Oedipus Lex

This text offers a reading of legal history and institutional practice in the light of psychoanalysis and aesthetics. It explores the unconscious of law through historical and contemporary examples. The book provides an anatomy of law's melancholy and boredom, of addiction to law, of legal repressions, and the aesthetics of jurisprudence. It retraces the geneaology of law and invokes the failures and exclusions - the poets, women and outsiders - that legal science has left in its wake. In addition, the text analyzes the role and power of the image of law and details the history of law's plural jurisdictions and traditions of resistance to law. It also explores mechanisms of repression and representation as constituents of modern subjectivity, using medieval texts and early appearances of feminism as resources for the understanding and renewal of legal scholarship.