Jacques Lacan on Law

Why is the work of Jacques Lacan important to contemporary legal theory? What is Lacan's account of the nature and function of law? What is a 'Lacanian' legal theory? Costas Douzinas describes Lacanian psychoanalysis as 'the latest great frontier of jurisprudence'. This book analyses the contemporary field of Lacanian legal theory - both in terms of the Lacanian theorists that engage with law as an object of study, and the legal theorists that develop Lacanian psychoanalysis as an account of law. The book argues that while Lacanian theory is complex and challenging, it offers legal theory a new and important way to understand the symbolic structure of law and the subject's unconscious relation to it. The book examines Lacanian legal theory by using key theorists to illuminate fundamental themes in this field, such as the subject of law, the Law of the symbolic order, and the nature of modern law. The book has three aims: first, to provide a clear and accessible introduction to the work of Lacan on law; second, to provide a critical overview of contemporary Lacanian theories of law; and third, to develop a new Lacanian account of modern law. The book is divided into four sections.
The first section, 'Lacanian Law', has two chapters. The first short introductory chapter situates Lacanian legal theory within contemporary jurisprudential debates. The second chapter sets out the foundational concepts of Lacan's account of law, such as the subject, the social, the unconscious, and the real, symbolic, and imaginary registers of law. The second section, 'Lacan and Law', examines how different Lacanian theorists such as Zizek, Legendre, and Salecl theorise the legal subject and legal order. The third section, 'Law and Lacan' explores Lacanian jurisprudence, and analyses how legal theorists such as Goodrich, Douzinas, Irigaray, and Cornell use Lacanian psychoanalysis to provide a critical account of modern law, rights, and justice. The fourth and final section, 'A Lacanian Theory of Modern Law' develops a new Lacanian jurisprudence that understands modern law as a social bond that produces real, symbolic, and imaginary relations between subjects.