ABSTRACT

This book advocates, and develops, a critical account of the relationship between law and the largely neglected issue of ‘enjoyment’. Taking popular culture seriously – as a lived and meaningful basis for a wider understanding of law, beyond the strictures of legal institutions and professional practices – it takes up a range of case studies from film and literature in order to consider how law is iterated through enjoyment, and how enjoyment embodies law. Drawing on psychoanalytic theory, this book addresses issues such as the forced choice to enjoy the law, the biopolitics of tyranny, the enjoyment of law’s contingency, the trauma of the law’s symbolic codification of pleasure, and the futuristic vision of law’s transgression. In so doing, it forges an important case for acknowledging and analyzing the complex relationship between power and pleasure in law – one that will be of considerable interest to legal theorists, as well as those with interests in the intersection of psychoanalytic and cultural theory.

chapter |5 pages

Introduction

chapter 1|7 pages

Reading law with Lacan

chapter 2|9 pages

Law's forced choice (to enjoy)

chapter 3|16 pages

Law and contingency

chapter 5|16 pages

The master and knowledge after nihilism

chapter 6|9 pages

Enjoyment and restorative justice

chapter 8|14 pages

Coraline, or l'envers de la loi

chapter 9|15 pages

Psyche and authority

chapter 10|9 pages

The legal and the erotic in True Blood

chapter 12|18 pages

Contract and conflict in Eve Online

chapter |4 pages

Conclusion