Klimt's Jurisprudence - sovereign violence and the rule of law

Abstract

This essay develops an extended analysis of 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 20th 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. But Klimt does not merely exemplify Agamben’s force field of jurisprudential violence; he also complicates and interrogates it. 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 develops three distinct readings of the painting’s relationship between man, law, and sovereignty. 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 highly charged study of their relationship is jurisprudence. Show more