Abstract
This essay investigates the cultural significance of the construction of justice in an internationally successful American TV series, Dexter . The double life led by the eponymous protagonist, a serial killer who is also part of the Miami police, is read as a literal staging of the mutually foundational relationship of legitimacy and violence, and of the paradoxes of what Giorgio Agamben, following Jacques Derrida and Walter Benjamin, terms “force-of-law,” with “law” under double erasure: a state in which on the one hand, the law is in force but lacks the power to be enforced, and on the other hand, the force of law is separated from the law and associated with acts that suspend the law. An embodiment of vigilante culture who is also part of the legal police enforcement, Dexter is a figure of sovereignty as the law: he reclaims and enacts a form of extralegal justice predicated on the disjunction between the legitimate and the legal. Reading this fantasy of justice as, in Slavoj Žižek’s terms, a “sublime object,” the essay argues that it operates along the same lines that were practiced and theorized by the Bush administration in the wake of September 11, 2001.
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