The Turn to Passion: Has Law and Literature become Law and Affect?

Abstract

Affect, this essay argues, has replaced literature as the other of law in law and literature. It begins with a survey of the influence of affect theory in posthumanism, queer theory, history, sociology, the new materialism, and narratology, arguing that “affect” – an umbrella term that describes assemblages of nodes, waves, materials, and intensities – has replaced Foucauldian “discourse” as the leading term in current critical commentary. The consequences of this affective turn for law and literature scholarship and conceptions of legal personhood are then explored. Whereas a more traditional view proposes that law's task is to mediate humans’ worst passions and sublate affectively particular conflicts, newer work contends that law is a source of pain rather than its antidote. This entails an end to law and literature as we have known it. Examples of alternative justice offered through literary narratives are now deemed less productive in querying legalist prescription than non-linguistic and non-narratively constructed phenomena. Literature's function of providing “a narrative supplement” to the law has been displaced by anti-narrative explorations of the visual, the haptic, and the experiential that demonstrate law's hidden emotionality and its use of emotional tropes towards ideological ends. This brings text- and linguistic-based law-and-literature work into radical question.

Keywords:

• affective turn
• law and suffering
• non-narrative
• affectively produced legal being
• Spinoza
• Gilles Deleuze
• Rudolph von Jhering
• Panu Minkkinen
• Andreas Fischer-Lescano
• Susanne Krasmann

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

This essay profited through interventions by Daniel Hartley, Frans-Willem Korsten, Yasco Horstmann, and Stefanie Rück, to whom the author owes great thanks and friendship.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. This effort belongs to a book project entitled Pluralities of Law: The Present and Multiple Futures of Law and Literature. “Recht als Kultur/Law as Culture” series (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, forthcoming).

2. Thomas O. Beebee, “Can Law-and-Humanities Survive Systems Theory?,” Law and Literature 22, no. 2 (2010): 244–67; repr. in Thomas O. Beebee, Citation and Precedent: Conjunctions and Disjunctions of German Law and Literature (London: Bloomsbury, 2012).

3. Doris Bachmann-Medick, Cultural Turns: Neuorientierungen in den Kulturwissenschaften (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt-Taschenbuchverlag, 2009), 25–26. All translations from the German are by the author.

4. Since this last field will be granted the least attention in the following, I will mention a few titles, including Patrick Colm Hogan, Affective Narratology (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2011), Robyn R. Warhol, Having a Good Cry (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2003); and Suzanne Keen, “Introduction: Narrative and the Emotions,” Poetics Today 32, no. 1 (2011): 2–53.

5. Spinoza, Ethics, E2, p. 13; quoted in Yitzhak Y. Melamed, Spinoza's Metaphysics: Substance and Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 170.

6. This truncated history ignores another genealogy of affect theory's current flourishing. This would include the work of “non-Deleuzian affect scholars” such as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and her adaptation of psychologist Silvan Tomkins's model of basic, universal emotions in order to explore the role of, for instance, shame as it is affectively disseminated as if by contagion; quoting Ruth Leys, “The Turn to Affect: A Critique,” Critical Inquiry 37 (2011): 434–472, 468. For key texts, see Silvan S. Tomkins, Affect Imagery Consciousness (New York: Springer, 1962–63); Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank, eds., Shame and Its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995); and Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003); for extended critical overviews of affect theory, see Leys, “The Turn to Affect”; and idem, From Guilt to Shame: Auschwitz and After (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007).

7. Brian Massumi, “Notes on the Translation and Acknowledgements,” in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), Xvii–xx, xvii.

8. Marie-Laure Ryan's field theory definition of narrative proves helpful here: Marie-Laure Ryan, “Towards a Definition of Narrative,” in The Cambridge Companion to Narrative, ed. David Herman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 22–35.

9. Karen Barad, “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28, no. 3 (2008): 801–831, 804.

10. Brian Massumi, “The Autonomy of Affect,” Cultural Critique 31 (1995): 83–109, 85; idem, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002).

11. Massumi, “Autonomy of Affect,” 88.

12. Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977).

13. Massumi, “Autonomy of Affect,” 100.

14. Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, 62.

15. Eric Shouse, “Feeling, Emotion, Affect,” M/C Journal 8, no. 6 (2005): n.p.

16. Katrin Becker, “The Literary Voice of Law: A Perspective on Literature's Entanglement with Normativity,” paper delivered at the “Law's Pluralities – Cultures/Narratives/Genders” conference, Giessen Germany, May 7, 2015.

17. Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, 66.

18. Rosi Braidotti, Metamorphosis: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming (Cambridge: Polity, 2002); eadem, Transpositions: On Nomadic Ethics (Cambridge: Polity, 2006); Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004).

19. Sara Ahmed, “Affective Economies,” Societal Text 79 (2004): 117–139, 121.

20. Anat Pick, Creaturely Poetics: Animality and Vulnerability in Literature and Film (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 6.

21. In her extended critique of affect theory, Ruth Leys thus highlights their common “anti-intentionalism”; Leys, “Turn to Affect,” 443.

22. Greta Olson, “Futures of Law and Literature: A Preliminary Overview from a Culturalist Perspective,” in Recht und Literatur im Zwischenraum/Law and Literature In-Between: Aktuelle inter- und transdisziplinäre Zugänge/Contemporary Inter- and Transdisciplinary Approaches, ed. Christian Hiebaum, Susanne Knaller, and Doris Pichler (Bielefeld: transcript, 2015), 37–69.

23. Julia J. A. Shaw and Hilary J. Shaw, “From Fact to Feeling: An Explication of the Mimetic Relationship Between Law and Emotion,” Liverpool Law Review 35, no. 1 (2014): 43–64.

24. Christoph Menke, “Law and Violence,” Law and Literature 22, no. 1 (2011): 1–17, 1.

25. Richard A. Posner, “Emotion versus Emotionalism in Law,” in The Passions of Law, ed. Susan A. Bandes (New York: New York University Press, 1999), 309–329, 327. For an overview of traditionalist scholarship on emotion, see Terry A. Maroney, “Law and Emotion: A Proposed Taxonomy of an Emerging Field,” Law and Human Behavior 30 (2006): 119–42.

26. Theodore Ziolkowski, Mirror of Justice: Literary Reflections of Legal Crises (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 20.

27. Jeanne Gaakeer, “The Legal Hermeneutics of Suffering,” Law and Humanities 3, no. 2 (2009): 123–149, 128.

28. Ibid., 149; quoting Ian Ward, “Narrative Jurisprudence and Transnational Justice”, Wesleyan Law Review 12 (2005): 155-187, 155, 157, 185.

29. Cf. Martha Nussbaum, Love's Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990); eadem, Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995).

30. Martha Nussbaum, From Disgust to Humanity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 15. This account does not mention, but is strongly reminiscent of, Mary Douglas's anthropological work on bodily containment and taboo; Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge, 1984). See also Martha Nussbaum, Hiding from Humanity: Disgust, Shame, and the Law (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006).

31. Nussbaum, From Disgust to Humanity, xix.

32. Suzanne Keen, Empathy and the Novel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).

33. Martha Nussbaum, “Cultivating Humanity in Legal Education,” University of Chicago Law Review 70 (2003): 270–71.

34. Nussbaum, From Disgust to Humanity, xviii, xxi. In contrasting traditional work on emotion with newer projects on affect, it is interesting to note that within queer theory, shame has been taken as a productive place from which to experience solidarity, and rage as a starting point for feminist transformation. On the former, see Ann Cvetkovich, “Public Feelings,” South Atlantic Quarterly 106, no. 3 (2007): 462–63; on the latter, see Clare Hemmings, “Affective Solidarity: Feminist Reflexivity and Political Transformation,” Feminist Theory 13, no. 2 (2012): 147–61.

35. On the distinction between reverent and irreverent approaches and their histories, see, among other overviews, Greta Olson, “De-Americanizing Law-and-Literature Narratives: Opening up the Story,” Law & Literature 22, no. 1 (2010): 338–64.

36. Nussbaum, “Cultivating Humanity in Legal Education.”

37. Greta Olson, “Confessing Self, Confessing Nation,” in Electoral Cultures: American Democracy and Choice, ed. Georgiana Banita and Sascha Pöhlman (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2015), 341–366, 344.

38. The latter part of the title is borrowed from Shaw and Shaw, “From Fact to Feeling.”

39. Christoph Menke, “Law and Violence,” Law & Literature 22, no. 1 (2010): 1–17.

40. Scott Veitch, Law and Irresponsibility: On the Legitimation of Human Suffering (Abingdon: Routledge-Cavendish, 2007), 19.

41. Panu Minkkinen, “The Expressionless: Law, Ethics, and the Imagery of Suffering,” Law Critique 19 (2008): 65–85, 71.

42. J. M. Coetzee's fictional treatments of torture suggest a non-voyeuristic manner in which to comprehend the photographs and our culpability in the actions they portray; Greta Olson, “‘Like a Dog’: Rituals of Animal Degradation in J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace and Abu Ghraib Prison,” Journal of Narrative Theory 44, no. 1 (2014): 116–56.

43. Panu Minkkinen, “Ressentiment as Suffering: On Transitional Justice and the Impossibility of Forgiveness,” Law & Literature 19, no. 3 (2007): 513–531, 523.

44. Ibid.

45. Ibid., 529.

46. Minkkinen, “Expressionless: Law, Ethics,” 84.

47. Ibid., 85.

48. Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2006); Rosi Braidotti, “Animals, Anomalies, and Inorganic Others,” PMLA 124, no. 2 (2009): 526–532, 530; eadem, The Posthuman (Cambridge: Polity, 2013).

49. Julia Shaw, Law and Passion: A Discrete History (Abingdon: Routledge, forthcoming 2016).

50. Shaw and Shaw, “From Fact to Feeling.”

51. Ibid., 48. Cf. Julia J. A. Shaw, “Against Myths and Traditions that Emasculate Women: Language, Literature, Law and Female Empowerment,” Liverpool Law Review 31, no. 1 (2010): 29–49.

52. Shaw and Shaw, “From Fact to Feeling,” 60, quoting Judith Butler, Undoing Gender (New York: Routledge, 2004), 20.

53. The German lexeme “Recht” denotes both law and justice.

54. “Die Kraft des Rechts ruht im Gefühl, ganz so wie in der Liebe; der Verstand kann das mangelnde Gefühl nicht ersetzen”: Rudolf von Jhering, Der Kampf um's Recht (Freiburg: Haufe, 1992), 45; quoted in Andreas Fischer-Lescano, Rechtskraft (Berlin: August, 2013), 61.

55. Fischer-Lescano, Rechtskraft, 41.

56. Fischer-Lescano, “Radikale Rechtskritik,” Kritische Justiz 47, no. 2 (2014): 171–183, 171.

57. Ibid., 177: “Bis heute definiert sich Recht als Verkörperung von Rationalität, Vernunft, Objektivität. […] Arationalität ist als Energie, Emotion, Trieb, Affekt Teil des Rechts.”

58. Fischer-Lescano, Rechtskraft, 75: die Habermas'sche Diskurstheorie denkt “die Demokratie nicht vom Menschen, sondern von tugendhaften, rationalen Staatsbürgersubjekten aus.”

59. Ibid., 118.

60. Ibid., 85: “[…] Menschen aus Fleisch und Blut. Affekt, Gefühle, Zorn, Empörung, Liebe, Hass mit allen Banalitäten des Lebens bilden die pulsierende Kraft des Rechts.”

61. Susanne Krasmann, “Über die Kraft im Recht.” The original reads: “In den Blick gerät vielmehr ein Recht, das zuallererst von nicht-sprachlichen, a-rationalen Momenten geprägt ist”), Zeitschrift für Rechtssoziologie (forthcoming).

62. Cf. Josue David Cisneros's discussion of the racialized affective construction of non-citizens in anti-immigrant legislation and practices: Josue David Cisneros, “‘Looking Illegal’: Affect, Rhetoric, and Performativity in Arizona's Senate Bill 1070,” in Border Rhetorics: Citizenship and Identity on the US–Mexican Frontier, ed. D. Robert DeChaine (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2012), 133–50.

63. Witness the doyen of law and literature Ian Ward's newest volume; Ian Ward, ed., Literature and Human Rights: The Law, the Language and the Limitations of Human Rights Discourse (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2015). For further discussion, see Olson, “Futures of Law and Literature.”

64. Thomas Keenan, “Mobilizing Shame,” South Atlantic Quarterly 1302, nos. 2–3 (2004): 435–36. However, see Alex de Waal's contrarian argument; Alex de Waal, “Becoming Shameless: The Failure of Human Rights Organizations in Rwanda,” Literary Supplement 3, no. 4 (February 21, 1997).

65. The Economist (April 25–May 1, 2015), front cover.

66. Upendra Baxi, “Towards an Aesthetics of Human Rights,” in Rechtsanalyse als Kulturforschung II, ed. Werner Gephart and Jan Christoph Suntrup (Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann), 163–179, 175.

67. Marouf Hasian, Jr., “Biopolitics and Thanatopolitics at Guantánamo, and the Weapons of the Weak in the Lawfare over Force-Feeding,” Law & Literature 26, no. 3 (2014): 343–64.

68. For one formulation, see Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977). This is also to say that new work on relationality and affect was anticipated in both feminism and in cultural theory.

69. Rosi Braidotti and Judith Butler, “Feminism by Any Other Name,” Differences 6, nos. 2–3 (1994): 27–61, 53.

70. See Nikolas M. Rajkovic on the obfuscations rendered by references to this rule in political contexts: “This article takes critical aim at these assumptions, to challenge the bright-eyed optimism common to research programmes on the ‘rule of law’ in world affairs […] theorizing on the ‘rule of law’ has promoted a zero-sum conception of power. […] Third, studies on the ‘rule of law’ in world affairs have served to obfuscate our understanding of global governance”; Nikolas M. Rajkovic, “‘Global Law’ and Governmentality: Reconceptualizing the ‘Rule of Law’ as Rule ‘through’ Law,” European Journal of International Relations, 18, no. 1 (2012): 29–52, 30–31.

71. Butler, Precarious Life, 22.

72. Bruce Holsinger, “Empire, Apocalypse, and the 9/11 Pre-Modern,” Critical Inquiry 34 (2008): 468–90.

73. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 49.

74. Jean Améry, Jenseits von Schuld und Sühne: Überwältigungsversuche eines Überwältigten (Munich: Szczesny, 1966), 51: “Doch bin ich sicher, dass er [der Gefolterte] schon mit dem ersten Schlag, der auf ihn niedergeht, etwas einbüsst, was wir vielleicht vorläufig das Weltvertrauen nennen wollen.”

75. Joseph Pugliese, “Instrumental and Gratuitous Violence: The Torture and Death of Gul Rahman in the CIA Salt Pit,” Cultural Studies 72, no. 1 (2013): 72–91.

76. Most prominently in Marianne Constable, Just Silences: The Limits and Possibilities of Modern Law (Princeton: Princeton University Press); see also the special issue on “Silence” in Law and Literature 24, no. 1 (2012).

77. Ian Ward, “Narrative Jurisprudence and Transnational Justice,” Texas Wesleyan Law Review 12 (2005): 155–187, 185; idem, Law, Text, Terror (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 81. See also Gaakeer, “Legal Hermeneutics of Suffering.”

78. It may be important to note here that “narrative” is often used in law and literature work to mean literary or aesthetic evocation, whereas within narratology the term denotes the usually linguistically conveyed representation of events involving human-like agents; Olson, “Futures of Law and Literature,” 43–44.

79. Minkkinen, “Ressentiment as Suffering,” 523.

80. Peter Goodrich, “Introduction: Psychoanalysis and Law,” in Law and the Unconscious: A Legendre Reader, trans. Peter Goodrich, with Alain Pottage and Anton Schütz (New York: St. Martin's, 1997), 1–36, 18.

81. Patricia T. Clough, “The Affective Turn: Political Economy, Biomedia and Bodies,” Theory, Culture and Society 25, no. 1 (2008): 1–22, 4.

82. Barad, “Posthumanist Performativity,” 821.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Greta Olson

Greta Olson was Fellow at the Käte Hamburger Center for Advanced Study in the Humanities “Law as Culture” (2014, 2016) and is Professor of English and American Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of Giessen; general editor of European Journal of English Studies; and co-founder of the European Network for Law and Literature Research. She works and wishes to facilitate projects on legal pluralism, cultural approaches to law, the politics of narrative form, critical media and American studies, and feminism and sexuality studies.