separate from the self.
In legendre's analysis, the story of Narcissus is that of a subject who
recognises himself as an other, as a semblance or in classical terms as a
likeness constituted in a relation with the truth (verisimilis). The theory of
narcissism predicates that to be a subject is to be an image amongst other
images. At the level of the social the recognition of the self as other is the
primary mechanism of political attachment. The art of politics is the art of
managing narcissistic identifications whereby the subject can come to love
the semblance or image of a social Father in precisely the same manner that
the child recognises itself in its parents. The social image or properly icon
of authority thus enters the subject as a likeness and the political bond is
constituted by the manipulation of the subject's attachment to its image.
Reason. The Western legal tradition is theocratic and more particularly

monotheistic. It believes in one God and so also in one cause of causes, or
law of laws. In classical terms, Roman law was explicitly a Christian tra-
dition and the emperor was the representative, spirit or tongue, of God's
absolute will. Roman law thus taught that God was both the source and
the support of its reason, and so also that the reason of law was bound by
necessity and lineage to an absolute Reason or divine will. God believed in
Roman law, its reason was his Reason, and that Reason excluded all others
as heretical and as mad (dementes vesanosque). The source of legal reason
thus refers us to the genealogy of the Western legal institution as belonging
to the lineage of divine government. The emperor or supreme source of
positive law was bound by a filial love to God the Father and so spoke 'in
the name' of the Father. To understand the reason of law, therefore, was to
believe or to have faith in the texts of law as the expression of divine
Reason. The first role of the legal institution was a ritual one, it was that of
directing social desire, or what were classically termed adorationes, towards
the space of a legally represented truth. At the level of positive law legal
reason required a faith in the texts of law - de fide instrumentorum - and
explicitly defined the truth as a textual phenomenon: law was reason, and
reason was written because reason and law were one and the same. The
author of law was its cause and authority. The authority of law was its
reason and its reason was its power. In short, faith and law, reason and
power, were in juristic terms identical by virtue of the commonality and
unity of their divine source.
Reference. The question of the origin of law and so also of its legitimacy
is addressed by Legendre by way of a discussion of reference. In a prosaic
sense, reference evokes the characteristic form of legal reasoning from
precedent texts or from rules and other authorities spoken in advance of their
instant use. The law, in this sense, speaks 'in the name of' a prior determina-
tion or source. Reference is here a logic of textual authority which guaran-
tees the order of law by referring it to prior textual sources which constitute
the reason and the truth of legal practice. At the level of the symbolic, the
An Abbreviated Glossary 261
structure of reference refers not to a specified or literal text but rather to a

metaphoric play of allusions, to a theatre and a poetics of power which
leads ultimately to the space of absolute Reference. The absolute Reference
is the founding place of the institutional order, it is the guarantee of the
truth of law, the mythological space of absolute knowledge. In terms of
the logic of the social, the absolute Reference establishes the meaning of
words and of things, and founds the order of causes which both explains
and guarantees the reason of the social. In affective terms the Reference
binds the social through the representation of the absolute source or truth
of the symbolic order. The Reference has to be communicated and yet, pre-
cisely because it is absolute, it can only be represented fictively or through
images. The Reference is an emblem or image, it is theatrically staged or
ritualistically represented as God or emperor, as constitution or people, as
sovereign or parliament, all of which effigies of social presence refer to an
absolute which cannot be either seen or directly known. All societies, in
Legendre's analysis, depend upon this mythological space and a theatre or
metaphor of foundations without which neither reason nor discourse would
be possible: a world ends when its metaphor dies.
Revolution of the interpreters. The modern juridical state is the unitary

expression of a dual, civil and ecclesiastical polity that dates back to the
interpretative revolution of the eleventh through to the thirteenth centur-
ies. In technical historical terms, the mediaeval revolution in interpretation
refers to what Harold Berman coined the Papal Revolution associated with
the Gregorian Reforms of the late eleventh century and consolidated in
Gratian's Decretals and in the reception of Roman law, of the Corpus Iuris
Civilis, in twelfth-century Europe. The papal revolution was described
by Gregory VII as a 'reshaping of the entire world' (reformatio totius orbis)
and can be depicted synoptically as having instituted the specific textual
order and form of government, the dogmatic reason that was to define and
shape the Western institutional order. The revolution was political and
hermeneutic, it established the order of sources of law and the hierarchy
of interpreters that would apply and develop that law. In political terms
the revolution of the interpreter established the pontiff as the first source
of law and the authority of the pontiffs (auctoritas pontificum) was to create
a monopoly of true interpretations. In hermeneutic terms, the reception
of Roman law provided a means of systematising and developing the
civil polity upon a comparable textual basis to that of the Christian state.
The great compilation of Roman law, systematised and aligned with the
texts of canon law, was to found the political order upon the logic of the
text, upon the written reason or ratio scripta of law. Truth was thus to
become both a question of law and a matter of texts and of their authorised
interpretations.
Text. The Western tradition of government is a textual tradition and his-

torically has conferred its greatest power upon the legitimate bearers and
interpreters of its texts. In a tradition that runs from the Middle East to
Rome and Byzantium, the Bible and the texts of Roman law together have
formed the basis of a social order and institutional reason that depends
upon the interpretation of writings which can be made to state the truth
and so express the law. The textual order or Text is founded, in other
words, upon an orginary truth, a divine source that is represented polit-
ically as the imperial or sovereign author of the laws, a living writing or
oracular text. Classically, the emperor was said 'to carryall the laws in the
archive of his breast' (omnia iura habet in scrinio pectoris sui). The Text was
not any simple or mere writing, it was the living embodiment of the law,
and so also the bearer of a transcendent meaning that the lawgiver would
state as the delegate or vicarious mouth of its originary author. The Text
spoke 'in the name of' a higher source of law and was in consequence
the means of access to truth. In that the Text represented the reason and
the law of social being, it was not only an emblem of political authority
but was the structural form of sociality. In one sense, this meant that the
texts of the law instituted the institutional form of social life, the persons,
actions and things that make up the institution and that would govern
life (magisterium vitae). In its symbolic aspect, the Text was the Empire of
the possible, a geography, both a parent and a country. In the words of one
classical jurist, Rome, meaning the written law, was a shared fatherland or
common home (Roma communis nostra patria est). According to another
etymology, the text was both terror (terreo) and territory (territorium), it
both circumscribed and conquered the world, it was the legal form of
community, a space of habitation. The subject was a 'child of the text' and,
captured by its institutional reason, both lived and died within its confines.
Third. The trinitarian structure of the Christian faith represents an essen-
tial feature of Western sociality. Power is never directly present but is
always triangulated, which is to say mediated through the space of the
third. In a theoretical sense, the Third is the structural site of the absolute,
the empty space, abyss or nothingness upon which both value and power
depend. As the founding principle of the social, the logic of the Third is the
logic of the distance or lack which makes power possible, it is the inaug-
ural space or theatrical stage of social value and subjective attachment.
In theology, the power of God or absolute place of the mythical Third
must thus always pass through a mediating figure - that of the Pope, the
emperor or the priest - before it becomes an object of subjective attach-
ment. The logic of the Third thus refers to a logic of exchange between the
subject and the absolute, which takes place across the space or distance of
interpretation. To communicate with, or to love, the enigmatic figure of
social authority or of divine power, the subject must address that figure as
a lack, as something absent or in Lacan's terms, as the object of an imposs-
ible desire. Thus Legendre variously refers to the Third as the absolute
Other, as the Image, Emblem, Mirror or Text. At the level of the Western
institution, the necessary yet empty space of the Third to which desire is
addressed is replicated most prominently in the practices of penitence and
law. Both practices are triangulated - confession and trial both take the
form of actus trium personarum - so as to allow the subject to address the
absent space of power, the place of divine desire or sovereign will, respect-
ively through the figure of the priest or that of the judge.
Index
abduction 80-1 Bejart, M. 74

Abelard 76-80 Benveniste, Emile 138, 234
absence 20, 73, 91, 214, 215 blasphemy 234
see also nothing body 40, 44-6, 110, 213
absens corpore 132, 215 and institution 121
academics 14, 57, 95, 113 and image 214
acheiropoiesis 228 law of 40
Aeschylus 184, 187 melancholic 49
aesthetics 17-21, 23, 36, 41, 67, and soul 60
160-3 Boehme,Jacob 214
secularisation of 56 Bollandists 87
Albert the Great 216, 221 Boncompagnus 76
alienation (spectral) 224, 243-50, books (as images) 73
252 Borges, Jorge-Luis 232
alignment 61-4, 66 Bornitius, J. 138
alterity 227-33,237-40,244-50,252 Bude, Guillaume 27
amnesia 37 Byzantium 108, 158
amulets 43
anima legis 27 Callieres, Fran~ois 78
apologia 228 calligraphy 72, 134-6
Arbeau, Thoinot 46 canon law 11, 114, 118, 122, 124,
arcana IUrlS 19, 24, 36 133, 178
Aristotle 39, 49, 138, 145, 167, Capellanus, Andreas 80
181,253 caritas 14, 19, 26, 28, 107
ars dictaminis 76 Carlson, David 7
ars epistolandi et amandi 76 carousel 64
ars fal/endi 181 Carroll, Lewis 244-5
art 91, 164 case (casus) 180-4, 202
of law 16, 17, 19, 36, 125, 133 castration 83-8, 115, 118
of love casuistry 11, 22, 48, 52, 57, 63,
Artaud, Antonin xv 114, 127, 161-3, 180, 190,
Artifex 91 192-4, 196-203,206, 252-4,
attachment 34, 95-8, 106, 176 257
augurs 169 Caudill, David 12
authority 11, 20, 172 causality 166, 172, 194, 233,
authorship 11, 159 245-7,248
Azo 124 Celsus 27
censor 20, 107, 112
Bachofen 115 ceremony 41, 54, 60, 75, 91
Baroque 73, 77, 81, 245 chancelleries 75, 76, 91
Barthes, Roland 26 charlatanism 98, 133
Bartolus 120, 191 Chaste!, A. 229
behaviourism 112, 148 chastity 96, 130
263
264 Index
choreography 40, 46, 57, 61 discourse 155
Cicero 90, 100, 181 inaugural 154
circumcision 110, 205 legal 122, 189
Cistercians 81 places of 184, 194-200
Code 103 dissemblance 100
Coing, Hermann 113 distinctiones 123
Coke, Sir Edward 28 division 141, 230
commentaries 123, 124 dogma 137-41, 159, 257-8
common law 118 dogmatics xiv, 15-16, 22, 69, 85,
communication 72-4, 83, 89, 103, 95-7, 98-100, 114, 125,
106, 137, 139, 141-56, 224 137-42, 154, 204, 257-8
confession 50, 171, 175, 176 and dance 37-9,56-9
contract, of love 75 function of 131-3, 144
Corpus Juris Civilis 8, 22, 24, 121 and tears 48-56
copyists 134-5 double reading 22
correspondence 74 Douzinas, Costas 7, 29
counter-dogmatics 15-16 dreams 67,128
Counter-Reformation 39, 119 Durand, Guillaume 64
Courts of Conscience 128, 173, Durer, Albrecht 229,236, 252
245
courtly love 79-80 Echo 216
crimen falsi 69 effigies 20, 121, 227
critical thought 189, 190, 197 emblems 20, 69, 70, 148
enigma xiv, 24, 70, 72, 81, 98, 107
dance 37-67 enjoyment 112, 113, 129
and belief 59 Enlightenment 120
and smell 46 epistemology 121, 126, 174
d' Auvergne, Martial 77 Eros/ Anteros 239-40
decorum 41 erotics 14-15, 17, 74, 79, 92, 130
decretals 121 of communication 72,74,123
de Pisan, Christine 36 erudition 72, 74, 86, 98, 112, 121
de fide instrul1Ielttorul1I 24, 36 eschatology 50
delirium (institutional) 19,28, 91, ethics 11, 168, 174,209
240,247 etymology 212
deportment 62-3 Eumenides 208
Derrida, Jacques 219-21 Euripides 56
desire 86-90, 112, 117, lSI, 176, exegesis 154-6, 179, 206
195-8, 199, 214, 229 eyes 48, 60-2
dying 95 and tears 48-56
social 13, 66, 126, 229
subjective 32, 49-51 face 11,228
destiny 51, 114, 115, 118, 143, 178 divine 226-8, 236-40
see also fate of the father 248
differentiation 137, 143, 157, 162, social 11, 228
178,212, 230 false Decretals 87, 127
Digest 8, 16, 19, 27, 108, 122, 132, fanaticism 72, 92
202 fantasm 8, 9, 17, 34, 35, 50, 66, 81,
dignitas 22 85, 93, 104, 112, 131, 163, 175,
disappearance 148 195, 198-200
Index 265
fantastic 254 Heer, Friedrich 79

fascination 95-7 Hegel, Georg 135, 219, 221
fate 252-5, 258 HelOIse 77-81
familial 6 heraldry 69-70
legal 29 Herberger, M. 98, 105
Fates 143, 151, 171, 178, 258 heresy 81, 89, 154
father 1, 3, 8, 9, 31, 117, 141, 160, hermeneutics 145, 150, 157
176, 183, 186, 198, 200, 240 Hermes 137-9, 143-9, 154, 157-9,
absent 13, 240 242
confessor 170, 176, 185 Herodotus 234
face of 33, 236-9 hilaritas 50
Name of 31, 160, 189, 198 historiography 89, 100, 102, 125,
fiction 25, 34, 44, 67, 69, 77, 109, 154
120, 137, 151, 154, 157-9, 211 history 68, 89
filiation 31 and forgetting 41, 114
fill' amors 80 and image 153
forms 164-72, 194, 201, 202 and law 41, 90-2, 101-8, 129,
Fortescue, Sir John 33,34 177
Foucault, Michel 105 and love 44, 89
Francis of Sales 64 and mourning 43
Freud, Sigmund xv, 4, 8, 12, 14, and psychoanalysis 43, 114
16, 30, 67, 81, 94, 100, 114, Hobbes, Thomas 69, 117
140, 175, 177, 189, 191, 197, Holy Face 226, 229-32, 236-9,
202, 212, 251 248
function 201 hOl1estas 130
normative xiii-xv, 201 Honorius III 121
Hotman, Fran~ois 24
Gabel, Peter 12 humilitus 70
genealogy xiv, 33, 69, 117, 119,
140, 155, 166-9, 176, 197, Iamblichus 239-40
207-8,251 icon 216
genre 74-5, 183 iconography 226, 245
geography 132 identity 238, 246, 248
general 132 and love 36, 214-16, 241-4
mental 132 social 8, 90, 142, 152, 232-5,
gesture 41-2 238-45
glossators 22, 44, 61, 96, 99, 105, subjective 9, 214-22, 237-45
109, 119-21, 123, 125, 133, 156, idol 101, 237
191, 209 idolatry 235
glosses 156, 212 ignorance (will to) 14, 29, 197
God 57 image 212, 214, 217, 220, 228,
governance 18, 33, 36, 197 237-50
Gratian 9, 18, 33, 52, 96, 120, 122, cult 147, 159, 204
128, 130, 175 defined 212, 214, 238, 258
Gregory IX 121, 128, 158 ecclesiastical 156, 237
of God 32, 238
Haas, Alois 91 of image 221, 236
Hachamovitch, Yifat 7, 12 inward 35
hedonism 44, 128 legal 9, 35-7, 153
266 Index
image - continued justice
and love 217, 245 and art 36
narcissistic 215-17, 234-40 genealogical 166, 168, 176, 182,
as trace 215-16, 237 195, 199-202, 208
war of 160, 226, 247-50 and judgment 186, 195-204
imaginary (the) 13, 25, 36, 61, 66, as speech 182
81, 91, 103, 212, 219 Theatre of 16, 35, 196
imago 9, 215, 246, 247 Justinian 9, 19, 22, 30, 103, 105,
Imago Dei 216, 226, 247 108, 114, 118, 121
imitatio imperii 121 Juvenal 91
incest 199
incomprehension (right to) 24-6 Kafka, Franz 101, 103
indifference 98, 118 Kantorowicz, Ernst 106, 109, 125
initiation 126 Kantorowicz, Herman 102
injustice 203 Kelsen, Hans 101
Innocent III 124 kinship xiv, 31, 141, 153, 198,
Innocent IV 121 205
insanitas 96 Kircher, Athanasius 96
instance 160-4, 217, 218, 247 kisses 46, 223
inscription 134-6, 193,202 Kofman, Sarah 16
institution 91, Ill, 141, 152, 157, Koran 107, 173
164, 190, 241 Kuttner, Stephan 113, 175
and subjectivity 5, 16, 17
madness of 21,91-3,239-45 Lacan, Jacques 6, 8, 12, 29, 67, 77,
institutionalisation 5, 7, 17, 57, 80, 93, 101, 107, 129, 191,203,
117, 126, 129 251
interdiction 129, 130, 140, 149, laesa maiestas 235
157, 165-9, 177, 179, 187, 195, language I, 21, 249
209, 220, 259 Latinity 27, 53, 68, 73, 79, 92, 96,
interpositae personae 28 100, 107, 110, 147, 156
interpretation 28, 86-8, 150, latria 35
161-3, 169, 196, 198 law 150
debt of 198, 207 aesthetics and 17-19, 22-3, 41,
erotics of 72-3, 86-90, 124-6 192
judaic 110, 226 books of 21
places of 196-204 civil 9-11, 177
Isidore of Seville 21, 216, 218, and dance 37, 61, 66
251 and death 12, 30
ius commune 105 ecclesiastical 160
ius gentium 121 and education 15-16, 209
ius imaginum 36 and emotion 5, 33, 41
ius personarum 19 and exteriority 151
and gesture 41
judgement 166-74 interior 170-5
judges 166-74, 177, 196 learned 106, 122
and analysts 192-204 letter of 26
office of 168 and love 7, 22, 40, 44, 63
jurisdiction 167-9, 180-5, 205 and memory 93, 160
jurist (carnivorous) 20, 32 and politics 130
Index 267
and psychoanalysis 4-12, 44, metaphor 223-4, 236, 248

184-92 Michaux 193
and scholarship 14 minnesang 78
and science 15, 99, 115 Mirandola, Pico della 254
and the soul 28 mirror 9, 221, 222-5, 231,
of thought 247 234-55
and women 52-4, 130 Modestinus 138
written 21 montage 93, 109, 140, 148, 154,
lawyers 17, 30, 43, 67, 74, 106 156, 162, 168, 170, 186, 190,
Leibniz, Gottfried 204-6 192,250-5
Le Bras, G. 122 More, Sir Thomas 28
legalism 75, 77, 83, 102, 104-8, mourning 52
110, 118, 125-6, 139 Murphy, Tim 8
letters 74, 87 Mutterrecht 115, 130
Levi-Strauss, Claude 129, 140 mystagogues 24
lex animata 112 myth 13, 25, 218
lex loquens 27 mythology 38, 43, 49, 59, 85, 93,
lineage 31, 149, 155 99, 104-6, 109, 120, 157,
litera mortua 27 211-18, 244-50, 254
liturgy 44, 51, 54, 64, 73, 77, 161,
172,227 names 70, 155, 159, 235, 241
living law 31, 163 in the name of 91, 177, 215
living writing 109, 113, 122, 125, narcissism 198,211-21,229-33,
200 242,259-60
logos 158-60 Narcissus 211-21; 223, 231,
Lortie, Denis 1-5, 10-11,33-4 235-8, 240, 245-6, 252
love Nicole, Pierre 233
legal 16, 17, 22, 36, 247 normalisation 99-100
letters 75-84 nothingness 213, 230
mad 93,246 Noverre 58,60
political 7, 63, 70, 99, 126 lIovitas furoris 240
textual 72, 124-6 nursing father 18
Lucques, Charles-Antoine 208
Oedipus xiv, 130, 148, 197, 204,
magnetics 96 240, 247, 251
maieutics 218 complex 12, 141, 146, 199-200
Maoists 93, 107 officium poetae 26, 69, 91
march 61-6 onirocriticism 128
Marcian 202 oracles 108, 202
Marin, Louis 232-3 order (love of) 18, 129
mark 193-4 Orestes 208
Marsilus of Padua 111 Origen 78, 84, 85-9, 110
masks 19 origins 140, 146, 161, 171, 220
Matisse, Henri 231 Other 83, 88, 103, 236
Melanchthon 119 absolute 92-3, 105, 225-9,
Menestrier 63 236-45,253
message 29, 73, 91, 139, 162, 213, other scene 7, 14, 81, 140, 251
217, 218, 243-5 Ovid 211-16,217-21,229,232,
messenger 147, 155,217,243-5 236, 239, 240, 248
268 Index
paterfamilias 9, 30 reference 147-50, 156, 163, 164,
paternae imago substantiae 32 198, 209, 246-54, 260-1
paternity 8-9, 32, 69-71, 115-17, Reformation 57, 128
172, 175, 246, 251 regimen animarum 33
Paucapalea 121 religion 43, 44, 137, 149
pedagogy 14, 165, 166 Renaissance 56,96, 103, 208
penitence 44, 46, 50, 127, 173, 205 repetition 41, 62, 76, 89, 109, 133,
private 130 140, 179, 194
public 128 representation 141, 146, 158,
Petrarch 69 212-20, 229-33
phantasm 44 reproduction 38, 67, 104, 138, 208
philosophia rationalis 252 rescripts 122
Placentinus 26, 134-5 revolution (interpretative)
Plato 139, 145 twelfth-century xvi, 9, 23, 134,
Pliny 64 149, 153, 169, 215, 261
poetics 5, 16, 19, 24, 72, 83, 97, second (Freudian) 191, 203, 205
103, 110, 251 rhetoric 27, 47, 56, 64, 74, 90,
politics 145, 150, 160, 234 101, 127, 181, 196, 202, 207,
pontiffs 55, 93, 109, 110, Ill, 121, 209
123, 156, 157, 162 forensic 91, 196-202
positive unconscious 15 Rimbaud, Arthur 217-18,242-3
Post, Gaines 99, 164 rites 17, 41, 44, 64, 165, 172, 227
Pottage, Alain 1,29, 31, 34 Roman Catholicism 44, 56-8
praetor 202 Roman law 9, 11, 22, 23, 30, 69,
prelacy 39-40 106, 111, 115, 117, 118, 124,
private sphere 127, 180 149, 153, 163, 176, 201, 202
Protestants 119 Rome 57,185
protocols 83 as text 8,44
psychoanalysis 174, 183, 187-9, Roudinesco, Elisabeth 94
192, 197,206,237-45 Rougemont, Denis de 80
denial of 14 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 75, 79
and law 5-11, 14-17,93, Rufinus 121
192-204 Rush, Peter 12
practice of 44, 67-8, 93, 99,
117, 192-5, 197-202 sacrifice 88, 111
and rhetoric 41 Sade, Marquis de 79
public sphere 127, 180, 186 Saint Ambrose 51, 78
puel1a divina 78 Saint Augustine 19, 107, 238
Saint Thomas Aquinas 172
quaestiones disputatae 12 Saliens 39
Quintilian 90, 100, 181, 182, 188, Saussure, Fernand de 107,249
207,208 Savigny 104, 119
scene of writing 84
ratio scripta 160 scholasticism 49-53, 56, 61, 68,
rationem reddere 204, 206, 208, 210 73,90, 96, 117-20, 124, 129,
reason 39, 72, 137-9, 148, 200, 149, 155, 202, 243
204-6,240-4,247,252-3,260 schools 124
Reception (of Roman law) 22-3, psychoanalytic 93-4, 100, 206
123 psychological 179, 206
Index 269
Schopenhauer, Arthur 214 text 72-4, 86-90, 152, 198,

Schiitz, Anton 1 201-2,262
scientism 43, 74, 84, 89, 95, 100, circulation of 41
114, 135, 166, 219 and image 24
scribe 76, 134 and interpretation 81
scriptorium 134 and ratio iuris 21
seduction 81, 83, 88-90, 95-7, without subject 8, 22, 41,
108 59-61, 198
Septimus the Severe 86 and terror 23, 133
sign 214 theatre 35, 38, 57, 59, 63
signatura rerum 214 of Justice and Truth 15, 26, 32,
silence 29, 47 34,204,236
simulation 7, 225 theogony 39, 116
societas perfecta 167 Therese de Lisieux 229
Socrates 139, 145 Third 135-6, ISO, 179, 195, 202,
solemnisation 41, 42, 76, 80, 84 204, 209, 231, 262
soul 16, 17, 32, 60, 178 linguistic 145, 147, 150, 153,
sources 13, 239-40 157, 166, 252-5
speaking being xiv, 138, 141, 146, Thomas, Van 176
148, 150, 197, 213, 233, 243, Torah 135, 172
246 totalitarianism xiii, 137
specularity 212, 220, 229-31, totems 13, 149
234-49 Trakl, Georg 240
speech 143, 157-9, 185, 191, 195, tradition
254 Judaeo-Christian 110-12
Spencer, Stanley 83, 93 textual 119
State 192, 205 tragedy xiv, 35, 70
structure transference 194-7, 198-200, 209,
and subjectivity 199 210
unconscious 14, 199-202 transgression 195
style 207 transmission 68, 118, 119, 129-32,
subject 138, 152
and desire 5,36, 128, 190, 249 trial 207
formation of 6, 152, 173, truth 15, 23, 73-8, 88, 155, 221
212-15, 237-246 dogmatic 137
and law 14 figure of 24
libidinal 14, 129 legal 138
monumental 152 place of 19, 22, 112, 195
submission (walking) 155, 194
symbolic (the) 6, 14, 16, 36, 59, Ulpian 184, 185
116, 119, 237-45 ultra-modernity 92, 101, 148, 153,
order of 8, 21, 97, 141, 194-8, 162, 177
247-50 unconscious 81, 84, 89-90, 141,
permutation 143,237, 248-50 199-202, 213, 240
symbolism 36, 195, 215, 236-8 and law 7, 12, 206-8
utrumque ius 12,18,108-9,113,120
taboo 196, 198,202
Talmud 99, 108, 109 Valery, Paul 222
tears 48-54, 218 veil 237
270 Index
Veronica 227, 228 Wiseman, Robert 28
vestiges 161, 224 Wolff, J. 43
Vico, Giambattista 254 word
vitam instituere xiii, 7, 12, 139, and image 240-50
161 incarnate 147
viva vox iuris 27, 100 and thing 153, 241-3
vivendi leges 31 writing 21, 67-9, 83, 93, 134-6,
void 141, 152, 193, 230, 237-42, 193, 195
244, 246, 254 arche-writing 193
vorago 246-8
Zacchias, Paul 104
Weber, Max 120, 149 zero 241-2
why? 139, 144, 147, 149, 205 Zurburan 237

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(Language, Discourse, Society) Peter Goodrich (Eds.) - Law and The Unconscious - A Legendre Reader-Palgrave Macmillan UK (1997)

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LAW AND THE UNCONSCIOUS

LAW AND THE UNCONSCIOUS

Edited by Peter Goodrich

Translated by Peter Goodrich

This book is published in Macmillan's Language, Discourse,

First published in the United States of America 1997 by

Editors: Stephen Heath, Colin MacCabe and Denise Riley

Ian Hunter, David Saunders and Dugald Williamson

Translating and editing this Reader has been an extraordinarily long-

The defining feature of the texts presented here, in an erudite trans-

In terms of a structural logic, which is to say in terms of the order

question of the stakes of Reason. To understand the radical character

constructions, I attach extraordinary importance to the history of the

On Friday 4 May, 1984, while watching the Prime Minister of Quebec

place to kill and to be killed. On Monday, 7 May he visited the

2. Legendre, Lortie, at 89.

to make him understand that he would be pardoned for all his

3. Legendre, Lortie, at 61.

The double negative represents what, with only a minor injustice,

interpretation of law. 6 In the hope of avoiding too didactic an account

The introduction of a psychoanalytic perspective into the ana-

To borrow a Roman law maxim, of which Legendre is fond, law's

9. Digest 1. 3. 2. The passage continues: 'Lex est omnium divinarum human-

13. Digest 50.1.33, discussed in Legendre, Le Desir politique de Dieu. Etude

14. Legendre'S views on what he terms the twelfth-century revolution of

or tongue. To legislate or speak the law was to take up a position

various disputed questions (quaestiones disputatae) spanned the dis-

QUESTIONS OF METHOD: THE DOUBLE READING

the history of law, alike suggest a comparably hidden basis or

In the context of such a lack of thought, and more broadly in

27. Legendre, Amour du censeur, at 17.

30. See Legendre, L'Inestimable objet de la transmission. Etude sur Ie principe

a system of rules but an aesthetic, a culture or form of life. It is in

THE AESTHETICS OF LAW AND THE LOVE OF POWER

From a psychoanalytic perspective, the most striking feature of law

dimensions of the legal tradition. The history of the mediaeval legal

34. See Legendre, 'Le droit romain, modele et langage: De la signification

of persons which is subsumed under the ius personarum or, as

the subject is a structure of love, or in Augustine's terms it is structura

THE POETIC RIGHTS OF THE TEXT

The double reading which psychoanalysis suggests as the appropri-

In other words if institutions are both speechless and delirious,

The structural form of the Western institution is that of written

of the law in the unconscious of the Western institution is the insist-

45. For a technical account of the reception, see Legendre, La Penetration

may wish to read the textual tradition more geometrico, in terms of

48. Legendre, L'Empire de la verite, at 132.

unconscious of the subject to the order of texts or to the culture that

through an unconscious desire or unspeakable symbolism of law. It

depended upon a complex of rhetorical and extrinsic techniques of

formulation we are similarly told that 'no words, forms, niceties, or

DOGMATICS AND DOMESTICITY

In its most radical reading, Legendre'S analysis of the legal struc-

a space of silence, it harbours nothing more than a set of highly

of Roman law is a familial one and it is precisely the common link

(civis).'71 The power of the father is not self-founding, it is legally

71. Legendre, L'Inestimable objet de la transmission, at 172. See further, Alain

What is crucial to Legendre's analysis of the subject is the recog-

It is Legendre's argument that in the same sense that precedent

73. Code 6, 26, 11i discussed in Legendre, L'lnestimable objet de la transmis-

and like any falling in love it implies an unconscious or a beyond

the concept of a subject, to know the fantasm, is already marked by

78. Papageorgiou-Legendre, Filiation, at 33.