Ambivalent Affines: Law Like Literature

Abstract

This short essay will dwell upon the ‘law of literature and the literature of law’, as illuminated in the enduring scholarship and intellectual legacy of Peter Fitzpatrick. Reading with Fitzpatrick, we must grapple with a law that is both constituted and subverted by recourse to the supplement of fiction. These ambivalent ‘affines’, law and literature, share in an oscillatory rhythm: each is constituted and enlivened by an unbounded exteriority, yet each must be rendered normatively determinate. I reflect upon the ways in which Fitzpatrick’s account of ‘law like literature’ grasps and hones the methodological challenge implicit in this reading: to read law as literature and literature as law. Yet further, I extend a reading of Fitzpatrick’s scholarship that acknowledges this fictive law as not merely susceptible to but constituted by decoloniality.