The Real of Law
The essay takes a narrow angle view of the relationship between law and psychoanalysis, through the concept of the Real in Lacanian psychoanalysis; the Real as distinguished from ‘reality’; where (everyday) reality is a ‘phantasy construction’ (as against realist readings of reality) and Real is that which is either marking (i) the inassimilable or (ii) the foreclosed (Verwerfung); in this chapter, the inassimilable or the foreclosed of Law. Building on Freud’s reply (dated September 1932) to Einstein on ‘war’, the essay argues that while we have hitherto pitted ‘right’ against ‘might’, law against force and have assumed that it is the discourse of right(s) that counters the discourse of might, and it is law that counters the perpetration of force, Freud shows how the discourse of right(s) and Law is also premised on the foreclosure of a ‘fundamental signifier’: ‘community might’ and how subsequent transitions (that is, humanizations), in the discourse of right(s) and law keeps the signifier ‘community might’ crypted. Freud thus questions the assumed transformation from might to right; he shows it to be a transition from one kind of might (individual might) to another kind of might (community might). Partha Chatterjee’s The Prince and the Sannyasi (2011) helps us instantiate the question of the Real of Law: Real as inassimilable and as foreclosed; including the Discourse of Law as the (im)possible neurotic suture of eros and the Discourse of Law as a delusional veil over the secret support of the praxis of law: community might. The chapter shows how perhaps it was community might that had operated as ground, affect, and drive for an ‘unusual trial’ in Bengal in the 1930s and a judgment which looked to be a discourse of (not-so-sound) evidence, and (not-so-sound) interpretation around questions of identity and a ‘crucial event whose reconstruction formed the core of the [identity] dispute in court’.