Jeanne Lorraine Schroeder

"The theory of law and economics that dominates American jurisprudence today views the market as rational and individuals as driven by the desire to increase their wealth. This view is riddled with misconceptions, as Jeanne Lorraine Schroeder demonostrates in her challenging new book, which looks at contemporary debates in legal theory through the lens of psychoanalysis and continental philosophy. Through metaphors drawn from classical mythology and interpreted via Lacanian psychoanalysis and Hegelian philosophy, Schroeder exposes the hidden erotics of the market. Her work shows that the predominant economic analysis of the market and the standard romantic critique of the market are in fact mirror images; both are based on the misconception that reason and passion are inalterably opposed.". "Central to Schroeder's case is the conviction that reason and passion are two sides of the same coin. Rationality represents the human potential actualized only through desire, she argues; and passion functions only insofar as it preserves the rationality that makes desire possible. Far from being anti-erotic, market relations are, in this analysis, the most basic form of eroticism. Disclosing a fundamental similarity between erotic and economic behavior, The Triumph of Venus reveals that, while the former cannot be reduced to the latter, the latter can only be explained in terms of the former. Venus triumphs over the market."--BOOK JACKET.

In this feminist exploration of the erotics of the marketplace, Hegel's notion of property and Lacan's idea of the phallus serve parallel functions in creating the subjectivity necessary for self-actualization. Subjectivity requires intersubjective relationships mediated through a regime of possessing, enjoying, and exchanging an object of desire. For Hegel, this regime is property; for Lacan, it is sexuality, symbolized by the Phallus, which we conflate with the male organ and the female body. Property law, in Jeanne Schroeder's account, is implicitly figured by similar anatomical metaphors for that which men wish to possess and that which women try to be and enjoy. This is reflected in imagery taken from ancient Rome - the ax and bundle of sticks known as the Fasces and the virgin priestess called the Vestal. Schroeder traces the persistence of phallic metaphors in modern jurisprudence. Feminist scholars, social theorists, political scientists, philosophers, and lawyers will find in Schroeder's analysis new perspectives on property theory and the feminine within the market and the law.