On Comics and Legal Aesthetics Multimodality and the Haunted Mask of Knowing [Hardcover]

What are the implications of comics for law? Tackling this question, On Comics and Legal Aestheticsexplores 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 laws 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.

1 On Comics and Other Ways of Knowing

Drawing the Frame

Komosand 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

Invisible Images

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