ABSTRACT
Relying on recently proposed hate speech regulation, Catharine MacKinnon makes a similar argument concerning pornography. The anticipated universality, for which the authors have no ready concept, is one whose articulations will only follow, if they do, from a contestation of universality at its already imagined borders. The contemporary scene of cultural translation emerges with the presupposition that the utterance does not have the same meaning everywhere, indeed, that the utterance has become a scene of conflict. MacKinnon insists that a woman's "consent" is depicted by the pornographic text, and that depiction at once overrides her consent. The legal domain of the state clearly has its own "aesthetic" moments as well, some of which the people have considered: dramatic rearticulation and reenactment, the production of sovereign speech, the replaying of phantasmatic scenes. The state resignifies only and always its own law, and that resignification constitutes an extension of its jurisdiction and its discourse.
