ABSTRACT
The two strictly interrelated questions concerning the law that Žižek repeatedly confronts in his writings are the following: How does the law work? How do we subvert law? The necessary precondition to any exploration of Žižek's understanding of law is, however, the awareness that Žižek is not, strictly speaking, a legal theorist (see Dean 2004). Rather, he has developed a psychoanalytic/philosophical approach that aims to expose the law's disavowed ontological core, which intersects and conditions the fundamental categories of being. Žižek's starting point is that there is no world outside the socio-symbolic law in which we dwell; all we can do is momentarily suspend its powerful grasp in order to reset its content. Second, what allows for content-related transformation is the law's hidden contradiction, which, however, is also the crucial hinge that sustains its functioning. The law, for Žižek, is internally antagonized by an inerasable excess which is also its condition of possibility. It is therefore apparent that Žižek's “general theory of law” is founded upon an antagonistic substance whose dialectical role is absolutely ambiguous – which, in turn, leads to an intrinsically problematic theory of political transformation. My evaluation of Žižek's concept of law is twofold: first, I outline its theoretical orientation, tracking the roots of the psychoanalytic insight that the law is grounded in its own libidinally-invested excess; in a second move, I look at cinematic representations of such excess with a view to assessing the validity of Žižek's theory of law vis-à-vis the current configuration of global capitalism.
