Lear and Law's Doubles: Identity and Meaning in a Time of Crisis

Abstract

Legal consciousness is vulnerable to sudden and profound change, even when there is no disruption to social or administrative routine. Such dilemmas pose problems that are at once hermeneutic, pragmatic and textual involving issues of recognition, decision making, agency, representation and discursive management, among other things. In this essay, I explore these issues by drawing on mixed media and genres comparative ethnography (from the margins of neoliberalism), current events (the Bush administration's case for war in Iraq and the campaign to ban same-sex marriage), and literary text (Shakespeare's King Lear). Reading across these sources, my purpose is to advance the case for taking the literariness of state power seriously as a register in which core propositions about the relationship between legitimacy and democratic accountability can be asserted and contested through the language of everyday life.