Taking the Law for a Walk

Abstract

This paper situates the existential stakes implied in Peter Goodrich’s oeuvres. A plea to an embodied, affective use of law, use of the body, by way of a minor jurisprudence attentive to desire and the phantasms, or images, that make up our world. Exemplified, as I suggest, through what Pierre Legendre describes as the trinity body-image-world. Goodrich’s gesture is to do away with swift judgements and sedentary regurgitations of legal rules in favour of getting up, and moving, slowing down, allowing for what is implied in the notion of affect, that is, emotion but crucially also movement. Vitam Instituere means precisely this, law’s function in instituting life necessitates a life engendered in living, a connection between the text and our sensibilities.