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The Grounds of Law

Document Cited in Related
Vincent
Published date01 March 2003
AuthorAlan Norrie
Date01 March 2003
DOI10.1177/096466390301200105
Subject MatterArticles
40P 05 Norrie1 (JS/D) 20/1/03 11:07 am Page 105
DIALOGUE AND DEBATE
THE GROUNDS OF LAW
THE TWO ARTICLES that follow are extended reviews of Peter Fitz-
patrick’s Modernism and the Grounds of Law (2001). Fitzpatrick was
for many years a member of the editorial board of this journal and his
work will be familiar to many of our readers and contributors. Over a period
of 25 years he has made an enormous contribution to the social theory of
law. In an intellectual trajectory that has taken him from the political
economy of law and development and legal anthropology to his work on
Michel Foucault, and then on to his most recent work centring around
Jacques Derrida, Fitzpatrick has been a tirelessly innovative scholar, unafraid
to take risks in a notoriously conservative milieu. Fitzpatrick’s latest mono-
graph is a typically thoughtful and individual piece of work, which illumi-
nates many issues in law and social theory and which, importantly, sheds
general light on the present state of such theory today.
For Peter Goodrich, Modernism is a stylistically uneasy book, but the
difficulty is not a question of individual idiosyncrasy. Rather it stems from the
risk the book takes, albeit falteringly, in engaging in an account of law through
the lens of psychoanalysis. Here the stylistic quirks, the literary foibles, the
prefatory musical quotation are symptomatic of a scholar living out a ‘diffi-
cult’ relationship with the law, one in which transgression and affect, which
exist ‘before the law’, are brought to bear on it. There is an ‘anthropology of
the psyche that is necessarily indefinite, irresolute, and transgressive’ that exists
before our conventional accounts of law and jurisprudence, and that threatens
always to disrupt, from the inside, their seemingly smooth lines.
Goodrich describes a moment of origin, ‘of birth, . . . creativity, [and] the
body as the irreducible and material site of subject and subjectivity’, a moment
‘before autonomy and identity . . ., a corporeal space of relation, of the...

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