Katrin Trüstedt

Conceiving of law as procedure bases the legitimacy of its results on the very openness of the outcome of proceedings and its responsiveness to the singularity and heterogeneity of the material entering the proceedings. On the other hand, the legal process imposes a selective legal form reducing this very singularity, and aims at a repeatability and a finality of its results that effectively removes the procedural openness. The reality of the modern law thus consists in the reduction of its own procedural complexity. Read against this background, Daniel Paul Schreber’s Memoirs reveal the dynamic character and potential reversibility of all procedures in such an excessive way that it goes beyond the limited and rationalizable confines of the law, but eventually opens them up to new usage. In this chapter, I proceed in three steps: I will first introduce some general features of procedures (Verfahren) by turning to Luhmann’s theory of legal procedure (I). In the main part, I will then unfold the two main layers of proceedings in Schreber's Memoir that make up this case, (II) the transformation into a woman as he describes it, and (III) his writing of the transformation by means of which he turning it into a legal and scientific case. In the concluding section I will indicate in what sense Schreber exceeded Luhmann’s procedural theory and points to another use of procedures (IV).

Laws of Transgression offers multiple perspectives on the story of Daniel Paul Schreber (1842–1911), a chamber president of the German Supreme Court who was institutionalized after claiming God had communicated with him, desiring to make him into a woman. Schreber was not only a successful judge, but was also to become the author of one of the most commented upon texts in psychiatric literature, Memoirs of My Nervous Illness. Published in 1903, this remarkable work documented Schreber’s visions, desires, jurisprudence, and theology. Far from ending the judge’s legal investments, it manifested an intensification of engagement with the law in the attempt to prove that becoming a woman did not deprive the judge of legal competence. Schreber’s experience of bodily change and his account of interior life has been the subject of more than a century of psychoanalytic and medical scrutiny. With the contemporary trans turn, interest in the judge’s desire to become a woman has intensified. In Laws of Transgression, Peter Goodrich, Katrin Trüstedt, and contributing authors set out to unfold Schreber’s complex relation to the law. The collection revisits and rediscovers the Memoirs, not only in its juridical and political implications, but as a transgressional text that has challenged law and heteronormativity.

Current crises give new urgency to the question of speaking and acting for others. How does one advocate for those whose voices are not heard? For stateless people, future generations, non-human actors, environments? The question of the possibilities and limits of representation arises anew against this backdrop and can be turned differently through the technique of "representation by proxy" (Stellvertretung) that steps in here. This technique does not prove to be a mere exception for supposed borderline cases. Rather, as this book shows, substitution is inherent in all speech and action. The history of theatrical, theological, juridical, and narrative scenes of substitution reveals the constitutive ambivalence of this technique: Substitution can bring to the fore precisely those who are otherwise not heard; however, it simultaneously doubles and divides the position of the represented and threatens to displace the very ones it represents. In readings from Aeschylus to Shakespeare and Hobbes, from Kleist and Kant to Kafka and the "ecopoetics," Katrin Trüstedt unfolds the multi-layered archaeology of substitution. In the process, a different history of the person also emerges. Against the attempt of the overcoming and internalization of substitution in the subject, this book wants to unfold the interpersonal technique of representation by proxy in all its complexity in order to open a more dynamic scene of the person and representation.

This introduction examines the main premises and terms of the special issue: person, agency, and representation. It argues that representation and agency stand in an internal relation: There is no agent without its personification and no agency without its possible vicarious representation. Yet, personification and representation enable agency only by at the same time complicating the integrity, authority, and presence of the agent. The introduction elucidates the inherent and conflictual relation of representation and agency by means of three early modern scenes from theology, law, and literature, and offers a brief overview of the individual contributions.

Against the tendency to regard Müller as a tragedian and his Hamletmaschine as a tragedy, I will read his play as an experiment on the possibility of comedic theater after Brecht. Hamletmaschine can thus be understood as an attempt to affirm the possibilities of theater and its own forms of estrangement without abstracting from tragedy, alienation, and negativity. The play contains three such models internally connecting alienation and affirmation: while “Hamlet” in his commitment to the negativity of a lost tragedy can only affirm it by resigning himself to it, “Ophelia” affirms and enhances negativity to the point of her self-extinction. Finally, the “Scherzo” refers back to these two models and finds a way to celebrate a form of affirmation that proves capable of transforming alienation and tragedy, without leaving them behind.

In a classical understanding of satire, its secondary status—giving in to literary distortions of an underlying reality—leads to a paradoxical trap. Satire seeks to reinstate a nonliterary norm by literary means. Shakespearean romance shares the paradoxical character of the satirical, but opens up an alternative response. Instead of attempting to eliminate the violation of norms, romance confronts an underlying tragic subplot of violence and crime with a decisively theatrical solution that acknowledges the secondary character of this response. The paradigmatic romance The Tempest exposes this trait in a specific sea-change, a shift of focus toward the non-serious and non-realistic. This sea-change culminates in a comic solution that takes place within a literary setting and remains, in a sense, ineffective, especially if one takes into account the latent threat and latent presence of the usurper’s son, which most critics, like the protagonist, have persisted in overlooking.

This contribution addresses issues of interpretation and translation in Derrida’s reading of Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice in relation to the supposed opposition of the letter and the spirit of the law. Rather than supporting a supersession of the law’s letter in favor of its spirit and advocating a sublation of the law by means of mercy, as a traditional reading suggests, this essay’s reading of Shakespeare’s play suggests that it deconstructs the underlying opposition. By linking the insistence on “the letter of the law” not to a kind of literalism or blind compliance with the law, but instead to an insistence on the textuality of the law, such a reading elucidates the law’s need for interpretation and highlights how the attempt to surpass the letter of the law involves a threat of a fundamental injustice.

This contribution investigates the intimate relation and the tension between legal and literary procedures of personification and subjectivation. In order to do so, the contribution turns to Kafka’s The Trial and examines the proximity of the juridical procedure depicted in the novel, intending to establish Josef K. as a subject, to the narrative procedures of the novel itself that aims at bringing forth an accountable protagonist. The intimate relation of the legal procedures described in the novel and the narrative ones of the novel itself is rooted in a shared historical heritage that impacts both. I argue that the fundamental configuration of advocacy in the classical rhetorical procedure: speaking for someone, against someone, in front of an other, lies at the basis of both legal and literary procedures. Against this common rhetorical background I investigate developments in legal procedures and the formation of the modern novel in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. Both developments occlude the rhetorical mechanisms of speaking-for and speaking against and turn the rhetorical procedures of personification into mechanisms of subjectivation. Kafka’s Proceß reflects these developments, yet does not affirm this transformation and ultimately does not result in a guilty subject and a ‘believable’ character. Rather, the novel embodies a gesture of resistance against certain modes of subjectivation that seem to be prevalent both in modern law and in the novel of formation