Freedom in the free world: The extimate becomes the law.
My article takes Robert Burt's piece as a starting point to highlight how a lacanian analysis of law differs from the one Robert Burt (rightly) rejected and from the alternative psychotherapeutic scenario Burt develops. I focus on what I consider to be the novel characteristics of a lacanian analysis, particularly its insistence on the castration of the human subject by language, a castration that problematizes our understanding of "freedom" and "free speech", and, in turn, on Law's own castration. The gradual peeling away of the claims made on behalf of the subject by ego psychologists, enables us to arrive at what a lacanian analysis would ideally uncover, that is the subject's extimate core. I illustrate this with the film The Act of Killing, a documentary which displays not only the extimate core at the heart of the subject but the extimate as the Law itself. The encounter between law and psychoanalysis, I conclude, far from leading to mutual understanding, leads to the dissolution of the analysand's pretenses, and, in turn, to the withdrawal of psychoanalysis from the scene altogether.
School of Law, Birkbeck College, University of London, London, United Kingdom. Electronic address: m.aristodemou@bbk.ac.uk.
Maria
M
Aristodemou
D005060:Europe; D005610:Freedom; D049672:History, 19th Century; D049673:History, 20th Century; D006801:Humans; D007603:Jurisprudence / Q000266:history*; D011572:Psychoanalysis / Q000266:history*; D011574:Psychoanalytic Theory; D014481:United States
Castration; Extimate; Freud; Lacan; Language; Law; Psychoanalysis