Peter Goodrich as I Imagine Him: The Man,the Mos,the Legendre

Abstract

Goodrich’s law veers towards the invisible. Obsessed with images, his concerns are invariably with what cannot be seen. Detectable in his work is always a desire to see the invisible, to capture the articulation of immaterial principle, structure, and imaginal form. To witness an image, and acknowledge it as—at best—an entry point to the infinite depths, mobility, and power of an unseen realm. Across the corpus of his work, this relentless desire produces an emergent jurisprudence that interrogates the formation and appearance of the juristic itself, sought across a range of contexts, but always tracing the invisible movements of principle and doctrine and their dogmatic control that lurk beyond the surface of the text, the madnesses of legal desire and their symptomatic structures and traditions of reading. This paper, encountering and working solely within the archive of Goodrich’s published work, constructs for its reader an overview of my own imaginary form of the man himself, followed by an articulation of the traditions—the mos—of interpretive practices he and his work (if they are separable) can be imagined to excavate from law’s own archive of images, leading—irrefragably—to the Legendrean stage upon which Goodrich builds his jurisprudential show.

The Man

A flourish of flaring nostrils and monstrous hair, of rolled-up shirtsleeves, of jaunty-cut suits and trainers, of eyebrows and glarish spectacles, of hearty laughter in the face of the abyss. A terrifying and free-thinking hippy, with mad professor vibes. Genial, generous, sneering—no doubt with a stick of rhubarb in his shirt pocket. ¹ When he is not otherwise, he perches at his desk in a maniacal stupor, appearing in human form, and performs his thoughts as a suit-tailed maestro upon his clavier, cramming and compressing the intricate elusions of his mind into a limited symbolic form. A slow fury of textual production, of emitted symptoms; an embodied outpouring of linguistic play and provocation; a studious rampage across the discipline. A hand-shaker, an eater and a breather—no doubt, also, beneath it all, a being of some sort; rhetorically personic. Tired and energetic he stalks the globe, telling jokes and venting insights, releasing the pressure of his mens iuris wherever he goes, hoarding books and other printed matter to embiggen his textual stash, forever seeking a way to enter the hors-texte and thereby transcend the melancholia of the legal condition. A curious man. A ‘cunt of a bloke’, some might say—or perhaps a ‘Cnut’ of a bloke. ² An eloquence of lawyers unto himself.

An occasional cackle reverberates through the couloirs élevées of Cardozo Law School as he cajoles his texts, teasing and taming them until they reveal the ludicrous underpinnings or personal politics of some foundational and well-respected treatise or other. ³ Ha! Or as he finds pathways through the vast interconnected web of law, wandering its laminated jurisdictions on a sprawling voyage through history, culture, and form, sensing the vibrations of law’s plucked fibres across the ages as he traces its infinity of telephone wires to nowhere.

Although I do not know him well enough to key such passages, at least not without causing some degree of offence or inaccuracy, this is how I imagine Peter Goodrich. And—to steal a term I’ve sometimes heard him use—I do so fondly. I imagine, also, that the sheer quantity of his work, if not its expansive themes and content, has inspired a generation or two of legal scholars—one way or another. The first time I met him was under the auspices of Desmond Manderson: we were both in attendance at a conference on law and visuality hosted at the Australian National University. Peter as an eminent invited keynote speaker, myself as an upstart early career academic fresh from the confines of PhD study who had somehow fluked his way in. The Goodrich stalked the lecture theatre, bellowing and striking the projection screen as he spoke massively about something I did not quite understand. I later stood still and spoke quietly about something I did not quite understand. Both being English, we barely spoke to one another. The conference dissipated into some ineffable memory, and Peter and I had the sad happenstance of being stuck together at Canberra airport awaiting our respective flights. Yet again we barely spoke—but for longer this time, and with bad airport food, overpriced beer, and the fleeting presence of Connal Parsley. Our ways parted, planes were elevated, and our paths diverged, and so ends the first time I met—

I tell a lie. I first met Peter Goodrich in 2003 or 2004, I do not recall exactly when. It was, of all the unlikely places, in an undergraduate law module during my LLB at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth. The module clearly had no place on a law degree, being called something like ‘law and culture’, and exposed unsuspecting undergraduates to ways of thinking about legality that were not—shock horror—mere dogmatic doctrine. One of the sources we had to read was an excerpt from Goodrich’s Languages of Law, concerning the case of the Haida Indians. ⁴ This was the first time I remember meeting Peter Goodrich, and I was quite taken with the narrative plight of the Haida and its implications for the contingency and arrogance of dominant Western legal forms. Well, I say that now—at the time I did not quite understand it, and the grade I received in my essay on the subject categorically proves as much. But despite the freedom I have felt in my approach to legal study since that moment, or one close to it (muted by doctrinalists at times, ⁵ and attributable to the course’s textual curation as much as to Peter), I still do not quite understand much of what Goodrich is going on about. A ‘cunt of a bloke’, indeed. ⁶ But herein lies an attempt to make some sense, to present a reading of the man’s own corpus iuris, to reduce it to something else, to capture and thereby kill its potential, to re-encode it with potentia anew—to invent some meaning from his marks.

With unqualified confidence, my claim is that Goodrich’s work is a protracted quest to avoid the drudgery of sedimented legal thought—primarily by veering towards the invisible forces that lie beyond or beneath it. His desire is to escape, to avoid the legal condition at all costs. But one must be bound if one is to desire freedom, and so this love of escape is doomed to be unrequited and unfulfilled, producing a symptomatic obsession with legal appearances—Goodrich remains trapped with the rest of us inside this dull cavern of legality whose boundaries are policed by sensible form. To articulate such a claim, this essay undertakes synthesis and analysis exclusively from within the Goodrichean ‘back catalogue’, from the stacks of the archivus petrae. It is hoped that what will emerge will not be a pointless summary, but rather a methodological articulation of a critical non-vision of law: as discipline and institution, as praxis and poetry, skidding around on the surface of a bottomless chasm of invisibility of which they are symptomatic but can never truly access. In short, by exploring the archivus petrae, something more than a petulant archive will be revealed. ⁷ My instinct is that it will open not only to a law that necessitates a grumpy critique of the failures and boredom of dominant legalities, but also to the rendition of a productive invisibility—a method sensitive not only to the administration and improvement of law’s contingently visible practices, ideologies, and forms, but also the invisibility they mediate and dwell upon, the unspoken or imperceptible forces that shape them. A method that, while unable to escape the legal condition, can at least model its limits and gesture towards its joyous transgression.

These opening paragraphs have already said more than is permissible of ‘the man’ himself: my imagination is clearly quite limited—by the symbolic order, by my own sense of decorum (quoting the C-word twice notwithstanding), no doubt by my Englishness and associated neuroses, and of course by the small knowledge I have of the man qua man (he emails me on occasion, using enjoyable words I don’t quite understand). That being said, something of him will no doubt return to haunt what follows, his dusty head drifting as a spectre within the page, looming unseen behind the printed words with his eminent proboscis nuzzling the back side of the text, helping direct our divagations towards justice. ⁸ These passages have also begun to breach the stated focus of the section—as if we can partition the man from his work. And so, following the title, we best move on: first to ‘the mos’ (which encounters themes of history and interpretive tradition), and then to ‘the Legendre’ (which encounters themes of images, psychoanalysis, amity, and a repetition of the central claim already stated above).

Onward, then! And irrefragably so.

The Mos

History

If there is a Goodrichalian method, it is on at least one level historical. Much of the work found in the archivus petrae engages with traditions and customs—the mos—of both law and legal study, including repressed critical histories, ⁹ genealogies of female work within masculine archives, ¹⁰ or the reanimation of pre-classical rhetoric as a counter to formalism ¹¹ (God forbid that Hart can save us—the answer is clearly history! ¹² ). Goodrich’s historical narratives follow plural themes, moving without emplotment through the development of the common law tradition. Wandering the archivus petrae, we witness the glossatorial practices in the reception of the Corpus Iuris ¹³ and its effects on the institutional status of reading and writing; ¹⁴ we sense the repression of images as legitimate knowledge through the Reformation ¹⁵ and the latent visuality of even law’s most textual pronouncements; ¹⁶ we experience the emergence of the common law itself, ¹⁷ including its formation as a written system, ¹⁸ the structural relationship between its positive forms and their divine sources, ¹⁹ and the derivation of the common law from historical agricultural practices ²⁰ and its druidic prehistory; ²¹ we traipse through alternative historical jurisdictions of the courts of love; ²² we are subjected to the reified modernity of the English legal institution and academy as it emerges out of continental European traditions that remain repressed as ‘foreign’ influences in order to maintain the common law’s authority; ²³ and we find the underpinning of modern law by a piratical confluence of the establishment of common law jurisdiction with the inherent transgressive interdisciplinarity of legal study. ²⁴ From which exempla a principle can be abstracted: the precedence of critique and plurivocality is repressed within the legal academy as its unconscious history, ²⁵ which critical legal studies must excavate and animate. ²⁶

Inscribed throughout the archivus petrae are enduring concerns of epistemology, tradition, and communication. Explorers are not merely exposed to the historical conditions precedent to particular institutional or intellectual forms, but are confronted with questions of the formation and authority of our contemporary models of legality, and find themselves unearthing hidden histories and forgotten alternatives that structure, support, or challenge reified concepts and sedimented institutional practices. Conscious legality is linked to a deeper and wider sea of cultural tensions and alternative pathways, rendering it contingent and mutable, and simultaneously opening up to untapped seams of precedent that produce multiple archives, constitute multiple jurisdictions, and about which orbit a plurality of ‘minor jurisprudences’. ²⁷ An overt example is love and amity: ²⁸ historical judgments of the courts of love reveal an amorous resistance to the establishment of settled order, connects abstraction to embodiment, frames an intersubjectivity distinct from the subjects it connects, ²⁹ and acknowledges the hidden desire that circulates in public fora. ³⁰ Another example is communicative form: modern legal discourse rests upon a denial of the rhetorical arts and the hermeneutic pluralism that characterises textual interpretation in the ongoing transmission of the common law. ³¹ Law’s antirrhetical structure ³² maintains its consciously textual form through historical repression of the visual and aesthetic. ³³ Taken literally, visuality is found in the practice of courts utilising images within their formal decisions, ³⁴ but even within its textual form qua text, visuality, figuration, and imagination animate law from the otherwise dead and ineffective texts of its printed form. ³⁵

For those trained within the archivus petrae, legality becomes a sea of cultural interconnection and relation, a meeting point or melting pot of plural perspectives, methods, knowledges, and practices. Law becomes something else, lost beyond the surface of the institutional or legal text, indicated and alluded to by its various and variable encodings, the dust or ruins it leaves behind. To conceive of law as a closed system is profoundly problematic, divorcing it not just from history but from its rhetorical practices, poetry, arts, and hermeneutic tradition. ³⁶ Through law’s material entry point, through the window of its forms, we witness legality as an intellectual openness replete with multivalent connections to be traced. Goodrich’s method—if we can characterise it using such a calculating term—begins the endless and expansive task of travelling these infinite pathways, of deepening and enriching the understanding of law’s core institutional forms by unflinchingly recognising their situation within the open-ended ranges of history, culture, and scholarship. And, I imagine, thereby seeking to escape the hampered condition dictated by a hegemonic mainstream legality.

Language

History takes on a particular inflection when it is placed within Goodrich’s animating concern for communication, which can be codified by delineating a hegemonic mos interpretationis or interpretive tradition from the marks where Goodrich’s thought has touched the page. As he declares:

viewed historically as a rhetoric or as a discourse—as linguistic practice first and foremost—the analysis of law as a unitary, formal language is but one—tendentious and motivated—possible account of legal communication. ³⁷

The hegemonic mos interpretationis of Goodrichian study is one that is ‘élitist, revelatory or hierophantic’, being an ‘intricate and exclusive system of disciplinary and dogmatic tools’ that were ‘developed early and precisely . . . to the effect of safeguarding and preserving the sanctity and general impenetrability of the written word as a system of social control’. ³⁸ As law developed away from ‘oral tradition and its rhetorical art’, what concomitantly emerged was a ‘juridical restraint of specific forms of inscription’ ³⁹ —both writing and reading were colonised and appropriated by law’s tradition of linguistic usage.

Law’s exclusive mode of transmission connects to a theological form of interpretation: the ‘carefully regulated techniques and strategies of construction’ ⁴⁰ —predominantly those of exegesis—emerged from religious reading practices: the meaning of biblical text was closely guarded by a small, linguistically skilled community of priests. ⁴¹ This canonical reading carried over into secular legal traditions through the spread of Roman law, initially distributed, read, and maintained by those same scribal priests. ⁴² The reading practices of the Corpus Iuris produced the priest-like status of the lawyer. A standardised system of authoritative meanings emerged, developing out of heraldry (itself a visual encoding of social hierarchy), and came to constitute a legal symbolaeography secured by the cloistered interpretive practices that guaranteed the immemorial authority of the common law it expressed. ⁴³ Reading sacred sources was necessarily didactic rather than critical, thus facilitating the production of unitary meaning. ⁴⁴ The printing press merely reaffirmed the tendency towards unitary meaning in the traditions of the legal profession, helping a single national law to emerge. ⁴⁵ Through these historical processes, the hegemonic mos interpretationis treated the legal text as sacred and its reading as unitary, and thus to be guarded, leading to and perpetuating the closed monologia of modern law and its study.

Latin played its part by enabling law to speak only to those with restricted expertise, ⁴⁶ an effect compounded by the emergence of Law French, an artificial dialect for the technical articulation of legal concepts that was divorced from the rhetorical and social contexts of linguistic usage. ⁴⁷ The modern shift to a comparatively vulgar vernacular, which retains numerous Latinate fragments, signals a deeper sedimentation: Latin terms now resonate with greater mysticism, authority, and rhetorical force. ⁴⁸ It is obvious that language and power are deeply interlinked in law:

the intrinsic dialogue of the text, the polysemy, plurality, polyphony and play of the textual discourse is controlled by the imposition of meaning, by the power of the political and doctrinal communities to define the discourse and to silence dissent. ⁴⁹

Alliterative, but accurate. And so, a rather predictable critical legal claim: interpretation and reading carry important political significance. But the oddness of law’s particular mos interpretationis—its often counter-intuitive closure and limitation, its technical ass(ass)i(g)nation of meaning—results in a concomitant recognition of alternative traditions of interpretive practice that mainstream law represses—and this is a central theme running through Goodrich’s engagement with language. In his petulant archive, we are trained to attend to dialogue, to hermeneutics and rhetoric in its broadest sense, to the slips and ticks hidden in plain sight in law’s technical jargon—rather than to receive law as a settled voice, as a monologic form or practice. ⁵⁰

Accordingly, Goodrich also develops an ‘other scene’ of legal writing: he writes differently. ⁵¹ The reliance upon alternative jurisdictions and lines of precedent is testament to this, but he also inhabits an alternative rhetorical practice through satire: performing a counter-discourse to the dominant language practices of law, encoding playful and humorous modes of legal writing in place of a dry seriousness. Such modes are evident in many of his texts, with irreverences and little jokes thrown in amidst a poetic style typically at odds with the linear decorum of academic protocol. ⁵² In an exemplary slip—reflexive in its performance—Goodrich outlines a wide variety of examples of ‘satirical legal studies’, both conscious and unconscious, and their critical value: at 120 pages and with over 600 footnotes, the paper is perhaps the world’s longest one-liner, satirising as it does the obsessive form of particularly US law review articles and their penchant for word count and over-referencing. ⁵³ But there is a deeper, immanent, and more serious humour in the counter-hegemonic character of the archivus petrae in general, which sends up the dull formalism of modern legality. The serious tone performed and perpetuated in law, its practice and texts, means that satire—as ‘the opposite of the solemnity of law’ ⁵⁴ —has critical capacity to lampoon and break open legal structures. As a mode of discourse ‘that names, inveighs, corrects, deplores, exposes and accounts . . . it is rhetorically one of the most appropriate means by which to challenge the legal norm’. ⁵⁵

Further transgressing the rhetorical closure of the law’s hegemonic form, prolonged and indeterminate reflections open law to vaster seas and networks of associations and linkages. Not only a different writing, but a different reading is promoted: a slower reading, which revels in the infinite potential of meaning and operates as a critical movement against the arrogant presumptions of mainstream legal language and decision-making. ⁵⁶ It is an invocation of a grammatological encounter that lets all forms speak without end—a mode of infinite reading, opening and encountering the multifarious appearances of law. ⁵⁷ Such protracted encounters with law’s multimodal, ⁵⁸ viserbial ⁵⁹ form gives Goodrichialist travellers a chance to appreciate the laminated and expansive layers of meanings available from both legal texts and images. Law may maintain its primacy by denying its visual dimensions, but imagistic forms are not only embedded in legal texts (as symbolism and imagination, as much as printed letters ⁶⁰ ), but include book covers, ⁶¹ pictures in judgments, ⁶² court architecture, ⁶³ megalographic portraits of law school Deans, ⁶⁴ images of Justitia, ⁶⁵ and editorial photographs of Duncan Kennedy ⁶⁶ or—indeed—of Ronald Dworkin sailing a boat. ⁶⁷ Inter an expansive alia. Need we mention legal emblems? ⁶⁸ Importantly, images and text are connected in Goodrich’s non-vision of law: both are hermeneutic clues, appearances of legality, part of the surface of invisibility, symptoms from which to trace the madnesses of law—and from which escape is an impossible desire.

The Legendre

Hermeneutics

Peter Goodrich is a contracts teacher. When he is not eating rhubarb or gallivanting through the academy, I imagine he bombards students with amusing tales of contractual interpretation and the reneging of promises. This love of contracts, of the protocols of interpersonal communication, is evidenced not only by his emails and epistolary discourses, ⁶⁹ but also by the recurrent theme of hermeneutics in his symptomatic modelling of the legal form as the visual and symbolic appearance of an invisible institution. From the earliest forms of modern western law, intrepid visitors to the archivus petrae can observe the dominant legal methods of exegesis and hermeneutics—of textual exposition and transmission, of the propagation of signs. ⁷⁰ The typical formulation is a hermeneutics of the beyond—the presence of written legal words, of juridical images, is an invocation of something else, something absent and, given the legal context, something that authorises or predetermines law and gives it structure. Law’s textuality depends ‘upon an unwritten word, a logos or ratio that belong[s] to tradition—to the custody of the profession—and [can]not be found through the written word alone but only through the professional legal reconstruction of an originary meaning that pre-exists and underlies the written law’. ⁷¹ More succinctly: ‘Law precedes speech, but equally is limited by speech’. ⁷² The citations can be multiplied. And, ably assisted by Pierre Legendre, Goodrich takes the next step: these apparent forms of law bind the legal subject and exercise power over individuals precisely because they connect to the invisible. ‘The visible sign represents an invisible presence . . . [without which it] could not hold (fascinate) the imagination or soul of its subjects’. ⁷³ Only the unseen of law is able to enter the soul of the subject, to go inside and captivate it. But the unseen requires the seen: it is ‘to the system of images (systema simulationis) that the subject adheres’ because the image creates ‘a spectral realm in which the living become haunted by the order of transmission’. ⁷⁴ Transmitted through its images, it is law’s obscure dimensions, its absences outside sensible form, ‘that bind [the subject] invisibly from within’. ⁷⁵

To retain its power, legal writing must necessarily be ‘approached as a representation, as an equivocal sign of hidden depths, and not as a profane, accessible or vernacular object of interpretation’. ⁷⁶ In the mos interpretationis, the priests of law—those authorised few—retain control over the legal meanings available from a text or image. For Goodrich, it is by paying attention to the hermeneutics of law—to the historical and contemporary (un)conscious rhetorical practices by which law is transmitted and received, bundling together his concerns with history and language—that this dogmatic control can be challenged, and thus that critical legal studies can proceed. ⁷⁷

[T]he doctrinal unity of the text, far from hiding the voice or speech of its source, rather veils the historical and political conditions of its existence as meaning . . . to understand that appearance requires a reading of the margins of the text, a reading of its figures of incorporation, of translation and inclusion. ⁷⁸

The profession of the lawyer is the deciphering and constitution of the ‘truth’ of law beyond the dead or sleeping surface of its material forms. It is a matter of attending to the paraphernalia of the play, in lieu of an impossible exeunt. ⁷⁹ In the archivus petrae law’s written form is encountered as a visual schema for organising and governing the social order, ⁸⁰ with this visual appearance of law in written form as the expression of jurisdiction ⁸¹ that connects institutional texts of law to a wider sea of literary practices based on the encoding of meaning into material forms, ⁸² and ultimately pointing to the divine source of true justice and binding the subject from within. ⁸³ The figures of letters and punctuation are the visible surface of an infinite and invisible depth, the limit of perceptible law, the vanishing point linking back to law’s supposedly immemorial history and heavenly sources. ⁸⁴ Legal typography is a hermeneutic of the divine, embedded in a hierarchy of sources that descends from divinity down to the minutiae of bureaucratic administration. ⁸⁵

In this way, these written symbols are evidence of the melancholic structure of law, always seeking to see—to capture and transmit—what cannot be seen. ⁸⁶ These invisible dimensions always exceed what it is possible to make present to the senses: ‘A geography of mental spaces clearly cannot be reduced to its physical presences, even if the latter are deemed simply indexes, ruins, of the former’. ⁸⁷ Yet it is the ‘ruins’ of legality that enable its transmission and the interpellation of the legal subject, resulting in a tentative inversion of law’s two bodies as an institutional form: it is not the mystical body of the institution that endures, not the immaterial strata, but the physical ruins, the material objects of legal articulation. Law plays in the imagination, as a moveable idea, anchored to perception via the encounter with material forms that themselves are static but enable the play of phantasmata. The immaterial dimensions of legality are fluid, changing, mutable, while the architecture and costumes of institution persist through the centuries. It is the physical apparatus of the state, the theatrical paraphernalia of the law derived from the material rituals of the Church, that constitute personhood and make the legal subject appear as an emblem of the divine. ⁸⁸ The trappings and decorations of the institution permit the investiture of the subject—and in particular stabilising the ephemeral body of the lawyer or judge as the authorised interpreter or speaker, the priest or lieutenant—the placeholder—of the otherwise invisible and shifting law.

Law always requires a visual or figurate form upon which to anchor its abstractions. A naked principle undressed of its generalised structure sends shivers of resistance and impropriety through the legal institution: to undress an abstract principle, to shed the appearance that indexes the legal concept, is to reveal the specificities it seeks to overwrite. Such disrobing unravels legal doctrine by challenging the possibility of framing an abstract principle that gathers together the sea of examples accumulated by legal experience—it augurs the threat of the unique and singular that ruptures law’s carefully ordered universal. ⁸⁹ Goodrich’s desire for legal emblems thus falls into place as a symptom of his general non-vision of legality. Without the emblematic process, the hidden order remains an intractable threat not amenable to legal categories. An emblem is that which tames and makes the invisible visible within the realm of perception—the emblem is ‘thrown within as an external inscription that is ingested and becomes part of the interior’. ⁹⁰ And while the unseen dimensions of legality may be ambulant or shifting when compared to the relatively static material forms of buildings and printed documents, ultimately the visible forms of law and the inhabitants of administrative office are but ‘the mere spectacle of the invisible monuments, the unseen causes that exist ineffably and eternally’, ⁹¹ in perpetual motion.

Goodrich unpacks the tradition of legal emblems as the signs and symbols of law that are inheritors of a visiocratic apparatus—of a governance through images—that runs from heraldry, through the insignia of office, to the traditional practice of emblematising law in visual images. ⁹² Following this historical trajectory, the visual forms that populate the modern order of legality retain the quality of emblems—as the perceptible shapes and traces that mark the presence of an external realm. As emblem, the image ‘is the outer shell, the mark, vestige or impression left by the hidden order and structure of being as law’. ⁹³

Psychoanalysis

As a self-consciously textual discipline, the visual quality of law’s presentation takes on a particularly significant psychoanalytic weight, as the slip or counterpoint to legal consciousness. Locating law beyond the realm of perceptible forms has benefits for the sovereign institution, which is then able to control access to that beyond by controlling who and by what methods the invisible sources of law can be interpreted and elaborated. It is in its invisibility, furthermore, that law is able to bind the soul or imagination of the subject. In the archivus petrae, the dogmatic control of legal propagation might be codified as the mos interpretationis of dominant legality, but there is an ironic relationship here: the meaning of law is limited by the dogmatic control of its invisible, prior structure, yet it is precisely the ambulant quality of this ineffable form that enables it to fascinate and intimately bind. This irony is resolved by a psychoanalytic analysis that seeks alternative routes and other scenes within law’s invisible strata, unhindered by dogmatic control, ⁹⁴ and encompassing the images that, against dominant patriarchal assertions, ground decision and reveal evidence of law’s unwritten structures and adherences. ⁹⁵

Goodrich’s model of institutional (in)visibility takes its psychoanalytical cues from Legendre’s analysis of institutional visuality, which structures law as a duality that is both itself, as it appears, and more than itself. ⁹⁶ The apparent forms of law are emblems of the beyond of the legal institution, binding the subject to the paternal sovereign as the children of the text. The subject is the offspring of an institution that gives birth to its dependents. ⁹⁷ This relation of desire, of love for power, is contingent upon ‘a corresponding aesthetics of submission to law’, meaning that law is also always a question of ‘subjective attachment . . . [that] can never be fully accounted without attending to personal questions of motive and desire, fantasm and truth’. ⁹⁸ The force of law is never enough to explain individuals’ adherence to its commands—the subject’s internal commitment to the law is always needed, which—like the law—is always beyond material forms:

the subject must come to desire its submission to power, the subject must love the signs of power, the emblems of an authority which cannot be physically present everywhere and so must appear most usually in fantasmatic or imagistic forms. ⁹⁹

The subject is bound by its love of power, and law cannot exist without this love. Such desire can only be inculcated by what can be perceived—it is a love that is kindled by images, captivating the subject within the ‘massive simulation’ ¹⁰⁰ established by law’s symbols, a simulation in which the individual perceives themselves as already located, at home as an institutional being. ¹⁰¹ ‘There can be no law’, we find written, ‘without subjective attachment, without belief, and that belief would be impossible were it not for the totemic representation of law’. ¹⁰² It is thus the iconic order of law that binds subjects by bringing forth a realm of divine or invisible order, a process maintained through the four Rs of the method by which law proceeds through resemblance to the unseen: recording, recall, repetition, and rhetoric. ¹⁰³ A procedure, ironically, that works to forget the material histories and origins of law, through the literary construction of rhetorical texts that suppress institutional practice and the contingent generation of judgment—and the critical study of which requires the remembrance of what was forgotten or repressed. ¹⁰⁴ Giving appropriate attention to the edifice of this iconic order, to the surface of the text as a symptomatic rendering of the rhetoric of subjective attachment, can reveal slips and clues that can permit access beyond that surface, behind the curtain, and into the legal unconscious and the realm of forgotten sources. ¹⁰⁵

This model—of legal forms as a species of mythology, simulation, or illusion that is symptomatic of unconscious drives or ‘other scenes’ of legality—opens to a radical critique of the dominant forms of western law that are grounded in patriarchal and dogmatic hierarchies and traditions of cloistered interpretation, enabling instead an excavation of law’s homosocial and homoerotic desire for similarity. ¹⁰⁶ Slipping beneath or beyond the surface of law’s visual forms—its textual and iconographic emblemata—grants the critic radical access to law’s formless form. While formless, in the sense of not yet having a material hermeneutic, law’s unseen dimensions are not necessarily without form, as a conceptual geography or structure of principle. The legal unconscious also takes invisible shape on the level of intersubjective relation, as a structure or principle of amity that determines or supplements conscious legal ordering. An amatory jurisprudence that sits outside the formal relations of institutional rights and duties, as an alternative arena and method of resolution and governance through a care of interpersonal engagement, and symptomatic of an even more expansive lamination of jurisdictional pluralism, embedding spaces of intimate desire throughout the polity. ¹⁰⁷ Indeed, relationships of desire permeate much of contemporary public and social life, but are often denied or denigrated in the seriousness of public and legal speech. ¹⁰⁸ It is perhaps not surprising that, in the archivus petrae, investigators can find it noted that most classic texts on friendship were written by lawyers, typically only analysing friendships once the other has departed and thus taking the mode of eulogy or as liminal acknowledgments in works on other topics—again denoting friendship, personal connection, as something suppressed in the public contexts of lawyerly office. ¹⁰⁹ Like sources, the friend is always absent for lawyers—there is no perfect unitary friend, only a disparate plurality of individual friends; there is no unitary law, only a disparate plurality of individual laws. The friend is the invisible soul or spirit of friendship, and amity’s invisible bonds return to the corporeal as they produce institutions and structures of relation. ¹¹⁰ To speak of friendship in public thus acknowledges its personal contingency and disturbs the structure of legality predicated on the mediation and dogmatic control of absent forms. ¹¹¹ But we have a friend in the archive: Goodrich’s model of critical amity does not shy away from the personal in the public; recognising that friendship is political work, it connects amity to the core elements of critique: the recognition and savouring of difference. Good friends are good critics, and vice versa, and therefore suppressing the interpersonal also stunts critique. ¹¹²

Another symptom, then, of Goodrich’s preoccupation with attempting to see the unseen. Of how his thought, as evidenced by interpretation of his work, always veers towards the invisible, seeking approach to the forms and structures of legality that lack material or institutional presence, and which are found outside of legal appearance, yet only accessible within or through it. And thus forms requiring a psychoanalytic method to appreciate, to detect and unpick as a trace or thread that leads through the navel to law’s unconscious. An unconscious not characterised by weird dreams and strange monsters—at least, not only that—but also full of the richness of life that the surface forms of institutional legality suppress, forget, overlook, denigrate, excise, or otherwise categorise as outside law: other jurisdictions, other histories, other texts and methods, other forms of relation and being. The attendance to which operates as a critical approach to law, radically reframing and reforming doctrine, theory and—potentially—the contingent edifice of the legal genre itself.

As claimed at the outset of this paper, I imagine that Peter Goodrich does not want to be a lawyer, let alone a legal subject. He desires to escape the law, to veer off beyond all categories and forms—a desire of which the relentless attention paid to law’s appearances and material administration is symptomatic. His melancholegalism, his capture and imprisonment by legal forms and imperious black letters that police the limits of subjecthood and prevent traversal out into the beyond, ¹¹³ manifests in multifarious ways—as we have seen, from history, to linguistics, to hermeneutics, amity, and the expansive firmament of legal emblemata. To close, however, it is to Goodrich’s long-nurtured reading of the mad judge Paul Schreber that I turn, as one particularly stark symptom of this desire. Schreber’s supposed madness manifested in his seemingly direct connection to God, among various other symptoms. Goodrich reads Schreber’s body as a judicial theology: the judge is the visible front edge of the unseen divinity that ultimately underwrites western law. ¹¹⁴ Yet Schreber should not be discounted as merely mad in his claimed divine connection, for his memoires—traditionally miscategorised outside law—actually reveal a critical jurisprudence. Schreber’s transgender desires, for example, reveal an impetus to resist and escape the masculinist and patriarchal order of law he was caught within as a Judge, offering a powerful critique of the masculine norms embedded within Western jurisprudence. ¹¹⁵ Schreber’s madness—and the text it gave rise to—is best taken as a judicial philosophy that argues profoundly against the dry monologia of formalism that rules legal thought; as an expressive desire to escape the dull strictures of an unimaginative and patriarchal law. ¹¹⁶

For Goodrich, as a melancholic subject straining against the boundaries of law, the critique is yet more profound. Judge Schreber broke or escaped boundaries and limitations, yet remained frustrated by his commitment to the asylum—like the legal subject, trapped within structures it desires to transcend. Schreber’s desire to transition to a woman was not simply to live as another gender, but to break the conventional norms and move beyond—for Goodrich, to return and wander in the prestructural flow of embodied life and matter. ¹¹⁷ It was a desire to escape the limited forms of law and knowledge, to dispose of the cartesian divide that separates law as a conceptual or invisible structure from the material world it supposedly acts upon, instead recognising and embracing their continuity and overlap, the mutual contingency of matter and the immaterial. ¹¹⁸ To escape law’s domination and be free; to dance outside the text. Schreber’s incarceration, like that of the legal subject, is emblematic of a more general hindrance that epistemology places in the path of justice, identity, and vital flourishing. ¹¹⁹ Framed in its most expansive rendering, Goodrich connects it to the more general transitioning that takes place, with all life ultimately in a process of transition towards humus and biomatter, beyond the limited forms of ‘human’ life, to the greater expanse and interconnectivity of all forms of being that both inhabit and constitute the world. In line with Goodrich’s own symptoms, Schreber signals a joyous transgression, an escape into the beyond that hegemonic forms repeatedly (fail to) suppress. ¹²⁰ And a transgression, a symptomatic joy, that is detectable across the traces consigned within the archivus petrae.

Envoi

The first time I was knowingly in the same building as Peter Goodrich I was bold enough to ask a question of a speaker who had just given a conference presentation. I do not recall the paper, nor the question—symptomatic of my own failings rather than those of the speaker. But I raised my hand, naïve in believing I had something to contribute, and was selected by the chair. Now, one of the lesser reasons I had for submitting myself to the trauma of a PhD was to be able to correct rude and unsuspecting customer service agents—pull rank, as it were, should the need arise. Either my aversion to confrontation or the unerringly brilliant customer service I have been proffered since graduating (you may decide which is more likely) has meant I have not actually enacted this most pristine of perks that comes with post-doctoral status. Except, that is, for the first time I was in the same building as Peter Goodrich. Perhaps something of his own critical exuberance had permeated the air conditioning. The chair, whom I had briefly met over coffee during a break in proceedings, said ‘Mr Giddens’ as he selected me, to which—taken by the moment—I responded with something along the lines of ‘that’s Dr Giddens, thank you very much’. The room erupted with laughter (this may be an overstatement), and I asked my unmemorable question.

The irony of this tale is that, had I known who the chair was—the eminent scholarly stature of the man—I would not have dared to enact such a breach of interpersonal protocol—such a contractual failing. For the chair of that fateful session was none other than William P MacNeil. And, despite having successfully completed a PhD in cultural legal studies (in which, I later recalled, I had cited one of his more minor texts), I had no idea who he was. I corrected him on the appropriate use of a title to which I was clearly not entitled. Whether it was the effluent circulating in the air conditioning, or the arrogance of youth, we may never know. But while my relative level of expertise means I am also clearly not permitted to write the current paper—Peter’s subsequent denomination of me as ‘Professor Giddens!’ ¹²¹ notwithstanding—the Goodrichish spirit is obviously an inspiring and infectious one that causes its victims to entertain a certain madness that results in a symptomatic disregard for foundational principles and assumptions, and to proceed with critical abandon into uncertainty. And, as I have hopefully articulated, to embrace the seemingly mad desire to escape the known, the rational, the ordered, the boring—and, instead: to always veer towards the invisible.