Law and Sacrifice

Abstract

In this essay, I pursue the idea of legal judgments as articulations of a (collective) body. I begin by examining the relation between the pleasure principle and the reality principle as a tension within modern legal-constitutional thought; and I discuss one traditional idea of legal sacrifice within those terms: as a suspension or withholding of a sovereign pleasure will in favor of a reality principle. In the second part of the article, I argue that the “pleasure-ego” and the “reality-ego,” although in one respect opposites, are, in fact, bound to the same “consumptive” conception of identity, and that against that dynamic of identity-formation stands a very different form of sacrifice, one for which we have too little of a tradition in modern legal thought.