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  • Transhumusians:On The Jurisography of the Corpus Iuris
  • Peter Goodrich (bio)

The image of beginning is the beginning of the image. It is marked as the central sign on the body, the fulcrum point of the stomach, the apex of the libidinal tensor of the skin. The navel, those forgotten folds, the umbilical ring, is the dark precursor, the sign of severance of attachment depicted in the point at which the ducta venosa, the bloody vein that carried new life to the inchoate human pupa, was cut. There we see, though we do not often look, the blind debt of birth, the wound left by the other, a properly unconscious memory forever resident as an alien interior on our skin. To the point, however, the pupa, as Didi Huberman relentless reminds us, becomes the imago, the wingēd advenience of incarnation, the flight of being in the world.1 In sum and pestle, the navel is the exsanguinated image and protreptic depiction of becoming, of falling to earth at the same moment that the mouth opens and the cry of the first law is heard across the phenomenological surfaces of an unfolding and opening skin.

In thought, in flesh, in imagine, we begin in the middle, in flight, falling, taking off. The navel is the starting point, the first matterphorical medium of the corpus iuris as ambulant image, tensile, pneumatic, waking and sleeping sensorium of an ever always also oneiric thought. The sensibility of images is the matter in and of life, its very idea being the exothermic allotrope of the movement of molecules through the heavy vapours of shared lawscapes and mutually imbricated atmospheres. The navel, which is not a nose, not a fetish, which does not shine, is beginning as becoming, the first law, prima regula as theologians were wont to put it in the ignorance of their wisdom. What is signaled by this priority of the image of midrift beginning is not simply the scar enfolded in the skin, the stigmata of a wound, but the affect of opening and openness, the flesh that indelibly marks every image, and every law as a necessarily corporeal event, incarnation as ambulation of both body and brittlestar, ego and eye amongst the variegated animations, cellular, organic, material and ever tellurian that constitute the life of law, the human in its humour on and in the humus, wandering on and in the skin of the earth.

To belabor the point would be to bore, to do the work of appreciative apprehension, the post critical investment in what Giambattista [End Page 117] Vico, for other purposes but not without vision, termed the university of the body. It is the beginning, as said, and so also the starting point for thought, the launching pad, the augur of the navel being naval, the stultifera navis of any adequate and equilibriated intellection. As Roland Barthes put it so finely, all those sadly crushed years ago, in and of inner experience: "It is through an 'intimate cessation of all intellectual operations' that the mind is laid bare. If not, discourse maintains itself in its little complacency."2 The gay scientist's admonition, conducted via the image of an ostrich with its head in the infinite sands of a desert of words was that one must first dare to quiet the incessant chatter of prejudgment, the burying of the visage in the ground, the closure of the penthouse lids, so as to feel, to open, to breath, to sense and to see. The sensorium of the corpus iuris, that body which constitutes, collects, digests, produces novellae, heralds, edicts, hears, cries, promulgates, pronounces, hands down, inscribes, records, tables and fines, that in equity at common law wields a sword and a shield, that sounds in equiparation of legal wrongs, is only latterly and partially a text. And even the text is historically sheepskin, then vellum, then parchment and latterly rag paper encased in red leather like the library equivalent of an anti-sex queen. The S&M of legal studies is evidentially modelled on the ultimate corporeality of legality or, as the bard has it, though not exactly in this order, 'there is an arm, there is a...

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