Description
What are the implications of comics for law? Tackling this question, On Comics and Legal Aesthetics explores the epistemological dimensions of comics and the way this once-maligned medium can help think about – and reshape – the form of law. Traversing comics, critical, and cultural legal studies, it seeks to enrich the theorisation of comics with a critical aesthetics that expands its value and significance for law, as well as knowledge more generally. It argues that comics’ multimodality – its hybrid structure, which represents a meeting point of text, image, reason, and aesthetics – opens understanding of the limits of law’s rational texts by shifting between multiple frames and modes of presentation. Comics thereby exposes the way all forms of knowledge are shaped out of an unstructured universe, becoming a mask over this chaotic ‘beyond’. This mask of knowing remains haunted – by that which it can never fully capture or represent. Comics thus models knowledge as an infinity of nested frames haunted by the chaos without structure. In such a model, the multiple aspects of law become one region of a vast and bottomless cascade of perspectives – an infinite multiframe that extends far beyond the traditional confines of the comics page, rendering law boundless.
Table of Contents
1 On Comics and Other Ways of Knowing
Drawing the Frame
Komos and Nomos
2 A Ghostless Machine
Cyborg Aesthetics
Disciplinary Aesthetics
3 The Irrational Threat
Madness and Aesthetics
Headless Lawyers
4 Horrific Jurisprudence
Call of the Cultural-Legal
Judging in the Abyss
5 On Haunted Masks
Masca Lex
Invisible Images
6 Redrawing the Law
Drawing the World
The Haunted Multiframe
