Law’s Origin in Desire

Summary

This article develops the theoretical tools for a reversal of the traditional relationship of law to society and science, a relationship in which law appears to be the “smaller” term engulfed by the other two. It introduces a fourth term, desire, in which law has to be reflected. Normativity must be thought from the “incarnative” aspects of its demands: its edges cut through bodies and their desire. Thus legal regulation is fundamentally linked with a prohibitive emphasis immanent to all symbolic orders. However, the symbolicity of social orders has been mostly depicted in speculative and narrative styles of explanation - involving ‘Urzenen’ and violent, sacrificial origins. This article argues that it is important to de-narrativise such accounts and to develop a theory of incarnative normativity which fits into the post-ontological framework of science. Such a theory must work its way through a reassessment of the relationship between cognition and normation. It can thus be shown how epistemes shape the elusive construction of objects they manage to always have “in their back”, in the blind spot of their cognitive project.