Media’s Law

Abstract

This article explores the relationship between law, aesthetics, and film theory with a particular focus on how affective relations and intensities define the encounter between law and cinema. It considers the longer history through which law has come to deny the significance of emotions, sense-perception, aesthetic discernment, and sexuality in its deliberations. It challenges such a disavowal in several ways, by pointing to how such considerations are manifest in the law’s self-presentation, in its codes and judgments, and its production of sexually charged renditions of the obscenities it sets out to police. This reframing of law and legal experience draws upon and seeks to contribute to recent developments in film theory that highlight affective and bodily dimensions of film experience over questions of representation.