ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces Batman as an avatar of justice and gives an overview of his 'dark night of the soul' in the Asylum, whilst the second articulates the threat irrationality poses for conscious law, reconfiguring this as something to be embraced in the opening up of cultural legal aesthetics. It examines the threat posed to the rational legal order by that which is outside it, configuring the threat of the legal unconscious as the lawyer's severed head inside the house of law. The chapter concludes with the lesson of Batman's encounters in the Asylum: that we should remember the 'madness' outside the legal order and thus see that law is always already more than its conscious 'sanity'. Irrationality is a threat to law's ghostless machine; an uncertainty that surrounds rational legal forms. In navigating Gotham's living morass, Batman can be seen to take up an aesthetic mantle similar to street artists – a connection that warrants some explanation.
