Tristes Juristes
| Author | Peter Goodrich |
| Date | 01 March 2003 |
| DOI | 10.1177/096466390301200106 |
| Published date | 01 March 2003 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
TRISTES JURISTES
PETER GOODRICH
Cardozo School of Law, New York, USA
PETER FITZPATRICK’SModernism and the Grounds of Law (2001) will
frustrate many, bemuse some and guide a few. Such a commendable
diversity of likely responses is the product of the risk that the book
takes and the style that it adopts. The risk is that of addressing legality
through the lens of psychoanalysis and posing a question that might be
termed that of the psychic life of law. Attention to this question, which can
also be formulated as that of the unhappy consciousness of the jurist, requires
a crossing of disciplinary boundaries, an attention to symptoms, an anthro-
pology of the psyche that is necessarily indefinite, irresolute and trangressive
of the norms of both scholarship and jurisprudential elegance as conven-
tionally conceived. The style, as befits a work that seeks to attend to the
residues that escape or come ‘before’ law, is clangorous, associative and
wordy. It is a style that reflects the risks of the analysis, its transgressions,
and in its way it seeks to embody the paradoxes of subjection, the sublima-
tion and the recoil or repression that Freud’s account of the origin of law
predicts. In short, the style is symptomatic of the work and the book both
offers and deserves a symptomatic reading.
For fear that the argument that follows may get lost in questions of style
or the ambivalence of my affection for what Fitzpatrick failingly attempts to
achieve, I will state the structure of its progression in advance. Modernism is
most optimistically to be understood as an elegy to a life spent among the
tribe of lawyers. It offers a Tristes Tropiques of the law in which the author
melancholically looks back upon the verbal and social delirium of being a
lawyer as well as being complicit in the globalizing project of Western law.
Seeking to look back upon these alternately biographical and ethnographic
records of time spent in the habitus of lawyers, Fitzpatrick seizes upon the
figure of the savage to depict both his own anger towards law – for his
complicities, for the delirium in which he became engaged, for the limits that
law imposed upon him – and to account for the violence or irrationality that
structures the imposition and elaboration of laws. The savagery that precedes
and subsists in law is also, in other words, a figure of internal delirium or
psychic violence. It gains embodiment and expression in a text that is
SOCIAL &LEGAL STUDIES 0964 6639 (200303) 12:1 Copyright © 2003
SAGE Publications, London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi,
www.sagepublications.com
Vol. 12(1), 109–120; 030847
40P 06 Goodrich (JS/D) 20/1/03 11:06 am Page 109
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