Zwischen Norm und Chaos: Literatur als Stimme des Rechts by Katrin Becker (review)

Katrin Becker's Zwischen Norm und Chaos is an ambitious work that draws on the concepts of Pierre Legendre's dogmatic anthropology in order to rethink the relationship between law and literature. Since Legendre's work may be relatively unknown to those working in intellectual disciplines outside law and literature studies, a large section of the book gives a clear and engaging introduction to the concepts, operations, and investments of Legendre's theory before mining its aesthetic potential, above all for works of literature. Indeed, the very notion of dogma that Legendre seeks to rehabilitate—which links normative commitments and beliefs (doxa) to a manner of appearance, making visible, and even potential deception (dokein)—makes the aesthetic into an anthropological constant: the "decor" in which the norm is presented comes to define the human just as much as the rationality of the norm itself.

Becker's engagement with Legendre does not so much seek to impose a theoretical model on literary works—in this instance, Kafka's Der Process and Hoffmann's Der Sandmann—as much as to let these works shine through a conceptual prism and thereby uncover latent features of literary art that would otherwise remain invisible and unthematized. In so doing, Becker brings to the fore a chaotic potential in these works—a disruptive literary agency—that undermines attempts to read literature primarily as a discursive resource aimed at the stabilization of preexistent normative commitments.

Cleaving too close to a theoretical scaffolding is not without its risks: does the work of art become submerged behind a conceptual edifice? Is the capacity of the work of art to stimulate thought and novelty tamed inasmuch as it is regarded as an allegory, an illustrative example operating in the service of a theory, or a feedback mechanism whose ultimate purpose is to problematize, expand or modify a theory (the work serving the theory rather than the theory serving the work)? If one regards theory not as the production of truth, but rather, as a manner of seeing the phenomenon in a different conceptual landscape and making it speak with a different voice—literature as the "voice" of law, to draw on Becker's phrase—then these potential risks can be navigated inasmuch as the theory itself becomes a source of profound alienation: throw the work of art into a sea of concepts and observe what comes up from the depths.

And such is the most productive gesture of Becker's book. One of the most striking elements of dogmatic anthropology for the study of literature consists in the way it mobilizes the insights of psychoanalysis—above all the specular and triangular logic of Lacanian psychoanalysis—in order to elucidate the norm-constituting dynamics of law. The operation of law is predicated on making visible a system of "reference," or that which allows human beings to speak in the name of something and to issue bans. A specular logic of triangulation suffuses the domain of reference, which binds selves capable of recognizing themselves within norms and institutions (analogous to seeing oneself through the otherness of the authority of the parent) according to the various modes of representation of these norms and institutions. According to the logic of dogmatic anthropology, the imaginary and the symbolic are not opposed, as the imaginary has an analogous norm-binding function to that of the symbolic: norm already inheres in the images of the imaginary.

For Legendre, law is anthropogenesis: it refers to those institutions through which the human first becomes human and enters into the domain of culture. While this conception of law might seem universalist and somewhat formalist in character, it nevertheless opens onto a specific historiography of law—akin to a Foucaultian episteme or Heideggerian Seinsgeschichte, but through the field of law. For example, the Judaic concept of law invokes a system of reference characterized by the potentially infinite interpretation of a text corpus (the torah as sensuous, embodied law) with no final adjudicating instance. In contrast, Roman...