The haunted "nomos": towards a jurisprudence of the ghosts of desire

Abstract

The article proposes a theoretical-methodological reflection on the relationship between Law and Art, drawing on the concept of nomos as the order that structures both the world that creates the artwork and the worlds that’s created by it. The starting point is the idea that desire circulates between these two realms, generating normative expectations that organize both. To understand this flow, a conceptual vocabulary is introduced, composed of three central notions: nomos, jurisprudence, and institution. Nomos represents the ordering concretized within these worlds; jurisprudence, understood in the manner of case law, makes it possible to interpret how desires and specters of “surpassed pasts, oppressed presents, and denied futures” haunt the present, materializing as ghosts – desired images shaped by imagination and memory, mediated by matter; and institution allows us to grasp how desire operates through time in what it retains as constant, even amid change. The ultimate aim is to offer a method for studying how desire constitutes institutional orders, enabling us to understand the “in-between” of the world that creates the artwork and the worlds that’s created by it. Thus, a jurisprudence of the ghosts of desire is proposed as an interpretive key for the relationship between Law and Art.