Law and Literature and the Right to Death
I just sent a paper, "Law and Literature and the Right to Death," off to the editor. Since it's appearing in a bi-lingual German anthology, which I suspect will not get a lot of play in the Anglophone world where I live; and since I'm hoping to expand it in the near future and could really use some feedback from people who know more about Blanchot than I do (at least some of whom I have reason to believe occasionally look at this blog); and since I'm already advertising it on the Legal Research Network (a database for law professors' scholarly self-promotion where it is all but certain to sink without a trace into a sea of incomprehension and indifference), so that it's too late to pretend innocence of self-promotionary impulses anyway; and prompted, in part, by this post at Charlotte Street; and since I haven't had the time to post anything else recently, here's the first paragraph (the abstract is here):
Whatever its intellectual frisson, I take it that most would agree that “Law & Literature” as a subdiscipline is at best secondary within the general study of law. The reasons for that marginal status are familiar and I will not belabor them here, although I will come back to what I take to be the most essential of these reasons shortly. My goal is rather to indicate a theoretical road less taken that suggests the possibility that the question of “literature” belongs instead at the heart of law and jurisprudence. That road will eventually take me through a reading of the French literary critic Maurice Blanchot’s 1948 essay “Literature and the Right to Death.” This is a “road less taken” not only in the sense that Blanchot has had almost no presence as a figure in the Anglo-American study of Law & Literature, but also because most attempts to de-marginalize the study of Law & Literature have begun with what is indisputably common to the law and to literature – their shared status as linguistic or cultural constructs, repositories of humanistic values, and so on. What I would like to try to do here, by contrast, is to begin at the very center of the concept of law itself (or at least its Western concept) – with law qua expression of political sovereignty. That is to say, I will begin with what is generally held to distinguish law most fundamentally from other linguistic, cultural or social norms or constructs, including particularly those of the institution of literature. My goal is thus to locate “the literary” – in a sense that remains to be determined – within the very essence of law itself, beyond the kind of general cultural resemblances that have previously been identified.
And this is the (absurdly ambitious) statement of the hoped-for pay-off :
In what follows, I hope to show that that point of contact with literature constitutes the simultaneous possibility and impossibility of law as sovereignty, its motivating essence and its most implacable and insurmountable obstacle, precisely insofar as law is understood as the sovereign power over death. And that because, as Blanchot argues, literature itself is nothing more than the simultaneous demand for death inscribed in every act of linguistic meaning and the exposure of its impossibility – the impossible condition of possibility at the limit of literature, of linguistic meaning, of death itself; and (I will argue) of law as well. But at the same time, and by the same token, the possibility of politics, also.
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