Inheritance law as constellation in lieu of redress: A detour through exceptional terrain

This study considers inheritance law as an aspect of cultural transmission. Five essays, bearing on different historical moments, consider the passing of property from forebears to followers in ways that comparative literature reads passing of the poetic (or political or religious) word. This focus on the act of reading---as a moment of struggle between actuality (the constraining/legal power of the received word) and potentiality (possibilities for critical practice to change meanings and unbind constraints)---opens dramatically the inheritance-law arguments common in legal academia today. Even the most fair-sounding legal formulation masks a desirous plea by someone that they be remembered. A law includes always some forebear's will (or "Last Will") to found a group of followers "in His own image." This focus on law in its diachronic aspects (which should take place prior to any weighing on synchronic "scales of justice") not only negates the possibility that redress calculations can be adequate and enduring; the diachronic view suggests ways to judge and make law with regard to inevitable bias and fallibility. This study presents an inheritance-law "idea constellation" (Walter Benjamin) that could impact political debate: limits on duration of property rights as response to the inadequacy of redress judgments (Giorgio Agamben, Samuel Weber, Negri and Hardt).; Chapters one and two elaborate, with regard to U.S. inheritance and constitutional law, methodologies that read cultural moments as contingently swayed by particular tropes. The trope with the most rhetorical power, when not read for traces of its rise and fall in prominence, tends to inspire (oppressive) imaginations of a transcendental founding Will that assures endurance of the then-established order (Nietzsche, Jacques Lacan, Robert Bork, Duncan Kennedy).; Chapter three finds similar imaginations resulting from aesthetic ideas, even without an overt "Founder" figure (Hegel, Adorno and Horkheimer, Thomas Mann, Francois Mauriac). Chapter four delineates political theologies that continue to bear on U.S. inheritance law (Milton, Paul of Tarsus, Spinoza, Alain Badiou, Etienne Balibar). Chapter five examines interplays between the fading father's (incestuous) desires and the (theological) law that enforces his Last Will and (Old) Testament (Shakespeare, Paul, John Locke, J. J. Bachofen, Julia Reinhard Lupton).