Maria Aristodemou, Law, Psychoanalysis, Society: Taking the Unconscious Seriously, Abingdon: Routledge, 2014, 190 pp, hb £75.00.
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1468-2230.12174 |
| Date | 01 January 2016 |
| Published date | 01 January 2016 |
Reviews
Maria Aristodemou,Law, Psychoanalysis, Society: Taking the Unconscious
Seriously, Abingdon: Routledge, 2014, 190 pp, hb £75.00.
Law, Psychoanalysis, Society invites the reader to be guided on an unconventional
journey of legal analysis. On this journey, the law itself is the patient of psy-
choanalysis. An enticing premise, Aristodemou’s style successfully seduces the
reader from the very first image on the front cover. Graceful and unwavering
in her critique, Aristodemou departs from conventional socio-legal scholarship
by weaving popular culture (from films and television series to music and
novels and current affairs) with legal theory to put law on the analyst’s couch.
This book does not presume knowledge of psychoanalytic jurisprudence and
I myself do not have a background in theory of this particular kind. While
references to psychoanalysis are common in academic writing, particularly
legal scholarship, Aristodemou begins with a warning that references to
psychoanalytic terms have domesticated the concepts rather than forced a
confrontation with what psychoanalytic inquiry pursues. The latter is precisely
what her book promises, and delivers. Aristodemou facilitates a confrontation
of law with psychoanalysis where the individual reader is prevented from hiding
her own subjectivity and, equally, is encompassed into the self-questioning of
analysis.
On the first page, the reader encounters 2013 Britain where the public faced
the revelations of Operation Yewtree and the inquiry into the decades of abuse
carried out by Jimmy Savile. ‘Unacknowledged “secrets” lie at the heart of our
laws and legal systems’, reads the second page. The enticement of the journey
takes hold, leading to chapters entitled: ‘The unconscious is out there’, ‘In the
beginning was the lack’, ‘The hole in the subject’, ‘the hole in the Big Other’,
‘Placebos’, until concluding with ‘Atheism’. The chapters of this expedition
may be visited (or re-visited as was my experience) in isolation. Subsections
provide a guide to pin-point particular topics, albeit with unconventional flags
for a law monograph; for instance chapter 3.3, ‘Cut by the word’, or 4.5, ‘The
perverse core of formal law’. Regardless of the route a reader chooses (the
order in which it is read), this book guarantees a journey like no other for the
legal scholar. The provocations linger and will entice further questions for the
reader, academically and personally, long after the book is shelved.
The premise of Aristodemou’s volume is that the procedure of judicial
inquiry is in need of analysis. Revelations or surprises that shake the edifice
of law and society, exemplified by Operation Yewtree or Edward Snowden’s
NSA exposure, are not hidden or unknown. The cracks in the legal and
social edifice stare us in the face if, according to Aristodemou, we care to
stop ignoring them. Aristodemou demonstrates the commonplace, unhidden
‘revelations’ as they are present in popular cultural products—film, music,
literature—and interrogates how these apparent truths are ignored in the
dominant ideology and production of law. They are, in Lacan’s term, extimate,
that is exterior-interior. With this point of departure, Aristodemou explores
not only what is extimate in law but what a psychoanalytic questioning of law
might involve. She questions law’s unconscious, and, even more provocatively,
why law lies to itself and how law can be analysed.
202 C2016The Authors. The Modern Law Review C2016The Modern Law Review Limited.
(2016) 79(1) MLR 183–206
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