Love as a State of Exception

Abstract

Abstract In Latin love elegy, the disavowal of law for the sake of love is couched in courtroom rhetoric and is thus both a denial and an appropriation of legal discourse. The elegiac recusatio is a version of the recusatio imperii, Augustus’ strategy for establishing his sovereignty by setting himself outside or above formal procedures. Not unlike the prince, Ovid proclaims a sovereign exception; he controls the production of law by deciding what lies outside it. The chapter studies a number of key passages from Catullus, Tibullus, Propertius, and Ovid to show that the love poets anticipate Augustus’ claims to sacrosanctity and sovereignty. It further examines love elegy’s affinities with the Saturnalian spirit of Roman comedy in order to argue that the elegiac suspension of legal action affords space for the emergence of an alternative jurisprudence of love.