Publication details
Pashukanis avec Lacan: Towards the Fantasy of Legal Form
| Authors | |
|---|---|
| Year of publication | 2024 |
| Type | Chapter of a book |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Description | This chapter applies the psychoanalytic concept of fantasy to the ideological function of legal form. Fantasy, developed as a clinical and analytical concept by Jacques Lacan, was used by Slavoj Žižek in the project of a psychoanalytically informed Marxist critique of ideology and its features, such as the commodity form. Yevgeny Pashukanis, thinking about law from a Marxist perspective, theorized the notion of legal form as the site connecting the legal mechanism to the commodity form. I argue that to use the notion of legal form today requires undergoing a new psychoanalytic reading. The same theoretical trajectory that Žižek develops, i.e. a return to Marx via Lacan, can be applied to Pashukanis and his notion of legal form. It is Lacan's concept of the fantasy as an unconscious narrative creating an ideological structure of our own relation to reality that can illuminate the sophisticated mechanism of legal form and its function in today's legal edifice of late capitalism. The structure of the chapter begins with a brief outline of Pashukanis' conception of legal form and its relation to Žižek's reading of Marx. Then I describe Lacan's conception of the fantasy. Next, I conceptualize legal form as an ideological fantasy with its distinct logic and mechanism. I argue that a psychoanalytic critique of the legal form, understood as a kind of fantasy, can reconfigure our relationship to the legal form and consequently give rise to a new kind of radical critique of law. |
| Related projects: |