ABSTRACT
This chapter elaborates the idea of a rational-textual conscious legality, and its denial and repression of anything beyond its limits. It focuses on the legal person, through engagement with the problem of human–machine integration and its implications for legal understandings of personhood, while the second explores the epistemological connotations of a discipline that frames the human in purely rational terms. The chapter introduces the character of Dr Manhattan from Watchmen in order to explore a hyperbolic rational framing of knowledge that represses the uncertainty of the self, imagining the universe as a purely rational system in order to maintain a solid and knowable boundary around the legal subject. It draws from Dr Manhattan the concept of a 'rational surface' of knowledge that represses other ways of knowing, ultimately highlighting the way in which a rational frame gives rise to a legal order that is problematically unable to encounter anything beyond that frame.
