Vol. 13 No. 2 (February 2003)

 

LAW AND AESTHETICS, by Adam Gearey.  Oxford, and Portland, OR: Hart Publishing, 2001. 176 pp. $44 Hardcover.  ISBN: 1841132438.

 

Reviewed by David H. Fisher, Department of Philosophy, North Central College.  Email: dhf@noctrl.edu .

 

In LAW AND AESTHETICS Adam Gearey makes a number of promises: he wishes to show how a combination of aesthetics and ethics is relevant to contemporary law and literature scholarship, and to the development of postmodern jurisprudence. This brief volume seeks to develop the implications of critical legal thought as a “gay science” in Nietzsche’s and more contemporary senses.

 

Following the classifications within the law and literature movement proposed by Jane Baron (1999), Gearey is clearly a “hermeneutic law-and-lit” type—one who reads literary and aesthetic theory—rather than a humanist who reads literature for “moral uplift,” or a narrativist who studies stories told within law by clients, lawyers or judges to evaluate their persuasive impact as narratives. Even when he evokes explicitly “literary” texts, such as Sophocles’ Antigone or Shelley’s “Ozymanidas” and “Ode to Liberty,” Gearey does so through the lens provided by critical readers of these works (including, in Shelley’s case, the poet’s own A DEFENSE OF POETRY). Throughout, Gearey’s indebtedness throughout to Lacan, Nietzsche, Unger, and their interpreters in psychoanalytic and critical legal theory, is evident.

 

Following an introductory chapter in which Gearey distances himself from law and literature orthodoxy of James Boyd White and the aesthetic formalism of Ernest J. Weinrib, Chapter 2, “Dream of a Legal Soul,” combines critical legal theory with psychoanalysis on the theory of image. Chapter 3, “The Book of Sand: Nietzsche and Aesthetic Responsibility,” uses THE GAY SCIENCE and THUS SPAKE ZARATHUSTRA as the bases for suggesting an aesthetic ethic.  Chapters 4 and 5, “The Province of Jurisprudence Deranged” and “Interruptions,” argue for the need to integrate rhetorical theory, critical race theory, queer theory, versions of reader response theory and critical legal studies articulated respectively by Peter Goodrich, Anthony Farley, Les Moran, Maria Aristodemou, and Tina Chanter and Costas Douzinas to carry forward the program of critique begun by early advocates of critical legal studies.  The final chapters suggest that the combined effect of these materials will “disenchant” legal scholarship from a naïve belief in its normative achievements.

 

At a time when the ideologically conservative impact of law and economics movement is growing in American legal thinking, and critical legal scholarship marginalized, Gearey’s aims are praiseworthy. Unfortunately, his reach exceeds his grasp. The fundamental problem of the text is that it cannot decide between the vocation of a strong poet, an inter-textual commentator/exegete, and the developer of an interdisciplinary critique. This ambivalence is most evident in “The Book of Sand.”  Indebted, as the initial note suggests, to Derrida’s reading of Nietzsche in THE POLITICS OF FRIENDSHIP (and, by implication, to Derrida’s MEMORIES FOR PAUL DE MAN) the chapter reads Nietzsche in the spirit of Derrida – which is to say aphoristically, epigrammatically but not playfully. Individual sentences are suggestive of creative insights, tropes, or possible linkages, but the whole, as with some of Derrida’s work, is less than the sum of its parts. Attempting to sound like Derrida imagining Nietzsche, Gearey masks and obscures his own potential as an independent thinker. In like manner, subsequent chapters are filled with evidence that Gearey has read an extensive body of work in postmodern jurisprudence, and can summarize and suggest links. What the work does not do is draw out, with sufficient clarity, the implications of these insights.

 

At one level Geary could respond that his work was not meant for a wider audience. Those already familiar with primary postmodern texts and their critical commentators will doubtless find in LAW AND AESTHETICS confirmation of Gearey’s impressive credentials, and at points, indications of arguments or insights to be pursued in future work. For example, a footnote on page 54 offers a critical analysis of Raz’s ENGAGING REASON (on the connection between ethics and aesthetics) that could easily have become an entire chapter, but that remains an undeveloped possibility here.  It is unfortunate that an author of Gearey’s obvious ability and creativity has not seen his way clear to a style of writing capable of engaging a larger readership. The “continental divide” that separates positivism, law and economics, and a renewed pragmatism in legal theory from critical legal studies, critical race theory, feminist and other postmodern forms of thinking is difficult to cross, and those who attempt to do so are typically viewed as compromisers by others in their respective camp. The promise rather than the achievement of LAW AND AESTHETICS is that Adam Gearey is one capable of accomplishing such a project with integrity.

 

REFERENCES

Aristodemou, Maria.     1998. “Law and Desire in Measure for Measure,” 9 LAW & CRITIQUE 117-40.

 

Baron, Jane B.  1999. “Law, Literature and Interdisciplinarity” 108 YALE LAW JOURNAL 1059.

 

Chanter, Tina.   1995 THE ETHICS OF EROS. London: Routledge.

 

Douzinas., Costas and Washington, R.  1994 JUSTICE MISCARRIED. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester.

 

Derrida, Jacques. 1989.  MEMORIES FOR PAUL DE MAN. New York: Columbia University Press.

 

Derrida, Jacques. 1997.  THE POLITICS OF FRIENDSHIP.  London: Verso.

 

Farley, Anthony. 1997 “The Black Body as Fetish Object” 480 OREGON LAW REVIEW.

 

Goodrich, Peter. 1999. “The Critics Love of the Law.” 10 LAW & CRITIQUE 343-60

 

Lacan, Jacques. 1998.  SEMINAR XX.  New York: Norton.

 

Moran, Les. 1996. THE HOMOSEXUALITY OF LAW.  London: Routledge.

 

Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1974. THE GAY SCIENCE.  New York: Vintage.

 

Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1956.  THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY.  New York: Anchor.

 

Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1986. HUMAN ALL TOO HUMAN.  Cambridge: Cambridge

            University Press.

 

Nietzsche, Friedrich.  1961. THUS SPAKE ZARATHUSTRA.  London: Penguin.

 

Raz, Joseph. 1999.  ENGAGING REASON.  Oxford: Oxford University Press.

 

Shelley, Percy B. 1909. “A Defense of Poetry,” in Shawcross, J (ed.) SHELLEY’S LITERARY AND PHILOSOPHICAL CRITICISM.  London. Henry Frowde.

 

Unger, Roberto. 1984.  PASSION.  New York: Free Press.

 

Weinrib, Ernst J. 1995. THE  IDEA OF PRIVATE LAW.  Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

 

White, James Boyd. 1990.  JUSTICE AS TRANSLATION.  Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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Copyright 2003 by the author,
David H. Fisher.