Translating Legendre or, the Poetical Sermon of a Contemporary Jurist

In deference to the occasion and to the theme of this colloquium I will not endeavor to provide any coherent, systematic, or sustained introduction to the work of the French jurist and psychoanalyst Pierre Legendre. I will begin instead with a brief history of a dual absence, that of psychoanalysis from law and of the writing of Legendre from the curriculum of contemporary jurisprudence. My question initially will be that of what can be predicated of this absence. What does it mean that the legal institution and specifically those that Legendre terms the moralists and bureaucrats-the "indolent pedagogues" of the legal academy-act as if psychoanalysis did not exist and as if the texts of Freud and Lacan would soon disappear from circulation?

Specifically, I will recount the history of a particular failure to translate the work of Legendre into Anglophone jurisprudence and I will subsequently comment upon the politics of that censorship or repression and the threat that accompanies the promise of a properly "analytic" interpretation of law.