Law's Bonds
Eros and Identification in Billy Budd
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 6032463 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Martha Merrill Umphrey (corresponding author) |
| Year | 2007 |
| Volume | 64 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 413-431 |
| Publication date | 2007-09-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | American imago (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0065-860X • E-ISSN: 1085-7931 |
| Publisher | Project MUSE (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1353/aim.2007.0037 |
| OpenAlex | W2085376403 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 12 |
This essay offers an interpretation of Herman Melville's novella, Billy Budd, Sailor (an inside narrative), that contests and supplements canonical accounts in legal theory emphasizing the relation between law and violence. Melville's narrative illustrates the ways in which subjects are bound even to an unjust law not only by fear but also by love. The judgment against and execution of Billy Budd, a signal enactment of legal violence, require the repression of powerful erotic bonds between Captain Vere and Billy; and Billy's execution is legitimated by the reassertion of those bonds via a chain of homoerotic identifications at the moment of his death. Melville's novella shows the relation between subjects and the law to be constituted and maintained by an ambivalent fusion of violence and love
Ambivalence · Art · Identification (biology) · Interpretation (philosophy) · Linguistics · Literature · Narrative · Novella · Political science · Psychoanalysis · Relation (database) · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Computer Science · Evolving Legal Systems and Governance · Law · Multicultural Socio-Legal Studies · Philosophy · Psychology
Group psychology and the analysis of the ego.
Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice
Civilization and Its Discontents
The Critical Difference
Dissent in Dangerous Times
Melville's Testament of Acceptance
The Concept of Identification in the Work of Freud Ferenczi, and Abraham
A Machine That Would Go of Itself
Herman Melville
Violence and the Word
Reflections
| Unique citing works | 1 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,17 |
| Citation span | 2020 - 2020 (1) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 1 |