Any attempt to understand the world by means of language, in law or in literature, imposes an artificial order on what is beyond our comprehension. However, whilst literature admits its own artificiality, law insists that it provides not only all the answers but all the right answers. Using examples ranging from Greek myth to contemporary writing, film and popular music, Aristodemou works from the assumption that not just literature but also law are fictions, and she suggests ways in which literature can help us understand better the mythic origins of law. In doing so she shows how we can...

This book puts the legal subject on the couch and explores the incestuous relationship between law and desire, enjoyment and transgression, freedom and subjection, ethics and atheism. The process of analysis problematizes fundamental tenets of the legal system, leading the patient to rethink long-held beliefs: terms like 'guilt' and 'innocence', 'truth' and 'lies', 'reason' and 'reality', 'freedom' and 'responsibility', 'cause' and 'punishment', acquire new and surprising meanings. By the end of these sessions, the patient is left wondering, along with Freud her analyst, whether 'it is not...