Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Preface and Credits
- Introduction: On the Case
- 1 Miscarriages of Transmission: Body, Text and Method
- 2 Silencing Schreber: Freud, Lacan, Rejection and Foreclosure
- 3 Morbus Juridicus: Crisis and Critique of Law
- 4 The Impure Theory of Law: The Metaphysics of Play-With-Human-Beings
- 5 The Judge’s New Body: Am I That (Woman)?
- Conclusion: Laughing in the Void
- Bibliography
- Index
3 - Morbus Juridicus: Crisis and Critique of Law
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 May 2021
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Preface and Credits
- Introduction: On the Case
- 1 Miscarriages of Transmission: Body, Text and Method
- 2 Silencing Schreber: Freud, Lacan, Rejection and Foreclosure
- 3 Morbus Juridicus: Crisis and Critique of Law
- 4 The Impure Theory of Law: The Metaphysics of Play-With-Human-Beings
- 5 The Judge’s New Body: Am I That (Woman)?
- Conclusion: Laughing in the Void
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
There must be an equalizing justice and it can never be that a morally unblemished human being with feet firmly planted in the Order of the World should have to perish as the innocent victim of other people's sins in a struggle carried on against him by hostile powers.
In the wake of a translation that deletes the bulk of the title of the work and removes the juristic credentials of the author, and of psychoanalytic interpretations that denude the Judge of his discourse and hir visions – ‘the growing disaster of the imaginary’ – it is time to rectify and rescue the jurist from her doctors. There is no question but that Freud and Lacan were somewhat in love with Miss Schreber, identified with his delirium and admired, were informed and entertained by hir discourse. It is indeed that identification and amusement, their sense that they too were ill in part of the same delirium, that leads to the projection of their own interpretation, their foreclosure of the Judge's text, by rather too quickly inserting the figure of the absent father into the space that could equally well be occupied by the plurality and complexity of images and figures of paternity and law that Schreber himself proposes. This constitutes a certain conflict of laws, that of the interpreter as against that of the jurist, and two rival conceptions of the paternal metaphor. For the analytic schema, the figure of the father is that of an absence, the lack of the signifier engendering the fantasy of the patient, as against the Judge's perception of a struggle to institute a novel governance and oikonomia in the place of a failed sovereignty and a useless deity. The psychoanalytic critique of the subject forecloses the critique of the law. It is not only a question of clearing the ground, of finding a position from which to listen to the subject's discourse, but also of taking account of the tradition and theoretical framework that the Judge inhabited and, however variably, expressed.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Schreber's LawJurisprudence and Judgment in Transition, pp. 61 - 86Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2018