Klimt’s Jurisprudence: Sovereign Violence and the Rule of Law

Public lecture by professor Desmond Manderson, ANU, 29 September, 2014 at 19.00

This lecture introduces Gustav Klimt’s lost masterpiece, Jurisprudence, bringing it into a richer dialogue with its social and legal context.  Jurisprudence, a suffering naked man surrounded by eyes, eerily captures the relationship between ‘sovereignty and bare life’ that Agamben argues was re-forged and refined across the twentieth-century. Klimt’s image might perhaps be regarded as the very first, and perhaps still the most comprehensive, representation of this profoundly important figure of legal modernity. Drawing on two of the most important cultural events to take place in Vienna at the time—the first performance of Aeschylus’ Oresteia; and the first publication of Sigmund Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams—the essay complicates and enriches this reading. Like an optical illusion, Klimt’s painting hovers uncertainly between three different but equally necessary perspectives: law as it is (the social); law as we imagine it (the philosophical); and law as it might be (the political). The proper name for the discomfiting study of their relationship is jurisprudence.

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