Law

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"law" (Fr. loi)

Lacan's discussions of the "Law" (which Lacan often writes with a capital 'L') owe much to the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss.

As in the work of Lévi-Strauss, the Law in Lacan's work refers not to a particular piece of legislation, but to the fundamental principles which underlie all social relations.

The law is the set of universal principles which make social existence possible, the structures that govern all forms of social exchange, whether gift-giving, kinship relations or the formation of pacts.

Since the most basic form of exchange is communication itself, the law is fundamentally a linguistic entity - it is the law of the signifier:

This law, then, is revealed clearly enough as identical with an order of language. For without kinship nominations, no power is capable of instituting the order of preferences and taboos that bind and weave the yarn of lineage through succeeding generations.[1]

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This legal-linguistic structure is in fact no more and no less than the symbolic order itself.

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Following Lévi-Strauss, Lacan argues that the law is essentially human; it is the law which separates man from the other animals, by regulating sexual relations that are, among animals, unregulated:

"(Human law is) the primordial Law... which in regulating marriage ties superimposes the kingdom of culture on that of a nature abandoned to the law of mating. The prohibition of incest is merely its subjective pivot."[2]

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It is the father who imposes this law on the subject in the Oedipus complex; the paternal agency (or paternal function) is no more than the name for this prohibitive and legislative role.

In the second time of the Oedipus complex the father appears as the omnipotent "father of the primal horde" of Totem and Taboo.Cite error: Closing </ref> missing for <ref> tag

If, on the one hand, law imposes limits on desire, it is also true that the law creates desire in the first place by creating interdiciton.

Desire is essentially the desire to transgress, and for there to be transgression it is first necesary for there to be prohibition.[3]

Thus it is not the case that there is a pregiven desire which the law then regulates, but that desire is born out of the process of regulation.

"What we see here is the tight bond between desire and Law."[4]

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If the law is closely connected to the father, this is not only because the father is one who imposes the law, but also because the law is born out of the murder of the father.

This is clearly illustrated in the myth of the father of the primal horde which Freud recounts in Totem and Taboo.

In this myth, the murder of the father, far from freeing the sons from the law, only reinforces the law which prohibits incest.


See Also


References

  1. Lacan, Jacques. Écrits: A Selection. Trans. Alan Sheridan. London: Tavistock Publications, 1977. p.66
  2. Lacan, Jacques. Écrits: A Selection. Trans. Alan Sheridan. London: Tavistock Publications, 1977. p.66
  3. Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar. Book VII. The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959-60. Trans. Dennis Porter. London: Routledge, 1992. p.83-4
  4. Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar. Book VII. The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959-60. Trans. Dennis Porter. London: Routledge, 1992. p.177