The Heteronomy of Flesh: A Minor Jurisprudence of the Use of the Human Dead and Tissues

The dissertation addresses historical and contemporary legal literatures—generally literatures that have not succeeded in becoming convention (Peter Goodrich)—that assert or rely on the human body’s “jurisgenerativity” (Robert Cover) to evaluate and determine what should be lawfully done with the human dead or tissues. These literatures demonstrate the limits of doctrinal legal methods and conventional jurisprudence which ordinarily deploy concepts of property or personhood. Instead of property or personhood, these literatures require the jurisprudent to attune to the heteronomy of flesh, a law engendered in the materiality of the body decomposing, cut into parts, or as fragments falling away from the individual. It requires the jurisprudent to reach past divisions of nomos and physis, playing with the normativity of corporeal forms. Drawing on concepts of critical legal theory including heteronomy (Stewart Motha, Jean-Luc Nancy); lawscape (Nicole Graham, Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos); jurisgenesis and biogenesis (Robert Cover, Margaret Davies); antirrhesis and the antinomian (Peter Goodrich, Marty Slaughter); and office and technics of jurisdiction (Olivia Barr, Shaunnagh Dorsett and Shaun McVeigh, Marc Trabsky), the author suggests how these literatures and their engagement with human corporeality can be re-read to foster alternate approaches to the laws of the dead and bodily matter. This leads the author to conclude the dissertation by gesturing to the possibility of a minor jurisprudence (Peter Goodrich, Shaun McVeigh, Panu Minkkinen) where the jurisprudent writes as flesh (Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari), inspired by re-readings of the failed literatures he covered, so to inhabit different modes of relating with corporeality.