ABSTRACT
A constitutive perspective in law is especially well-suited for assimilating many of the ideas of postmodernist’s key scion, Jacques Lacan. In a exchange between Joel Handler and his critics in Law and Society Review, much discussion has been centered on the transformative potentials of postmodernist thought. For Lacan, topology theory is not metaphor nor analogy, but rather homology: qualitative operations precisely define the dynamics of the desiring subject in relation to discourse. Lacan, in the 1960s and 1970s, was to make heavy usage of topology theory in his exposition of the nature of the desiring subject in discourse. The chapter shows that epistemological breaks necessitate a new vocabulary and a centering in a new discourse. It explains some of the essential insights of Lacanian topology theory portraying the desiring subject in relation to discursive production. The chapter provides a framework for a psychoanalytic semiotics.
