Playing the Law

This chapter begins with a review of some of the arguments in Derrida’s essay “Before the Law” regarding the relation of literature and the law, each one coming (to stand) before the other. This condition, Derrida asserts, allows literature to do what he calls “play the law.” This idea is then taken up in a reading of a Baudelaire prose poem, “An Heroic Death,” in which a mime condemned to death for plotting against the throne performs before the sovereign and dies mid-performance when this prince engineers a rude interruption. The questions raised about this event by the poem’s narrator and left suspended, as well as other questions that can be raised, let me draw out all the senses in which this performance, including the text’s own performance, plays the law. I show that this play confounds the distinction of condemnation and pardon.