Lex Amicitia: An Anthropology of the Law of Amity

Lex Amicitia draws a long history of the law of friendship – from Aristotle to Derrida – into a contemporary context: scouring the backrooms, bars and ill-lit alcoves, the corridors and side-rooms where the interior engine of institutional decisions operates. The intimate public sphere is fueled by the affects of amity and enmity, identification and rejection, experience and projection in negotiating and deciding the fate of workaday lives. Using the example of law, and specifically of the legal academy in the Anglophone world, this book pieces together the hidden ties and the secret bondings, the erotics and the hostilities that play beneath the surface of public lives. Patiently reconstructing the apparitions of affect and amity as they are glimpsed in marginal moments and off-hours, peripheries and slips, emails and other unintended viscera, the structural role of the laws of friendship, the legal form of compact, concord and contract is reconstructed and expounded.