Cardozo Law Review
Abstract
Where is the site of law's emergence? What opens the field of ethicity? Where does the law come from? Is there a ground of emergence of ethics and of obligation, rather is there a being obligated that arises before any obligation, a duty bound that precedes any particular duty? Our inquiry will attempt to trace the "question of law"-of law's origins and of its value, of law's validity and of its force. Does the law come from the burial ground of the primordial Father? Or from the places of the double murder of the Son and the Daughter? Or, finally, from the place where the Spirit advances and shatters? The question is haunted, it is persecuted by ghosts. The name of the Father refers us back to Freud and Lacan and the primal scene of the horde. The Spirit returns to Hegel and Heidegger, the recorders of the closure of metaphysics and of the death of jurisprudence. But it is Antigone, the daughter of Oedipus, who has guided the steps of philosophy and psychoanalysis to the primal scene from which jurisprudence emerges, and from which it never leaves.
Keywords
Ethics, Natural Law, Punishment, Penology
Disciplines
Law | Natural Law
Recommended Citation
Costas Douzinas,
Law's Birth and Antigone's Death: On Ontological and Psychoanalytical Ethics,
16
Cardozo L. Rev.
1325
(1995).
Available at:
https://larc.cardozo.yu.edu/clr/vol16/iss3/21
