Jacques Lacan and law might seem to be odd bedfellows. Although his seminars wandered far from a narrow focus on psychoanalysis to invoke such fields as philosophy, religion, literature and the arts, Lacan showed no interest in jurisprudence or legal doctrine. Nevertheless, Lacanian theory is all about law. Lacan posits that the subject is created through submission to the “symbolic” order of intersubjective relations including language, sexual identity and law. Indeed, Lacan’s theory was anticipated more than 100 years earlier by G.W.F. Hegel’s theory of law’s role in the creation of subjectivity. One might be tempted to object that, on the one hand, psychoanalysis infamously concerned, or even obsessed, with sexuality, whereas legal analysis is rational. This is a false dichotomy. To both Lacan and Hegel, reason and passion are two sides of the same coin. Lacan rejected a simplistic Freudian identification of sexuality with anatomy, and desire with the animal mating urge. Human desire, in contrast, is the desire to be recognized by others. Hegel argues that law is created as means of fulfilling the desire for recognition. Sexuality is, therefore, legal; law, erotic.
