Power and Legitimacy: Law, Culture, and Literature by Anne Quéma (review)

Anne Quéma's Power and Legitimacy: Law, Culture, and Literature is an ambitious contribution to law and literature scholarship. Carefully, although at times densely, written, it reads literature and law alongside the thought of Judith Butler and Pierre Bourdieu and an analytic structure provided by the contemporary Gothic. In doing so, Quéma thinks through the symbolic violence of power and how that power is legitimated. For readers of law and literature scholarship, as well as of jurisprudence more generally, it rewards as much as it challenges.

The aim of Power and Legitimacy is less to elaborate on the cultural-legal work of specific texts, although that does occur later in the book; rather, Quéma's approach is to examine a number of the key theoretical concerns of law and the humanities as a field: the nature of the relationship between law and culture (which she illustrates through the figure of the double helix, an intertwining that acknowledges that law is produced in more than the spaces of courts and the work of judges and legal statutes), the role of performative utterance in cultural-legal texts, the work of the ymbolic, and the methodologies of interdisciplinary legal scholarship. Bringing together these strands, Quéma describes her hybrid method as "an unwieldy progeny" (9), an apt image given her interdisciplinary interest in the Gothic and the legal and literary representation of the family. Cumulatively, Power and Legitimacy acts as something of a reflection on the field of law and literature itself, both a microcosm of its concerns and an extension of them through its theoretical engagements and its focus on the articulation and operation of legitimacy.

How, Quéma asks, is legitimacy constructed through law and literature, two discourses that "constitute themselves as fields of symbolic power vying with other social practices for recognition and social authority and, as such, are potentially implicated in the exercise of symbolic violence in their production of social meaning" (8)? Noting rightly that their institutional and discursive differences mean that there can be no "mere analogy" between these two fields, Quéma's focus is on how the operation of symbolic power in law and literature enables legitimacy. The polis provides Quéma's analytic crux, materializing social poiesis (that "constituting of the social world as a constant and agonistic process" [198]) as a site in which "law and literature engage to create norms of being and doing things while seeking to legitimate these norms through performative effects of authority" (8). The conceptual power of law, she writes, lies in legitimation, in how social meaning is made by transmitting principles and decrees into material, objective conditions. Thus, for example, constitutions invoke the foundational communities that they create at the same time as they claim their authority from them, legitimacy naturalized through seemingly immemorial customs and tropes.

Quéma foregrounds questions of symbolic representation in Butler and Bourdieu's work, and, through an examination of law and literature's production of social meaning, the work of symbolic violence in the constitution of legitimacy. Butler and Bourdieu operate in often uneasy conjunction in the book, sometimes in tension, sometimes in concert. Their presence wanes later in Power and Legitimacy, although their ideas continue to frame it and they never vanish entirely.

This latter part of the book, where I found Power and Legitimacy to be at its most fascinating, focuses upon the interrelations between family law, the Gothic, and literature. As a genre, the Gothic often tracks the relationship between public and private, internal and external. Gothic unease is so often located in the home and interior space, yet its disquiet is also lodged in institutions (notably the Church) that entrap and torment—as law does, with the legitimacy of the state, in its own institutions and structures. Quéma differentiates her approach from other, earlier work about the relationship between law and the Gothic, including David Punter's Gothic Pathologies. Notably, she distinguishes her...