Sacred Kingship and Antinomianism: Antirrhesis and the Order of Things

Peter Goodrich's paper on antirrhesis gives us a method for analyzing the nature and history of law through the metaphors and tropes that lie in the legal unconscious. I would like to supplement his history to gloss it by digging in other areas of that cultural unconscious. I will concentrate on the early modern period because this is the point of time Goodrich uses to enter the long duree of legal history. The first thing I want to look at is the notion that law belongs to and creates an order of things. Here I am concerned with the boundaries created by the law, the way it delineates, and the way in which discontinuous bodies or things preserve their intactness and integrity. This is opposed to chaos, fragmentation, hybridization, and decomposition all of which lie outside the law. My point concerns Goodrich's thesis that the rationality, order, and legitimacy of the common law is based on a repressed genealogy that unites sacred kingship with nature, and the law with that sacred genealogy. It makes me uneasy reading Goodrich's paper knowing that within thirty years there will be a civil war and regicide and that by the end of the century there will be another revolution and deposition and that the dominant model for the kingship and state will become contract rather than the organic or mystical body. But to begin with the first subject: what lies outside the law and what that tells us about the nature of the inside of the law.