Law and Its Remainder

Law and Its Remainder names the structural thesis that the Symbolic Law — the paternal prohibition, the Name-of-the-Father, the oedipal interdiction — does not simply repress or contain the Drive but actively generates it as its own constitutive by-product. In the cinematic reading of Cape Fear (1962) offered in todd-mcgowan-sheila-kunkle-lacan-and-contemporary-film-other-press-2004, the character of Cady functions not as a figure of pre-social or natural evil standing outside the Law but as what the Law necessarily secretes from within itself: pure Drive. The Sam-Cady dyad is not a simple moral opposition (law-abiding citizen versus criminal outsider) but a structural complicity in which the respectable legal subject and the driven transgressor are two faces of the same Symbolic order. Law and Its Remainder thus designates that excess — Drive, Superego jouissance, the Real — which the Symbolic order cannot eliminate because it is the very mechanism of prohibition that produces it.

This concept also implies that the Symbolic cut (the paternal metaphor, the Name-of-the-Father) is never simply sufficient or final. Precisely because Drive is generated by prohibition, each new application of the symbolic cut intensifies the pressure it is meant to pacify, escalating the very remainder it was designed to resolve. The Superego — that "obscene underside" of the Law — emerges here as the direct heir of this remainder: the more one obeys the Law, the more the Superego demands, and the more ferocious the Drive becomes. Law and Its Remainder therefore captures the paradoxical, self-undermining topology of the Symbolic order: prohibition and transgression are not opposed but co-constitutive moments of a single structure.

Within todd-mcgowan-sheila-kunkle-lacan-and-contemporary-film-other-press-2004, Law and Its Remainder functions as a film-theoretical application of the Lacanian topology of Drive and Superego, using Cape Fear as a symptomatic text that makes visible what normally remains invisible: the implication of the legal, respectable Symbolic subject in the very enjoyment he disavows. It sits at the intersection of several canonical concepts. Most directly, it is an extension and specification of Drive: if the Drive is that relentless looping force produced when instinct is subordinated to language, then Law and Its Remainder names the precise mechanism of that production — legal prohibition is the signifying operation that converts biological pressure into Drive's circular, insatiable structure. The concept also recasts the Oedipus Complex and the Name-of-the-Father: rather than treating the paternal metaphor as a clean resolution that installs desire and law, Law and Its Remainder insists on what the Oedipal operation fails to metabolize — the remainder that returns as Superego pressure and Drive intensity. This aligns the concept with Lacan's later, more critical readings of the Oedipus complex as insufficient myth rather than complete structural operator.

The concept further illuminates the structural kinship between Perversion and the Law: if the pervert "shores up" the Law by filling the lack in the Other, then Cady — as pure Drive animated by legal prohibition — occupies an analogous structural position as the Law's necessary supplement. Law and Its Remainder could be read as the general structural principle of which Perversion is one clinical expression. Finally, the concept touches on Fantasy and the Real: the cinematic text (Cape Fear) exposes the fantasy frame that normally conceals this structural complicity, allowing the Real — the Drive as irresistible remainder — to appear on screen as Cady himself.

Lacan and Contemporary FilmTodd McGowan & Sheila Kunkle (eds.) · 2004 (page unknown)

Cady is pure drive, an urge against the laws that would not exist without them... drives reach a new level of intensity and require a new force of symbolic cut to resist them.

The phrase "would not exist without them" is the theoretical crux: it converts the Drive from a pre-legal, natural energy into a product of the Law, collapsing the opposition between prohibition and transgression. The second clause — "drives reach a new level of intensity and require a new force of symbolic cut" — then articulates the paradoxical escalation logic: each symbolic cut (each renewed legal prohibition) intensifies the very Drive it was meant to subdue, making the Law's remainder structurally inexhaustible.