Maria Aristodemou

Democracy or Your Life! Knowledge, Ignorance and the Politics of Atheism in Saramago’s Blindness and Seeing

In western philosophy, the terms “gnosis” (knowledge) and “agnosia” (ignorance) are linked to seeing and to blindness: to see is to know while not to see is to be ignorant. In contrast to this genealogy, the anti-philosopher Lacan maintains that seeing does not guarantee knowledge, at least not knowledge of the “truth,” because there is always one point from which we can never see, that is, the blind spot. In a parallel way, however much we talk or write, we never manage to represent the whole truth or what Lacan terms the Real. The experience of analysis, the shattering impact of trauma, or, at times, a work of art, can enable us, however, to lift the veil covering truth. This article addresses Saramago’s twin dystopian fiction Blindness and Seeing and suggests that by pushing the limits of the possible and portraying the possibility of the impossible, Saramago enables us to catch a glimpse of the Real. The trauma depicted in Blindness leads to Saramago’s characters reassessing their relationship to knowledge and in particular their knowledge of the Big Other. Following this trauma, they cease making demands of the Other and in the process vanish him out of existence. The repercussions for our political system, and in particular for democracy, are fleshed out in the sequel Seeing where the State is impotent in the face of a silent protest by a sea of what I call atheist citizens; in other words, citizens who no longer believe in the city state. Saramago’s anti-politics, or politics of atheism, I suggest, are the natural companion to Lacan’s anti-philosophy and ethics of atheism.

Where God Was, Law Will Be?: Kant Avec Houellebecq

Abstract This paper explores how modern subjects have responded to the so-called death of God and what substitute objects they have tried to put in its place; these cures, or placebos as they turn out to be, have ranged from law, to reason, to work, to sex, to shopping, to love, and finally to literature. By examining Kant’s legal philosophy alongside the work of Michel Houellebecq, the paper wonders whether formal law can fill the endemic lack in the subject and in the symbolic order, or whether, as Houellebecq insists, ‘the trouble is, it’s just not enough to live according to the rules’. What are the consequences of this ‘ideational decline’, better known in contemporary parlance as ‘depression’, for law, for literature, and especially for the discourse we have come to know as ‘law and literature’? One consequence, I suggest, is the treatment of literature as the fantasy object that will fulfil law; such an approach, I suggest, is detrimental to law, to literature, and to `law & literature’. That the ethical response is to acknowledge the lack in each subject and in each discipline, and cease expecting the other (subject or discipline) to make up for one’s lack.

Does the Letter of the Law Always Arrive at Its Destination? "A Study in Feminine Psychology"

Abstract This paper uses Balzac’s short story “A Study in Feminine Psychology” as a springboard from which to explore what position the letter of the law occupies in a subject’s psychic space. Through this tale of a misaddressed declaration of love, the paper examines how the law and the signifier arrest the subject, and what freedom, if any, the subject has to maneuvre around this position. Are subjects condemned, as Balzac seems to suggest in this tragicomic tale, never to fully find, let alone assume, their own satisfying place “before the law”? Or that they can never do so without some embarrassment and/or pain? If the letter of the law always arrives at its destination, if the subject is always arrested by the signifier, what hope is there for protest or critique? In conclusion, the paper considers whether subjects on the feminine side of the formula of sexuation have greater capacity to transcend and transgress the letter of the law than subjects on the masculine side.

Cause lawyers are alright: ideology works its magic on the cause

To paraphrase Barack Obama, cause lawyers aren’t supposed to make any money: ‘their poverty is proof of their integrity’ (Obama, 2007, p. 135). Integrity and its insignia are, of course, sought-after signifiers not only in the field of community organising that Obama was describing, but in all professions, not least that of cause lawyers that is the focus of this book. The Cultural Lives of Cause Lawyers is the fifth in a series of essays edited by Austin Sarat and Stuart Scheingold on the activities of cause lawyers. Previous collections set the scene for the nature and aims of cause lawyering, analysing their professional and political commitments in theory and in practice, and their relationship to the state and to social movements in a global era. It is a series that almost single-handedly, quickly and efficiently helped define, as well as develop, this exciting new field.

Death by Representation: In Law, in Literature, and in That Space Between

The chapter reads Jose Saramago’s All the Names and Death at Intervals and suggests that although the symbolic order fetishizes the dead letter, works of art can resurrect inert signifiers and turn them into living, breathing, and growing bodies. The argument is that what allows Saramago’s texts to persist beyond the death wreaked by representation are two miracles that take place in the interstices of signification: first the miracle of love and second the miracle of poetry and in particular of metaphor. These miracles, I argue, form the backbone of Saramago’s texts, suggesting that the loss, or death, inflicted by the signifier can be rejoined, pasted, or united in a space between the symbolic and the Real, between law and literature.