Law's Cut on the Body of Human Rights (Glasshouse Book) by Rogers Juliet

Author:Rogers, Juliet [Rogers, Juliet]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781134097302
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2014-06-12T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 5

The violence of the Other's law

* * *

We are all used to ritual in your Lordships’ House, but ours is harmless and hurts no one. 1

Freedom and the clitoris are what the (mutilated) woman wants. Apparently. If only Freud had known this when he asked the infamous question ‘what does woman want?’. But his ignorance is pertinent to our discussion precisely because the condition of uncertainty is the condition evoked, not only by the knowledge of an arbitrary sovereign desire, but also by an encounter with another's law. Indeed, the other's law draws our attention to the possibility of arbitrary judgment. The other's law, in the era of cosmopolitanism, self determinations and domestic multiculturalisms — which demand equal recognition and, what is termed, ‘respect for diversity’ — mean that other decisions, other laws cannot easily be rendered illegitimate (derived from no father worthy of the name). The other's law evokes the problem that there are other desires and other codes of being. That is, the other's law could be, in Lacanian terms, the Other's law.

The other, the migrant on our shores, introduces this uncertainty at the same time that her presence and her practice offers the objects precisely suited to the arrangement of a fantasy that promises to point to knowing. As discussed in Chapter 2 , we do not know what the mutilated woman wants; we are, like Freud, looking at a culture that embodies radical difference. This condition of not knowing, at the level of the unconscious, inures the anxiety that we do not know what will fill the lack introduced by castration, a condition resonant with not knowing the (un)certain desire of the sovereign-Other. Knowing , common or otherwise, offers the conjoining reference point for the condition of the subject before the law of the state (of the sovereign) and the condition of the subject before the law-of-the-father. If the subject knows what the sovereign wants of him/her — now and in the future — then s/he can obey, agree or align, as discussed in the last chapter. From this position the sovereign and the subject have no lack, and agreement, even obedience, assures a continued position of subjection as opposed to subjugation — what Douzinas calls subjectus . 2 Similarly, if the subject of castration can know the desire of the Other, as the one who can sanction the Ideal image in the mirror, then the love of the Other — or we might say, the position of being all that one imagines oneself to be — is secured. In both these positions there is no lack. However, the condition of subjectivity — the condition before law — is not this. One cannot know the desire of the Other. As Collette Soler explains of ordinary subjectivity:

There is a twofold lack: a ‘lack of knowing’ and a ‘lack of being’; a ‘want-to-know’ and a ‘want-to-be.’ The neurotic subject [as an ordinary subject] seeks an answer to these questions by way of the Other's desire … In the Other of the signifier, the Other has a locus.

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