Somewhere in Time: A Response to Zizek, Santner, and Reinhard’s The Neighbor

Abstract

This paper considers, with respect to property law critique, both synchronic and diachronic causes that emerge from the Lacanian Real. All too often property law reforms (and legal reform in general) are discussed only in the synchronic dimension (e.g., redistribution of property rights, distributive justice more generally) without sufficient awareness of the importance of also (perhaps firstly) thinking law as such as an intergenerational claim that places older and younger generations in distinct conflict. If we provide this critical awareness with the additional insight, refined by Zizek, Santner, and Reinhard, that no intervention into the symbolic (into law and language) can be effective without passing through the dimension of the Real (the painful, sadistic “evil” of the Real, the beyond of the symbolic dimension of justice to which the symbolic dimension is always knotted), then we are prompted to consider the superego, thought in its Real dimension, as both the most significant site of synchronic human relations (a crucial site, an unavoidable swerve, through which horizontal ideas such as “equality” and “justice” must be thought) and the place where law passes vexed between generations.These considerations need to be brought to bear on property law, insofar as private property has become the primary site of political power. The aspect of private property that needs to be looked into is its temporality, its diachronic aspect that aggravates relations between forebears and followers. What needs to be looked into is the long-unexamined presupposition that private property rights must be Eternal to effectively motivate participation in economic production. From a Lacanian perspective, this emphasis on “effectiveness” and “rational economics” not only disavows the theological resonances of the idea of “Eternity.” Just as importantly, such an emphasis ignores the Real relations to which the Symbolic realm of justice is irrevocably knotted.