Ari Hirvonen

The Subject of the Law

Prisons of silence
“I abhor to be caught in prisons: psychic, social, physical.” Thus wrote Lars
Norén, the most prominent contemporary Nordic playwright, who has also
written poetry and novels, on June 1, 2008 in his published diary, En dramatik-
ers dagbok (“A Dramatist’s Journal”).1
Thirty-five years previously, Norén wrote in a poem of “the broken dead” in
asylums, who “live arms tied to the back / and head bound between feet”,
“who have become stone and latrine / in the dormitories of order and econ-
omy.”2 The inspiration for this poem, which also inspired his first play, Furste-
slickaren (“The Prince Licker”, which had its premier under the direction of
Donya Feuer at Stockholm’s Dramaten, on November 22, 1973), was the Italian
book, Morire di classe (“To Die of Class”, which also refers to the death of
class), published in 1969.
The book presented photographs taken by Carla Cerati and Gianni Berengo
Gardin at Italian psychiatric hospitals, and conjoins radical psychiatry and
photography.3

I started to write the play one night, when I was lying about and leafing through an
Italian documentary book of photographs, Morire di classe. There were images of capital-
ist society’s mentally dead people, which make me stop feeling, loving, dreaming, which
invoke in me an absolute readiness to susceptibility, craving, dreams.4

But in the poem he also declares: “Go you to them with your world, your
love!”5 This is exactly what Norén’s writing is committed to: It goes out to the

1 Lars Norén, En dramatikers dagbok (Stockholm: Bonniers, 2008), June 1, 2001 (the diary is
without page numbers).
2 Lars Norén, Kung Mej och andra dikter (Stockholm: Bonniers, 1973), 37.
3 Morire di classe was a vociferous call for the abolition of mental hospitals and in 1978 the
legge 180, a new Italian Mental Health Law, was passed, which decreed the closure of Italian
mental hospitals. Morire di classe: La condizione manicomiale fotografata da Carla Cerati e
Gianni Berengo Gardin, ed. Franco Basaglia & Franca Ongaro Basaglia (Torino: Einaudi, 1969).
Some of the photos are available at: http://www.repubblica.it/2006/08/gallerie/spettacoliecul
tura/berengo-gardin/11.html. Accessed March 15, 2011.
4 Lars Norén, “Fursteslickaren. Ett urval av några typiska formuleringar,” Dramaten, 32 (1973/
74): 2–9, 5.
5 Norén, Kung Mej, 37.

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120 Ari Hirvonen

excluded, and gives a voice and visibility to those people, visions, forces, and
desires that “normal” society and its legal, social, and moral norms have con-
demned to silence and invisibility. Norén says that one of the most important
things for the spirit of theater is that “the invisible can still be seen, and the
unspeakable can be heard”.6 Therefore, he puts on the stage (his poems are
also stages where images and fantasies are presented) the truth of being-in-
the-world, which he says is “defined by those who have it worst”.7 This reality
is the fire that drives theater. “I usually begin a play with a theme that interests
me, and arrange a story, an act that is not autobiographical.” After rewriting
something several times, he asks himself: “Why do you not tell the truth? […]
And then I start to write what really happened.”8 “One must see reality as it
is”, says Personkrets 3:1’s Anna, who has come become psychotic, and is running
away from her parents, who are trying to force her to return to a mental hospi-
tal.9
Often those who suffer most exist outside positive or statutory law –
human-created legal norms, institutions, and practices – or marginalized by
it. Laws do not merely legitimize and justify practices and institutions of vari-
ous kinds of prisons, but may themselves be prisons that entrap people. Legal
norms, institutions, and practices, combined with legal, psychiatric, and crimi-
nological knowledge constitute complexes of control, repression, and exclu-
sion that organize societies, delineate a legal subject’s duties, define modes of
being, and delineate borders between the visible and the invisible, audible
and inaudible, possible and impossible.10 However, positive law may also
incorporate emancipatory, affirmative, and inclusive effects. For instance, legal
subjects enjoy fundamental freedoms and human rights that are not merely
guaranteed, but also protected by the state authorities.
My claim is that the law has an essential role in Norén’s poetry and drama.
I will analyze how it functions in his texts, especially in its relationship to the
subject. In my analysis, the law is not reduced to positive law. Instead, the law

6 Cited in Per Zetterfalk, Inter esse. Det skapande subjektet, Norén och reality (Hedemora:
Gidlunds förlag, 2008), 341.
7 Cited in Björn Apelkvist, Moderskonflikten i Lars Noréns åttiotalsdramatik (Hedemora: Gid-
lunds förlag, 2005), 63; cf. Christian Tomner, “Anteckningar från ett samtal med Lars Norén”
in Programhäftet till Hebriana (Upsala: Upsala stadsteater, 1993).
8 Norén in an interview with Stan Schwartz. Stan Schwartz, “Jag var naiv – Lars Norén talar
ut om ‘Sju tre’, ‘Kyla’ och döden,” Expressen (October 23, 2003). Available at: http://www.
expressen.se/nyheter/1.56261/jag-var-naiv-lars-noren-talar-ut-om-sju-tre-kyla-och-doden.
Accessed March 23, 2011.
9 Lars Norén, Personkrets 3:1. Morire di classe. (Stockholm: Bonniers, 1998), 25.
10 See Jacques Rancière’s concept of police order in his La Mésentente. Politiques et philoso-
phie (Paris: Galilée, 1995).

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 The Subject of the Law 121

is a general concept, which describes not so much the substance of the norms
of various normative systems (law, morality, economic, grammar, etc.) but the
structure of all these normative practices. I will use Jacques Lacan’s concept
of the symbolic order, the order of language and signifiers, which consists of
rules of signification, unconscious prohibitions, laws of desire and sexuation,
social and moral norms, and legal norms.11 This normative order, which envel-
ops human beings in a network of various kinds of norms, does not merely
repress the subject, but establishes it as a speaking and desiring being in a
symbolic community. It is the determining order of the subject, which struc-
tures and organizes the subject. Moreover, it institutes the life of the subject,
marks the limits of its world and being. Since I will emphasize the normative
function of the symbolic order, I will call it ‘the law’.
In contrast to legal positivism, I do not consider positive or statutory law
an autonomous normative order, but a part of this general symbolic order. The
precondition of both positive law and the legal subject is thus the normative
symbolic order, that is, the law. At the same time, positive law and its concepts,
categories, and rationality construct the Western symbolic order, at least
(Freud’s universalization of the Oedipus complex is problematic. Thus, I differ-
entiate between the symbolic order as a formal, normative structure that is
universal, and the historical substantive norms of which it is made). According
to Pierre Legendre, the Romans were the inventors of normative logic. They
designated juridical phenomena by the formula “to institute life”; hence, the
radicality of their legal thinking was “to make us see that life is originally
affected by law.”12
In Norén’s writing, there is never a merely dual logic, or conflict between
two figures. Instead, the third term (various forms and manifestations of the

11 The symbolic order is one of three orders. The other two orders are the imaginary and the
real. The imaginary order is the realm of the ego, sense perception, narcissistic relationship,
and the illusory sense of wholeness, unity and coherence. In this phase, the infant recognizes
that its body is separate from its mother and the world, the effect of which is the feeling that
something is lost. As a result, there is demand to make the other part of oneself. In the mirror
stage, which is a way of answering to this demand, the formation of the ego takes place by
imaginary identification with the specular image, the ideal ego. The imaginary phase is not
developmental, but remains at the core of the adult subject. The imaginary and the symbolic
orders are in tension with the real, which is what resists representation and symbolization. It
exists at the borders of the symbolic world. It is impossible, in the sense that we cannot
express it. One may approach it, but never grasp it. But it is also the non-eliminable residue
of articulation, the foreclosed element, the traumatic kernel, which continuously influences
the subject and threatens its reality, which consists of the process of signification. It is the
sphere of the death drive and jouissance.
12 Pierre Legendre, “The Other Dimension of Law,” Cardozo Law Review, 16 (1995): 943–961,
943.

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122 Ari Hirvonen

symbolic order: language, laws, and institutions) is always already operating

in his dialogues and monologues. Hence, we cannot avoid confronting the
function of the law in his poetry and drama. In this way, his works not only
reveal the interdependency of various forms of the law, but also bring out the
heart of the phenomena of normativity. What is more, his works show what
happens when the law or its particular forms do not function properly, or are
ineffective.
I divide my reading of Norén’s works, which combine psychoanalysis, aes-
thetics, and jurisprudence, into three sections: the pre-Oedipal, Oedipal, and
post-Oedipal phases (these are not so much temporal as structural, since they
are not passing phases, but always present in the constitution of Norén’s
works). The first two parts deal with the maternal body, the paternal prohibi-
tion, and the introduction of the human being into the symbolic order. The
third part deals more with the failures of positive and moral law, which are
embedded in the symbolic order, as noted previously.
I will speak of the law’s subject and not of the legal subject, which refers
merely to the subject of rights and duties recognized by positive law. The law’s
subject has much more complex character and its subjectivity differs with each
normative-regulatory instrument, its facilities, logic, and practice, and hence,
it is not enough to consider the place of the subject in the legal landscape, but
how subjectivity is instituted in the landscape of the symbolic order, the law.13
My thesis is that Norén manages to thoroughly map this landscape.
Before proceeding with my reading, I will note that I am not analyzing
Lars Norén as a person, nor as a writer, but as a subject as writing and a subject
in writing, who is not some pre-given being, or a sovereign and autonomous
author, but a subject undergoing a constant process of transformation. This
subject is created and recreated through the process of writing. One reason for
this is that in Norén’s works, the subject that speaks in a particular text, the
spoken subject of the text, and the written subject of this particular text, the
author or the writing subject, are often intertwined. They are paradoxically the
same and different, in a process where the text and this paradoxical double
subject are created.

The Foreclosure of the Law

Norén, who has been presented on many occasions as the successor to August
Strindberg, began his writing career as a poet. In 1963, with the support of

13 See Michael Thomson, “Rewriting the Doctor: Medical Law, Literature and Feminist Strat-
egy” in Feminist Perspectives on Health Care Law, ed. Sally Sheldon and Michael Thomson
(London: Cavendish, 1998), 173–188, 177.

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 The Subject of the Law 123

Artur Lundkvist, he published his debut collection of poems, Syrener, snö

(“Lilacs, Snow”). In 1964, the year in which his second collection of poems,
De verbala resterna av en bildprakt som förgår (“The Verbal Remnants of a
Vanishing Imageluster”), was published, his mother died. Around that same
time, he had an extremely intensive period of writing, during which he wrote
most of the pieces for his next collection of poems. This triggered a psychosis,
which was characterized by his believing that his mother was still alive: “I saw
her everywhere”.14 In the autumn of 1964, he was committed to a psychiatric
hospital, where he was diagnosed with schizophrenia.
The time he spent in the hospital between 1964 and 1965 was “an unprece-
dentedly disturbing time, a deep psychosis”.15 There were only two doctors for
200 patients, and thus there was no time for anything other than subjecting
him first to chlorpromazine, then to electroshock therapy, after that, to insulin,
and then to abstinence from drugs. “[I] never had any discussion with the
doctors. I think I got five minutes during the whole time”.16 In Encyklopedi.
Mémoires sur la fermentation 1–3 (“Encyclopaedia. Memories of Fermentation
1–3”), he draws a parallel between “cure” and “sickness” by asking

How do you think it feels when someone places twelve electrodes on your head? … You
would be totally disoriented and mechanical, you would get tastes in mouth that resemble
those taste hallucinations schizophrenics encounter once in a while. You would lose con-
tact with reality. You would begin to dance.17

He also wrote an article in the leading Swedish newspaper, Dagens Nyheter, in

which he criticized Swedish psychiatric institutions. He claimed that the more
he needed contact with people, the more he was given psychopharmaceuticals
and sleeping pills. “I disappeared into a perfect machinery of suffering and
indifference.”18
Mikael van Reis has called Norén’s early poetry “schizopoetics”, which
accurately describes his poetry of the 1960s, in that it is fragmentary, discontin-
uous, and associative.19 There is no coherent unity, and meaning is broken

14 Torkel Rasmusson & Leif Zern, “Förvandlingar av människan; ur ett samtal med Lars
Norén,” Bonniers Litterära Magasin, 38 (1969): 348–355, 349.
15 Lars Nylander, “Samtal med Lars Norén” in Lars Nylander, Den långa vägen hem. Lars
Noréns författarskap från poesi till dramatik (Stockholm: Bonniers, 1997), 348.
16 Rasmusson & Zern, “Förvandlingar av människan,” 349.
17 Lars Norén, Encyklopedi. Mémoires sur la fermentation 1–3 (Stockholm: Bonniers, 1966), 91.
18 Lars Norén, “Om mentalsjukvården i landet,” (Stockholm) Dagens Nyheter (April 16, 1966).
19 Mikael van Reis, Det slutna rummet. Sex kapitel om Lars Noréns författarskap 1963–1983
(Eslöv: Symposium, 1997), 84–147; Mikael van Reis, “Det slutna rummet. En essä om gränser
hos Lars Norén,” Bonniers Litterära Magasin, 51 (1988): 23–31.

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124 Ari Hirvonen

down. The self is brought forth as schizophrenic, hallucinatory, and chaotic.

Both the writing and the experience of one’s own body are shattered. Facticity,
hallucination, automatic association, fragmentation, repetition, redoubling,
simulation, and intertextuality describe the relationship between the poet and
reality.20 According to Anders Olsson, Norén’s early poems concentrated on the
Orestes complex and matricide, which was necessary for the language used.
According to him, “The chilly and materializing sexuality, the brutal effects,
language as concrete material” all refer to the lack of the self and the will to
separate oneself from the mother.21 Norén’s poetry emerges from “the precipi-
tous crisis”: His mother’s death and the ensuing journey through schizophre-
nia are mental centers around which his poetry constantly circles.22
In her analysis of Norén’s schizopoetic works, Cecilia Sjöholm takes up an
important point: one should not limit oneself to diagnosing descriptions of his
schizopoetry and analyses of it as symptoms of a distorted mental state.
Instead, they should be seen as an impressive, consciously orchestrated body
of work, whose images have productive potential.23
His schizopoetry does speak of the unconscious, which is studied during
a personal crisis, and which is simultaneously written into the text. But as
Sjöholm says, Norén’s text challenges the Freudian unconscious. It has very
little to do with the bourgeois individual of Freud’s analysis. This is because
the unconscious in his poetry is neither constituted as desire nor described
through the Oedipal situation. The unconscious is disclosed in the openness
of the text itself. His poems are not formed under the pressure of censorship,
because they have never confronted the norms of censorship.24 In Encyklopedi,
Norén writes: “I don’t give a shit about social resentment.”25
For Lacan, the unconscious is the discourse of the Other, which means
that our unconscious desires emerge in relation to the Other. One has always
to articulate one’s desire through the language and desires of others. Hence,
the unconscious is full of foreign desires.26 Here, the Other does not refer to

20 Cecilia Sjöholm, Föreställningar om det omedvetna. Stagnelius, Ekelöf och Norén (Stock-
holm/Stehag: Brutus Östling Bokförlag Symposium, 1996), 216–218. In her excellent work,
Sjöholm concentrates on analyzing Norén’s three collections of poems, which she regards as
schizopoetry: Inledning nr: 2 till SCHIZZ (SCHIZO, 1965), Encyklopedi. Mémoires sur la fermenta-
tion 1–3 (1966). Stupor. Nobody knows you when you’re down and out (Stockholm: Bonniers,
1968).
21 Anders Olsson, Mälden mellan stenarna (Stockholm: Bonniers, 1981), 38.
22 Van Reis, “Det slutna rummet. En essä,” 24.
23 See Sjöholm, Föreställningar om det omedvetna, 205–206.
24 Sjöholm, Föreställningar om det omedvetna, 207–208; see also 258–262.
25 Norén, Encyklopedi, 46.
26 See Bruce Fink, Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance (Princeton, NJ: Prince-
ton University Press, 1995), 9.

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 The Subject of the Law 125

other beings, but to the symbolic order. As noted previously, to be a subject is

to be subjected to the law. For Lacan, the Oedipus complex and the threat of
castration are symbolic processes, in which the father is a signifier. The infant
assumes its position in the symbolic order through the process in which the
intervention of the Name-of-the-Father, the paternal metaphor, replaces the
desire of the mother within the symbolic order. The intervention of the sym-
bolic father effects a conversion from the dual relationship with the mother,
and the imaginary identification of the phallus with the symbolic identification
with the paternal metaphor. The law means symbolic castration of the imagi-
nary phallus. The recognition of the paternal metaphor, the law that controls
desire, signification, and communication, is a precondition for entering the
symbolic order as a desiring subject. The subject reinscribes its narcissistic,
imaginary relationship into the laws and contracts of the symbolic order. The
symbolic order is the pact that links subjects together in a community. There-
fore, human interaction is founded on the existence of the world of the symbol,
namely, on laws and contracts.
But in the chaotic flood of images and words in Norén’s poetry, it seems
that this symbolic process has not taken place: The paternal metaphor and the
symbolic order are foreclosed (Verwerfung), and because of that, there is a hole
in the symbolic order. The Name-of-the-Father, the paternal function imposing
the law, has not come between the dual relationship between the infant and
the mother. The symbolic castration has not taken place. And, since the pater-
nal metaphor is the fundamental signifier that makes signification possible,
symbolic identification with the symbolic father, proper symbolization and
integration into the symbolic order and society cannot take place. As a result,
the subject is not named, and its identity is not properly formed. It is not
separated from the mother-child symbiosis, and it does not achieve a position
in the symbolic order. The subject is dominated by the mother as the Other, as
the primordial subject of the demand. Hence, the subject becomes completely
subjected to the excessive desire of the mother (not its desire for the mother
but mother’s desire). In this way, it loses the way of its desire.27 The failure of
the law is the precondition for psychosis, symptoms of which are attempts to
fill the hole with imaginary constructions. The flood of images of the writing
subject reflects precisely this kind of attempt.
However, there is another way to understand what is going on in his
poetry. Melanie Klein’s paranoid-schizoid position is extremely close to Norén’s

27 See Jacques Lacan, “Hamlet, par Lacan” (a session from an unpublished Seminar VI, “Le
désir et son interprétation,” 15.4.1959), Ornicar?, 26–27 (1983): 7–19.

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126 Ari Hirvonen

early poetry.28 The paranoid-schizoid position precedes the entrance of the

father and the paternal law, the Oedipal complex, the symbolic order, the mir-
ror stage, and also Klein’s depressive position. Klein accepted Freud’s contro-
versial death drive (Todestrieb), aimed at destruction, annihilation, and non-
existence, and from her perspective, the infant is subject to anxiety from birth,
because inherent to it is the conflict between the life and death drives. The
infant is also exposed to the external world, and has primitive object relations,
which are not relations to whole objects (that is, the whole of the other person)
but to part objects (that is, parts of the whole objects, for example the mother’s
breast). To deal with the death drive, the infant projects its destructive
impulses outwards. At the same time, the infant divides objects into “good”
objects and “bad” objects, so that the death drive may be projected onto, and
sadistic aggressions turned towards, bad objects. In the infant’s fantasies,
these objects turn into dissecting, tearing, drowning, penetrating, and burning
objects. As these bad objects are introjected, they become persecuting objects
in the infant’s interior world. Moreover, they become the root of the super-ego,
which thus has a sadistic kernel, and which emerges earlier than the Oedipus
complex. However, the most evil objects are not integrated, but pushed into
the deepest parts of the unconscious, where the death drive in its purest form
remains, and poses a constant threat for psychotics.29
Norén’s schizopoetry discloses the failure of the paternal law of the sym-
bolic order, and as such, it is witness to the effects of the foreclosure of the
law, as Lacan would say, or the domination of the pre-Oedipal position, as
Klein would say. This is not merely the subject of Norén’s writing, but the
writing subject also has to confront the failure of the symbolic order. Instead
of any kind of desiring-speaking subject, there is a violent word machine that
runs amok. “The word machine takes the place of the symbolic order and
the relationship with the other.”30 This word machine, which blends dreams,
fantasies, mass media images, childhood memories, and visual impressions,
has taken the place of the subject and its desire and poetic imagination. The
empty self has become “the place of through-passage for all collective trau-

28 Van Reis, “Det slutna rummet. En essä”; Sjöholm, Föreställningar om det omedvetna, 224–
228, 264–265; see also Nylander, Den långa vägen hem, 104.
29 See Melanie Klein, “Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanism” in Melanie Klein, Envy and Grati-
tude and Other works 1946–1963 (New York: The Free Press, 1975), 1–24 and Melanie Klein,
“On the Development of Mental Functioning” in Melanie Klein, Envy and Gratitude and Other
works 1946–1963 (New York: The Free Press, 1975), 236–246. See also an excellent reading of
Klein in Tomas Geyskens & Philippe van Haute, From Death Instinct to Attachment Theory. The
Primacy of the Child in Freud, Klein, and Hermann (New York: Other Press, 2007), 61–90.
30 Sjöholm, Föreställningar om det omedvetna, 261.

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 The Subject of the Law 127

mas.”31 The pre-Oedipal world wherein Norén’s writing moves is a world of

threatening, violent, and destructive images, the darker than dark world of
phantasms. The unconscious has become the pure death drive, which mani-
fests itself in his poetry.
The death drive operating in Noréns poetry is not merely personal, but
also collective, a singular-universal death drive that forces us to face the
repressed violent and destructive images of our historical being-in-the-world.
As van Reis says, the border between internal and external diminishes, and
the closed room of De verbala resterna becomes global, limitless, but still an
enclosed infinity, where the self is ultimately image, perception, text.32 Or, as
Sjöholm puts it, after Auschwitz, the source of the poetic imagination, that is,
the Freudian unconscious, is exhausted, and images of violence, sacrifice, cru-
elty, rape, and cannibalism have invaded it. An image that returns again and
again in Norén’s early poetry is the image of the extermination camp, which
“symbolizes everything from the hell of schizophrenia and mental hospitals,
to evil that is excluded from the ‘normal’ consciousness.”33
All in all, Norén’s poetry is stamped by traumas that haunt the contempo-
rary world, and are disclosed in a psychotic stream of words. And the one who
bears witness to our world, and the repressed violence and barbarity that are
at the heart of our civilization is the schizophrenic, through his suffering and
identification with the victims.34 Therefore, instead of considering schizopoetry
as a symptom of psychosis or as a psychotic rush, it should be seen in its
“double status”, as “it gives off images that are as much the world’s as the
subject’s.”35
One could draw the conclusion that the failure of the law frees the writing
subject from conventional legal, social, and moral norms, from the oppression
and channeling of the subject and its desire, by the Oedipal forces and the
juridico-political order. This also makes the writing subject a witness to the
truth that lies beyond the socio-cultural order, beyond the reality of our lives,
beyond the symbolic order. As such, Norén’s poetry is part of that new form
of political combat and anti-fascism that Foucault says was taking place in
Europe at the end of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s, which no longer
conformed to the model that the Marxist tradition had prescribed, and whose
experience and technology of desire were no longer Freudian.36 One could

31 Sjöholm, Föreställningar om det omedvetna, 274, see also 244–247.

32 Van Reis, “Det slutna rummet. En essä,” 29.
33 Sjöholm, Föreställningar om det omedvetna, 250.
34 Sjöholm, Föreställningar om det omedvetna, 256–257, 277.
35 Sjöholm, Föreställningar om det omedvetna, 240.
36 Michel Foucault, “Preface” in Gilles Deleuze & Feliz Guattari, Anti-Oedipus. Capitalism and
Schizophrenia (London: Athlone Press, 1984), xiv.

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128 Ari Hirvonen

even say that his poetry anticipates Gilles Deleuze and Feliz Guattari’s Anti-
Oedipus, even if we do not confront in it the primacy and positivity of the
desire which is so dear to Deleuze and Guattari. And even they dismiss the
more horrifying side of the pre-Oedipal.
Then again, Norén’s writing testifies to the destructive results of the failure
of the law. His writing is an attempt to pull the writing subject out of the
breakdown of the symbolic order by means of the writing, a struggle to save
the barrier that separates the real from reality, and to prevent the real from
overflowing the field of reality. If the writing fails, the barrier is torn down and
the result will be psychosis.37 Moreover, his writing is a constant battle against
this failure, and against the domination of the mother and the perverted mater-
nal power. Norén’s writing is not the same as psychosis, but it is already poetry,
that is, an intentional transgression of the maternal injunction: “For me writing
is always connected to anxiety and guilt”; it is “as if I would defy a ban.”38 “I
write despite the fact that my mother forbade me to write.”39 Thus, if we follow
Klein, we confront in Norén’s writing the dominating maternal body, the pre-
Oedipal super-ego, even some kind of pre-symbolic maternal “law”, which
could be understood as the mother’s “no” to the infant’s attempts to separate
itself from the body of the mother and enter the symbolic order as a social
being. The maternal prohibition functions against the symbolic order, which
demands separation and identity as a speaking being. The writing subject,
even if the borders between reality and fantasy have vanished in his poetry,
attempts to distance himself from the overpowering maternal Thing by means
of writing and being-in-language. Writing is what makes the subject possible,
a fact which is presented on the stage, in Tiden är vårt hem (“Time Is Our
Home”, 1991), where Jacob, Norén’s alter ego, receives the ability to write him-
self free.40 In his diary, he writes, “I have said that language is my only home,
my only world.”41
But at the same time, this transgression means alienation and homeless-
ness. In Order (“Words”, 1978) he writes: “Language is not a / home, I cannot /
let myself out.”42 Perhaps psychosis, or death, would promise a way out of
language, a return to the maternal home of non-being, where “the goddess of
justice / this woman in a double monarchy of imprisonment and release” waits

37 cf. Slavoj Žižek, Looking Awry. An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture
(Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991), 19–20.
38 Nylander, Den långa vägen hem, 356.
39 Cited in Nylander, Den långa vägen hem, 194.
40 Björn Sundberg, “I familjens rum,” Teatertidningen, 22.5 (1998): 21.
41 Lars Norén, En dramatikers dagbok, April 20, 2001.
42 Lars Norén, Order (Stockholm: Bonniers, 1978), 15.

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 The Subject of the Law 129

as “I yearn for the luxurious anxiety which is called justice.”43 In Dagliga och
nattliga dikter (“Daytime and Night-time Poems”, 1974) the subject of writing,
who transgresses the maternal “law”, promises the mother: “Once I will come /
home where nothing is.”44

The Paternal Law

This maternal “law”, which operates effectively in Norén’s schizopoetry, which
in turn is a constant and angst-ridden fight with that law and its effects, is
increasingly substituted by the symbolic order. In Revolver (1968) he writes
normatively: “speak calmly, write calmly”.45 And in Kung Mej (1973) he tells:
“Yesterday we were at the sea / to wash / my eyes of hospital visions.” Getting
rid of the overwhelming images and fantasies is now possible, because the
symbolic order stabilizes the speaking subject, and limits the domination of
the overwhelming Mother, although still “the sea stank of beasts / green and
unconscious.”46 Regardless, the schizoid subject of the text becomes a more
and more delimited “I”, who speaks with the generalized other. Sometimes, it
refers to the mother, sometimes to some concrete others with whom the self
speaks in definite situations, such as a hospital attendant named Marie.47 In
this way, the subject of Norén’s text appears more and more as a discursive
I.48 For Norén, this change was influenced by the fact that he had found Celan
and Hölderlin, in whose poetry there is “a special form of address, a You.”49
The more Norén turns from poetry to drama, the more the identification
of the writing subject with the mimetic room becomes a substitute for the
writing subject’s identification with the subject of the text, which took place
in the “authentic” poetical utterance. For Norén, to be a dramaturge is to be
in the present. What he writes is real, and in writing drama he says that he is
interested in getting “people to say these things [“beautiful, important, diffi-
cult, fascinating”, “innermost” things].”50 But to be able to concentrate, and

43 Lars Norén, De verbala resterna av en blodprakt som förgår (Stockholm: Bonniers, 1964),
60.
44 Lars Norén, Dagliga och nattliga dikter (Stockholm: Bonniers, 1974), 95.
45 Lars Norén, Revolver (Stockholm: Bonniers, 1969), 11.
46 Lars Norén, Kung Maj, 115.
47 Norén, Revolver, 79.
48 Nylander, Den långa vägen hem, 193.
49 Nylander, “Samtal med Lars Norén,” 350. Patrik Mehréns has analyzed Norén’s poetry from
the 1970s, concentrating on its metapoetical features in his Mellan ordet och döden. Rum, tid
och representation I Lars Noréns 70-talslyrik (Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis, 1999).
50 Nylander, Den långa vägen hem, 355.

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130 Ari Hirvonen

get people to say something, he has to be extremely careful to stay in the room,
his room.51
I will now turn to Norén’s drama, where the closed, imaginary room,
which, paradoxically, is infinite, is transferred to a more symbolic and social
space, where the self and the infant are no longer omnipotent, principal char-
acters.52 The main theme of his drama is the problem of the identity of a
desiring subject, the Hell of the family structure, the Oedipal conflict, the role
of the mother and the father, and the function of the law, which denies the
symbiotic relationship between mother and child. I will analyze the role of the
father and the law, which interrupts the symbiosis of the mother and the infant
of his poetry, in two of his earlier plays, Fursteslickaren and Modet att döda
(“Courage to Kill”, 1978), the first a lyrical-mythical play, the second, a psycho-
logical-realistic play taking place in a natural space, even though his family
dramas deconstruct the psychological-realistic code, and the aesthetic frame-
works of naturalist drama. First, let me remark that Norén does not dismiss
the Orestes complex, the relationship with the mother, the problematic process
of separation and emancipation, and the destructive aspects of the mother’s
domination and the perverted maternal power. However, the symbiotic rela-
tionship is now more clearly a conflict between the son and the mother, where
a dominating mother censures the infant’s speech and emotional expression.53
In Fursteslickaren, which is actually lyrical drama, the overpowering
mother is replaced by a father figure, who should represent the law.54 However,

51 Magnus Florin, “Det nattliga festen. En intervju med Lars Norén,” Ord & Bild, Nr. 1 (1983):
18–37.
52 Van Reis, “Det slutna rummet. En essä,” 30. Both Nylander and van Reis divide Norén’s
writing into different phases, and in their in-depth analysis, show how Norén’s drama emerges
from his lyrical work. See Nylander, Den långa vägen hem; van Reis, Det slutna rummet.
53 Björn Apelkvist, who has made an exhaustive analysis of the maternal conflict in Norén’s
drama of the 1980s, defends the realism and naturalism of those plays. Consequently, he is
critical of Nylander, who finds in Norén’s work a general tendency to denaturalize the tech-
niques of realism, and to show that reality is always an aesthetic, psychological, ideological
construction, and that it is always a disorganized conglomerate of images, experiences, and
fantasies that refuse to be structured into some illusory wholeness. (Apelkvist, Moderskonflik-
ten; Nylander, Den långa vägen hem, 231, 337.) I agree with Nylander, although otherwise, I
find Apelkvist’s book excellent.
54 The play has not been published. There are different versions of the manuscript at Dram-
aten’s library. Lars Norén, Fursteslickaren. Arkivexemplar 1 (Stockholm: Kungliga Dramatiska
teaterns bibliotek, 1973). Regarding the play, see van Reis, Det slutna rummet, 336–357; Nylan-
der, Den långa vägen hem, 283–295; Sven Hansell, “Spegeln sprack från kant till kant. Masku-
linitet och begär i Lars Noréns ‘Fursteslickaren’,” (a conference paper presented at “Den Gode,
den Onde, den Normale” – Nordisk mansforskningskonferens 2004, 2–3). Available at:
http://www.kvinfo.su.se/lankar/mansforskn%20konf%20-%20Hansell.pdf. Accessed March 23,
2011.

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 The Subject of the Law 131

at the beginning of the play, the father casts out his son, Andreas, following
the death of the mother, to finally reach some peace and calm. Andreas sneaks
away, afraid of being beaten by his father. He then meets master Gesualdo,
who takes him to the renaissance principality of Bohemiae Rosa, which is
definitely no rule-of-law state. The Prince is an absolute sovereign, who rules
with violence and fear, and who aims to reconstruct the world as he believes
God meant it to be. The Prince, who becomes a new father figure for Andreas,
gives Andreas the task of composing an opera that praises the victory of the
Principality over the Jews, and to inspire Andreas, he shows him the torture
of the Jews. Andreas, who desires love, approval, and progress, has no ethical
problem in agreeing to glorify this unjustifiable and horrendous violence in
his music. He becomes a court musician for the Prince, who needs art to create
his martial-masculine State, his Nazi Germany. However, Andreas falls in love
with Anna, whom he subjects to his total control, thus mirroring the Prince in
his own household. Andreas’s love upsets the Prince, who demands uncondi-
tional loyalty. The Prince imprisons Andreas in a pigsty and rapes Anna.
Andreas does not retaliate and hence betrays both himself and Anna, who
becomes ill, and dies. The Prince then dies in a war. At this point, Andreas
finally realizes his misdeeds, and blinds himself, as Oedipus did. The final
scene takes place in an asylum, where the new Prince goes to meet Andreas,
who, behind his insanity, finally clearly sees the truth of his conduct.
Fursteslickaren may be read as a confrontation between a feudalist and
patriarchal worldview, and new humanist and nationalist ideologies. It also
addresses the question of an artist’s ethics and art’s relationship with power.
At the same time, it is an Oedipal drama, which, although it is set at the end
of the sixteenth century, concentrates on the instability of the symbolic father
in modernity.55
Andreas’s factual father could have taken on the position of the symbolic
father, with whom Andreas might have identified. However, he seems to be a
violent, punishing, and tyrannical father, the primal father Freud introduced
in Totem and Taboo, whom we also confront in Lacan’s diagram of sexuation.
On the male side, that is, the phallic side of the diagram, there are two proposi-
tions. One says, “All subjects are submitted to the phallic signifier,” which is
the universal law of the symbolic existence. However, the other proposition
states: “There is one subject who is not submitted to the phallic function.”56

55 See Nylander, Den långa vägen hem, 177; van Reis, Det slutna rummet, 187.
56 Jacques Lacan, Encore. Le Séminaire, livre XX (Paris: Seuil, 1975), 73; Charles Shepherdson,
“Lacan and Philosophy” in The Cambridge Companion to Lacan, ed. Jean-Michel Rabaté (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 137–138.

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132 Ari Hirvonen

Thus there is an exception to the law. This exception is Freud’s cruel and all-
powerful primal father, whose power is unrestricted, since he is beyond and
above the law, beyond and above all limits. By casting Andreas out, his factual
father fails to function as the symbolic father, and functions merely as the
omnipotent primal father. Later, he becomes an imaginary father, that is, an
idealized, imaginary construct that Andreas builds around the figure of his
factual father. For a while, Gesualdo seems to assume the position of the repre-
sentative of the law, as he teaches Andreas the rules and principles of music,
but in the totalitarian order, Gesualdo is powerless. Andreas turns to the
Prince, who fully embodies the primal father beyond the law and castration.
He has all the enjoyment and power. He does not seem to be marked by a lack.
The Prince is not so much a feudal lord or a monarch of absolutism, as a
modern totalitarian leader, who embodies the Führer principle. Actually, his
rhetoric and anti-Semitism refer to National Socialism, and in the play there
are other references to Germany, which is “God’s anus” as Andreas says to
Ariel, who wonders whether “Germany is still strong?”57 Bohemiae Rosa is a
world from which all the gods have withdrawn. Instead of being their repre-
sentative on earth and the embodiment of divine or natural law, the modern
totalitarian father-leader represents nothing but pure and limitless power.
The modern state and the family come together with the failure, absence,
or withdrawal of the symbolic father, the representative of the law. This does
not lead to human freedom (which, in fact, needs the law and the possibility
of transgressing limits, something Ariel, “dressed in straitjacket or dress”, sees
in the asylum: “No prince will make me free – none”),58 but to an order of
pure power and the fantasy of full enjoyment, for which people reach by
destroying others who are regarded as hindrances to this enjoyment. In this
family-state, people such as Andreas, who desire acceptance, willingly submit
to the leader-fathers, and identify themselves with these figures to become like
them, even though they may have absolute power only in their limited spheres,
as Andreas has, in his relationship with Anna (and also in his music). As
Andreas begins to go mad, the Princess reminds him: “You who thought to be
a German” can now just “hum and hum and hum”.59 A German refers to the
obsessive-compulsive neurosis and to a personality obedient to authority. The
result is that Andreas fails both to internalize the law and to take up his posi-
tion in the symbolic order as a subject of law and desire, which the symbolic
father does not oppose, but unites. This makes it impossible for him to be a

57 Norén, Fursteslickaren, 74.

58 Norén, Fursteslickaren, 70, 83.
59 Norén, Fursteslickaren, 66.

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 The Subject of the Law 133

Kantian subject of moral law. For this reason, he is incapable of making ethical
judgments, and also unable to love, although he declares his need for love and
“a human being who does not hide her wonderful eyes, to again become that
which I can be!”60 But his love inevitably turns into tyranny. Finally, Andreas’s
only way out is blindness and psychosis, which is his way of being able to see.
The last act in the asylum is “a resting place, and if it is quiet and profound
it will be able to efface previous cruelties.”61
In Modet att dödä, the outcome of the father-son relationship is different:
a patricide (the following year, Norén dealt with matricide, in his Orestes).62
In the play, which may be seen as an analysis of a narcissistic wound,63 a
widowed and retired father is visiting his son Erik. The first lines reveal the
truth of the disastrous rivalry between father and son. When his father asks
Erik to close the window of the apartment, Erik refuses, replying: “It is I who
live here.”64 But even though Erik seems to have the upper hand, as he either
keeps a cold distance or attacks his father with accusations, his father puts
Erik down time after time, all the while complaining about his own age. He
even makes a pass at Erik’s girlfriend Radka, when Erik is not present. There
is no authentic conversation between them. Neither listens to the other. How-
ever, the truth emerges through gestures, tone, and unintentional remarks.
Moreover, not only do their gazes not meet, but they are blind to each
other. They “are not able to identify, that is, see each other as just son and
father.”65 The father does not see Erik, since his vision is filled by egocentric
enjoyment and power. If he had taken the position of the symbolic father, his
gaze would have functioned as the gaze of the law, which would have given
Erik his own space, and regarded him as another subject with his own life,
desires, and loves. This failure of the gaze of the law that colors the family
history is what takes place in the naturalist closed room. Erik is unable to see
his father, or himself and his desire, precisely because he is not seen as a
subject. “When he turns his gaze within, he meets only the gaze of the father,

60 Norén, Fursteslickaren, 30 (addition).

61 Norén, “Fursteslickaren, Ett urval,” 3.
62 Lars Norén, Orestes, in Tre skådespel (Stockholm: Bonniers, 1980). For Norén, Modet att
döda is an example of those of his plays that come about by themselves, and “where one does
not think so much what one wants or where one will end” (Zetterfalk, Inter esse, 247).
63 Van Reis, Det slutna rummet, 339.
64 Lars Norén, Modet att dödä, in Tre skådespel (Stockholm: Bonniers, 1980), 11.
65 Van Reis, “Felsteget – Lars Noréns urscener i Modet att döda” in Oidipus vid skiljevägen.
Åtta essäer om existens, psyke och kultur, eds. Mats Mogren & Ove Sernhede (Göteborg: Daida-
los, 1993), 97.

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134 Ari Hirvonen

who sees nothing.”66 Hence, what Erik sees is merely the haunting and threat-
ening imaginary bad father who is both outside and within himself.
The formation of Erik’s ego, and also his father’s, is based on imaginary
processes, and as long as Erik can sustain the illusion of being a coherent and
united ego, things somehow work.67 But since Erik does not really have a posi-
tion as a subject in the symbolic order, although he has started to establish
his own identity and social life (he has his own apartment, girlfriend, occa-
sional jobs as a waiter, then again, his employment is almost the same as his
father, who used to be a restaurant worker, and his background is grubby and
even criminal; the apartment does not look like a real home: “I do not want a
home”68), his identity as a subject is so unstable that the mere presence of the
father threatens his being: “Father, I beg you, let me be, do not stand inside
me.”69 This is because in their imaginary and rival mirroring and identifica-
tions, they are fighting over the same ego-position. This fight reveals to Erik
the real being of his ego; that is, discord, fragmentation, conflict, and struggle.
And it is Erik who will lose the fight, since his father, who does not see him,
or sees him as nothing, sees the truth of his being: nothing. And this gaze is
also Erik’s own gaze, the way he sees himself. When his father says, “Erik,
look at me, it is me, your father,” Erik answers “I have difficulties seeing you,
because I have your eyes.”70 As Nylander correctly remarks, Erik’s problem is
that the gaze of the father he has internalized does not constitute a symbolic
instance. There is no symbolic father who would function as the agent of the
law, culture, identity and symbolic function. It constitutes no position from
which Erik could see both his father and himself as subjects. He sees him only
as the imaginary father of enjoyment and power.71 Therefore, the presence of
the father threatens Erik’s entire being. The reason for this is that the father
never took the position of the symbolic father, which becomes clear when
the father desperately wonders what he has done and Erik laconically replies:
“Nothing.”72
Love might have offered Erik a way of being an autonomous and desiring
subject – “As an example, I could not have ever hoped to love someone as I

66 Nylander, Den långa vägen hem, 292.

67 Both van Reis and Nylander offer an interesting analysis of the imaginary processes and
ways of seeing in Modet att döda (van Reis, “Felsteget,” 100; Nylander, Den långa vägen hem,
291–295).
68 Norén, Modet att döda, 22.
69 Norén, Modet att döda, 18.
70 Norén, Modet att döda, 75–76.
71 Nylander, Den långa vägen hem, 294.
72 Norén, Modet att döda, 73.

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 The Subject of the Law 135

do…”73 – but with the presence of the father, everything has reached the point
where there is only one way out. Erik decides to free himself of the father, “In
the only possible way I can.”74
In this claustrophobic play, the murder of the factual father allows Erik to
“free myself from you,”75 “to break out”76 from the closed room, which is the
space of the imaginary father, but this self-creating act is at the same time his
destruction, “a catastrophic creation – a birth in destruction,”77 because once
the imaginary realm of identifications and mirror-reflections breaks down,
there is nothing for Erik but the lack of being, that is, no subject position.
Both Andreas and Erik, through whose figures Norén shows “an abused
child in an adult human being,”78 are in the Oedipal situation, which is dis-
torted because of the lack of “a clearly demarcated father figure” and because
of “an obviously unstable father function.”79 The father has not managed to
take the position of the symbolic father, and thus has been unable to function
as the representative of the law, which would be the precondition for there
being an “autonomous” desiring subject. The symbolic father with whom
Andreas or Erik could indentify is absent. The paternal-symbolic codification
does not really function. In these plays, there are only perverted father figures.
These father figures embody the “lawless” primal father. In their faltering and
unstable identities, they desperately identify imaginarily with those figures
that would guarantee their egos some kind of unity and coherence. In their
emptiness and insecurity, they attempt to mime the unrestricted enjoyment
and unlimited or lawless power of the father, which takes the place of the ego
ideal, but which, at the same time, threatens them as a punishing sovereign.
The father-son relationship is a closed room, as van Reis says, the absolute
limits of which are set by the father.80 There is no legitimacy in this space,
since that would demand the existence of the law, which the subject could
internalize, and thus accept as its own law. This produces fascist personalities,
who seek strong leaders who can guarantee them some kind of identity, and
for whom all others are a constant threat. For those sons lacking the symbolic
father, violence and domination are the only ways to confront others. Hence,
these plays are stories about “how violence in history, in culture, and in the

73 Norén, Modet att döda, 21.

74 Norén, Modet att döda, 73.
75 Norén, Modet att döda, 70.
76 Norén, Modet att döda, 76.
77 Van Reis, “Det slutna rummet. En essä,” 26.
78 Sven Hansell, “Bränt barn går igen,” Expressen (January 11,1992).
79 Nylander, Den långa vägen hem, 100, 30.
80 Van Reis, “Det slutna rummet. En essä,” 25.

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136 Ari Hirvonen

family spring from a distortion and hollowing-out of the function of the

father.”81
In these plays, which bring out the dissolution of the function of the father,
the failure of the law, and the Oedipal solution, there seems to be only one
way out of this closed room: psychosis, since even patricide, which made it
possible for the brothers of the primal horde to form a legal and political
community, seems to offer no possibility of taking the position of the subject
of the law and desire, and thus be able to love Annas or Ratkas.

Positive Law
When Norén became artistic director of the RiksDrama in 1999, he defined the
themes of his first year as crime and punishment, good and evil, health and
illness. According to him, “To tell about our society and concealed rooms, that
is the whole purpose of the RiksDrama. Theater should be at the service of
society, like social studies. The theater’s task is also to develop people’s ability
to put one’s soul into something, since without empathy the only thing that
remains is coldness, brutishness.”82
During the 1990s, Norén moved further and further from the closed room
of the family, to the closed rooms of social, legal, institutional, and urban
spaces, to a disintegrating society in crisis and to the tragedies of human
beings in this society, and thus, from the failures of the law in family history,
to the failure of the law in society. This is also a transition from naturalism to
more experimental theater, where the borders between reality and fiction dis-
solve. Norén calls this theater “sociological theater”, whose subject he defines
as “the vulnerable, the discriminated against, who are at the core of the
truth, … they are the ones who define the truth about us.”83
Of his sociological dramatic works, I will concentrate on the Morire di
classe trilogy, which ushers in his period of “a meager aesthetic,” “rigorous
reducing and nakedness”84 and the prison play, Sju tre. It consists of Personk-
rets 3:1 (“The Human Circle 3:1”, 1998), Skuggpojkarna (“Shadow Boys”, 1999),
and À la mémoire d’Anna Politkovskaïa (“In Memory of Anna Politkovskaïa”,
2007).

81 Van Reis, Det slutna rummet, 148.

82 Cited in Hansell, “Spegeln sprack från kant till kant,” 3–4.
83 Carl Otto Werkelid, “O’Neill-pjäsen är färdigt, efter åtta år. Lars Norén ser allt,” Svenska
Dagbladet (January 21, 1990).
84 Norén, En dramatikers dagbok, October 7, 2000, November 10, 2000.

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 The Subject of the Law 137

“A big bare space … Perhaps it is a car park, which will be pulled down to
build a residential building in the middle of the city.”85 As the stage direction
reveals, at the beginning of Personkrets 3:1 we are in one of those marginal
urban zones that has become non-functional. In this forlorn, semi-public
space, marginalized people meet. One could not say that their way of being-
in-the-world is being-together or being-with. They are people who merely hap-
pen to occupy the same space at the same time: “Some have gone, nobody
knows where, others have come, nobody knows where from.”86 They are drug
addicts and dealers, prostitutes, alcoholics, the unemployed, the mentally ill,
and the homeless; people with whom no ordinary person would care to share
a bench on the subway or the bus. In this closed world, a twenty-year-old girl
sells her body to get heroin, some make money by selling others’ bodies or
drugs, violence is present all the time, work is absent, and one can say to
another: “Hit me. I feel nothing, so it does nothing.”87
One could dismiss the play as social pornography, as some critics have
done, but in that case one sees nothing beyond the more or less disgusting
acts onstage. Instead of this kind of bourgeois blindness, a seeing being – who
sees “the heart of the theater – under text,” and “the movements of shad-
ows”88 – confronts at least two important issues. First, one sees family infer-
nos, traumas, depression, breakdowns, and failures of the law in the words,
gestures, and being of the figures on the stage. Secondly, the play shows the
dysfunctional state, or, more precisely, means and mechanisms used by the
law – here I mean positive law, the normative and institutional system of the
Nordic welfare state – to define these people as “marginal”. We exist in a
democratic welfare state, which operates under the rule of law wherein even
punishment is considered rehabilitation and treatment. Hence, the welfare
state should include the marginalized, by helping, supporting, and treating
them. At the same time, this same state excludes them, by labeling them,
criminalizing them, relegating them to the shadows of various legal, medical,
and urban closed rooms (prisons, mental hospitals, abandoned buildings,
streets, and sewers).
To “die of class” is not so much about the death of classes or death by
belonging to some class, but about belonging to a class that has no name, on
the one hand – it is neither the working class nor the precariate – and on the
other hand, the death of solidarity among and within classes, the death of the

85 Norén, Personkrets 3:1, 9.

86 Norén, Personkrets 3:1, 93.
87 Norén, Personkrets 3:1, 244.
88 Norén in an interview. Schwartz, “Jag var naiv”.

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138 Ari Hirvonen

social justice that perhaps once was the ideology behind the welfare state and
its legislation. The truth about welfare state law that the play reveals is thus
neither some kind of inclusive socio-legal order nor an inclusive-exclusive one,
but merely the exclusive function of the welfare state law and institutions. The
world to which these people are banished is a world that which lies in the
shadows of the social, moral and legal world of work and welfare. This shadow
world is the world of the living dead, the mythical Hades. Although these
people have a status as legal subjects – which is reduced to the status of being
objects of the social and medical services, social control, and criminal law –
in reality, they live between two deaths: social and physical. This is the time
frame of the play: an empty and senseless time that differs from ordinary time.
Time and death are interlinked, as in many of Norén’s plays: “I think very
much about time and it is the same thing as thinking about death.”89 Here, it
is not time that is linked to Heideggerian being-towards-death, but the time of
being-already-dead. At the same time, these people do somehow manage, if
not to really live, to survive and to live on. Perhaps self-destruction, apathy,
hopelessness, despair, and also hate, are paradoxical means of surviving, even
if there is no future.
In Skuggpojkarna, Norén moved from the closed room of forlorn urban
spaces to the closed room par excellence, the prison. He already analyzed
closed institutional spaces of control and discipline. En sorts Hades (“A Sort
of Hades”, 1994) and Kliniken (“The Clinic”, 1994) take place in mental hospi-
tals, in which the patients’ traumas and wounds are not treated, but merely
numbed drugs.
Before Skuggpojkarna was performed, he became involved in another
prison project, which caused a scandal in Sweden. In 1998, Norén received a
letter from a prisoner from the maximum security Tidaholm prison, in which
he was asked whether he had any play for them.90 He had written some scenes

89 Zetterfalk, Inter esse, 319.

90 In Sweden, there is a tradition of prison theater. In the 1960s and 1970s, the Pioneer
theater Company and several other independent groups toured hospitals and prisons. The
inmates themselves also formed a theater group at Långholm prison in the 1960s. In the mid
1980s, the actor-director Jan Jönsson toured Sweden with a monologue, and also presented it
in prisons. At Kumla prison he then staged Samuel Becket’s Waiting for Godot with five
inmates. The theater group also toured in Sweden until four of the five inmates absconded.
Because of Waiting for Godot and Sju tre there have been cuts in theater grants and a tighten-
ing-up of security measures. Elisabeth Åsbrink claims that Sju tre confirmed the image of
criminals as evil (Annika Persson, “Pjäsen som delade Sverige – Intervju,” Dagens Nyheter,
August 29, 2009). Anyway, in 2005 Riksteatern joined the EU “theater in Prisons” project,
which was initiated by the Italian Carte Blanche. (See Metta Flensburg, Prison theater in
Sweden. Report for the EU Project “Teatro e Carcere in Europa” (Stockholm: Riksteatern, 2005.))

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 The Subject of the Law 139

of Skuggpojkarana, and realized that he knew nothing about prisons, and had
never visited any.91 He agreed to meet them, and the result was Sju tre (“Seven
Three”), which refers to Section 7:3 of The Swedish Act on Correctional Treat-
ment in Institutions, which limits parole and temporary absences outside the
prison for anyone serving a prison sentence of four years or longer. In the play,
three long-term convicts played themselves alongside a professional actor, who
played the director, John (Norén’s alter ego). Norén recorded conversations in
the prison, which he then worked on. Only what was said in the prison was
included in the play. What had been done and said before was ignored. The
inmates had the final word. This blurred the difference between the fiction of
the stage and reality, since on the stage the inmates played themselves. The
problem was that two of the inmates turned out to be neo-Nazis and expressed
their views from the stage. This caused a raging debate about the limits of art
and the role of art institutions, which only got worse when the day after the
final one of the performers with two other persona were involved in a bank
robbery in which two police officers were killed.92
Some critics argued that the play violated the idea of the fiction of the
stage according to which the theater should provide distance from reality.93
But this kind of theater that the critics were defending is what Norén opposes:
“I strive for a non-theater … freed from ‘the terrible habit of theater’ [in Eng-
lish].”94 One cannot separate theater and life, fiction and reality, so that thea-
ter and art constitute an uncontaminated and privileged sphere, or so that the
public may keep a comfortable and comforting distance from the events that
take place on the stage.

91 Schwartz, “Jag var naiv”.

92 Norén addresses this event and its aftermath in his journal (Norén, En dramatikers dagbok).
In an interview in Svenska Dagbladet he said that he was planning to write about the killing
of John Hron by three young neo-Nazis: “We also have to show the other side, what Nazism
and the xenophobia may cause.” Kyla (2003) is loosely based on the case, and deals with the
inability to express oneself, youth violence, the group dynamic, and the National Socialist
ideology. The naturalist play brings out the spiral of violence with its terrible consequences.
“I wanted to portray a rash outburst of powerlessness and violence,” he says. (Zetterfalk, Inter
esse, 351; Jens Kärrman, “Det var som en ond dröm”, Aftonbladet, January 14, 2001). Also see
Elisabeth Åsbrink’s analysis of the case in her Smärtpunkten: pjäsen Sju tre och morden i
Malexander (Stockholm: Natur & Kultur, 2009). There is also a documentary film, Repetitioner,
about Sju tre and its aftermath, by Michal Leszczylowski and Gunnar Källström, and also a
very controversial movie, Vägen till Malexander by Folke Rydén.
93 Thus, Leif Zern and Tomas Forser argue in Dagens Nyheter (respectively, 8 May 1999 and
15 May 1999). See Ola Johansson, Janelle Reinelt & Willmar Sauter, “‘It’s the real thing’: Per-
formance and Murder in Sweden”, European Review, Vol. 9 (2001): 319–337, 331.
94 Norén, En dramatikers dagbok, October 7, 2000.

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140 Ari Hirvonen

There were also accusations that Norén did not sufficiently condemn the
Nazism expressed, that he caved in, or even assented, to National Socialist
ideology. There was a certain irony in this situation, as Ulf Olsson says.95
Throughout his career, Norén has challenged Nazism. As he himself says, he
has, written “so much of his hate of fascism.” “For me, it was a duty to come
back to this topic [“the suffering of Jews in Auschwitz”] again and again, since
there man transgressed a boundary that changed forever the moral history of
humankind. And because it happened, it can happen again. … It is the focus of
everything. Everything is stained by it. Auschwitz has displaced our focus.”96
One of the main problems arose in the second act, where John’s Christian
morality seems to be weak and ineffective against the strength of National
Socialist arguments. Then again, Anders Johansson claims that Sju tre drama-
tized the contemporary Swedish social and political dilemma in confronting
an upsurge of neo-Nazism, to which society had no immediate remedy. The
second act is the dramatization of the impotence of the Swedish welfare state
and its political, moral, and legal apparatuses and functions. For Johansson,
the presumption of moral clarity in art is problematic. One might ask whether
theater (and art in general) should be a space where good always wins out
over evil, even though in reality this does not happen, or is it, as Johansson
argues, ethically and politically appropriate to dramatize social impasses, as
Norén did, in Sju tre.97 Even though one might agree with the Lithuanian thea-
ter director Eimuntas Nekrošius, when he says that “art cannot give answers,
it can merely ask,”98 providing a space for National Socialist ideology is
extremely problematic. One must take seriously Theodor Adorno’s categorical
imperative: “arrange thoughts and actions so that Auschwitz will not repeat
itself, and that any other similar occurrence will not happen.”99 Even if Norén’s
intention was in accordance with this imperative, it is not enough, because
the play itself should follow the imperative. In this sense, Norén took an enor-
mous risk.100

95 Ulf Olsson, “Redigera sin existens. Till kritiken av bekännelse”. OEI, 42 (2009): 53–61, 53.
96 Schwartz, “Jag var naiv”.
97 Andreas Johansson, “Kritiken av en konst som inte vill vara god – Om Sju tre-debatten och
den svenska litteraturkritikens tillstånd,” Glänta, 3 (1999).
98 Kirsikka Moring, “Menestys kuluttaa ja on vaarallista,” Helsingin Sanomat, August 9, 2009.
99 Theodor Adorno, Gesammelte Schriften, 6 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986), 358.
100 Ola Johansson says that it was not an anti-democratic event, as some have said, but a
democratic one, since, given “the lack of a secure author of fiction, the audience had to take
interpretative action by embodying a virtual as well as a conceptual setting, and thus develop-
ing a democratic frame of resistance, right then and there” (Johansson, Reinelt & Sauter, “‘It’s
the real thing’,” 324–325).

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 The Subject of the Law 141

Norén himself admitted in an interview that there are limits to what one
can do in the theater, but “it is difficult to say what those are,” and, as he
himself asked, should he have immediately walked away, when it became clear
that two of the prisoners were neo-Nazis, which he admitted was “a bitter
shock”?101 For him, there was no choice. This was the only way to deal with
the material.102 When one of them said that he was in prison for ideological
reasons, as he was a neo-Nazi, Norén thought: “Here is a guy, twenty-three
years old, how he can be a Nazi? Where did he get that?”103 And he wondered,
“How can these young people avoid seeing this suffering, this moral destruc-
tion?”104 They were “living weapons. If everything is taken away from them,
they still had the weapon of their bodies left, oiled, cleaned, and loaded.”105
He wanted to get them to speak, “to say something more.” and “one does not
start with telling them that they are wrong. Even though that was indeed what
I did.”106
He sought to open a dialogue with the most shunned people, who are
rejected by the law and conventional morality. He had hoped that the play
would be met with an understanding and affection, but it had the opposite
effect. It did “not receive any understanding that one wanted to elicit.”107 Even
though many of the main issues of the play – critical questions concerning the
function of prisons and their negative effects on convicts, and issues related
to the mechanisms that make young people turn to violent action and ideol-
ogies, or how convicts see their own deeds – were ignored. In 2003, Norén
said that Sju tre succeeded in generating considerable debate on prisons, neo-
Nazism, and theater, precisely because it was theater. However, if he were to
repeat it now, which he would do, he would stage it inside a prison, and not
present it to the public.108
At the beginning of Skuggpojkarna, the bureaucracy and control mecha-
nisms of the prison (which represent the Nordic welfare state) are highlighted
in an absurd scene in which a guard, Stefan, cannot get into the prison,

101 Norén, En dramatikers dagbok, 2 October 2000.

102 Magnus Londen, “En röst från mörkret,” Hufvudstadsbladet (January 15, 2000). Available
at:
http://www.magnuslonden.net/sve/artiklar/intervjuer/artikel-3826-1416.html. Accessed March
23, 2011.
103 Schwartz, “Jag var naiv”.
104 Schwartz, “Jag var naiv”.
105 Norén, En dramtikers dagbok, May 10, 2001.
106 Schwartz, “Jag var naiv”.
107 Johansson, Reinelt & Sauter, “‘It’s the real thing’,” 333.
108 Schwartz, “Jag var naiv”.

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142 Ari Hirvonen

because the security guard, who can see and hear Stefan through the CCTV
demands more and more information from him: “Could you be a bit more
precise, possibly?”109 However, even this closed prison has loopholes: Arne,
one of the prisoners, sees a roe deer, and wonders how it got inside to this
“hermetical hole.”110
The play takes place in a special section for sexual offenders, who are, as
Arne says, “the lowest of all … We have no value at all in the eyes of society
and people generally. We are worse than animals. … I thought from the begin-
ning that I am nothing.”111 These people have raped, beaten, and killed girls,
boys, men, and women. The play neither presents prison as an extremely vio-
lent place, nor as a Genetian, romanticized den of thieves and forbidden love.
There are seven prisoners, who are doing nothing more than killing time. One
of them, Christoffer, who murdered his mother and set her on fire, says, “One
does not do very much.”112 They speak with each other about everyday things:
TV programs, football, politicians, celebrities, but also sometimes about their
hopes, prisons, and the criminal justice system (Per, a neo-Nazi, who has killed
a man and claims that he is in the wrong prison since he is not a sex offender,
speaks repeatedly in favor of the death-penalty).
In prison, Anders, one of the prisoners, says to Stefan, “It is just the same
things, same… same people all the time.”113 However, they will come forward,
sit on a chair and give a monologue, where they speak about their back-
grounds, families, and anxieties – and about their crimes. But they usually
speak of their crimes as if they are outsiders, as if someone else had committed
these crimes. Anders, who has killed a woman and gouged out her eyes so
that they would not reveal the murderer says, “it was not intended that any-
thing would happen, … I don’t know how it came about; that I cannot explain….
I didn’t want to do them evil. Forgive me. … I am kind. I am kind now.”114
The final part of the trilogy, À la mémoire d’Anna Politkovskaïa, is, accord-
ing to Norén, his darkest play, “a short and terrible play, and the most vicious
I have written.”115 Although the play, written shortly after Politkovskaïa’s mur-
der, does not deal explicitly with her, Norén wanted to pay tribute to her with

109 Lars Norén, Skuggpojkarna (Stockholm: Bonniers, 1999), 13.

110 Norén, Skuggpojkarna, 107.
111 Norén, Skuggpojkarna, 92.
112 Norén, Skuggpojkarna, 18.
113 Norén, Skuggpojkarna, 26.
114 Norén, Skuggpojkarna, 120.
115 Lars Norén, A la mémoire d’Anna Politkovskaïa. Dossier de presse (Nanterre: Théâtre Nant-
erre-Amandiers, 2008), 4.

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 The Subject of the Law 143

the title: “Thus, I gave this title to the play, so that we will remember her
courage and strength.”116
The play takes us back to the streets, where there is no hope, love, free-
dom, fun; but we are no longer on the streets of a Swedish city. This is a state
after a war in which people no longer have any human dignity or value. They
have nothing to sell other than their bodies. There is no effective positive law,
no legal institution to provide justice, and no police that would respect and
maintain the law. Neither is there any moral law left. In this absolute zero-
point of the law, violence and abuse are the only principles. It seems that the
only one who cares is a man who carries the head of his son in a bag to give
a proper funeral for the whole body in their hometown, but who loses his bag
when he visits a prostitute.
This living hell, the Hobbesian state of nature, could be a post-Soviet state,
some collapsed state in Asia, Africa, Europe, but “it can be whatever state,
whatever war” and “it also deals with those people who come to Sweden since
they cannot stay in their native countries. I want people to see what histories
they have, and why they are forced to emigrate.”117
In the midst of this lawlessness there is no hope. Dunja, a prostitute, drug
addict, and mother, says, “It will become better when one’s dead. / A short
break / It cannot be worse.”118 She lives with Zarko, her pimp and lover, who
both beats her and provides her with drugs. Her ten-year-old boy, Stoijko, is
“[n]ot sure if he will grow up.”119 His biological father, Mihai, sells him to an
Englishman, who is a relief worker in a human rights organization, which
“helps children, only children,” as he says to a Russian, who has come to ask
for money, and who had eaten a cat, the last cat in the country, three days
ago.120 To get money for Dunja’s course of methadone, Stoijko agrees to Misha’s
proposal that he spend some nights with a man who is “a politician and rich
as hell.” Misha tells Stoijko to tell the man that “you are eight years old.”121
Stoijko’s friend, Elma, a twelve-year-old girl, is blind because her alcoholic
father beat her, and she also has AIDS. Andrej beats her to death for no reason

116 Elsa Westerstad, “Lars Norén letar efter ljuset,” Fokus (October 31, 2008). Available at:
www.fokus.se. Accessed March 23, 2011.
117 Westerstad, “Lars Norén letar efter ljuset”.
118 Lars Norén, À la mémoire d’Anna Politkovskaïa. Unpublished. (Norsborg: Riksteatern,
2007), 5. I would like to thank Cecilia Nilsson and Maud Forsman from Riksteatern for their
help in providing the text of the play. The play is both in Swedish and in French (translated
by Katrin Ahlgren).
119 Norén, À la mémoire d’Anna Politkovskaïa, 19.
120 Norén, À la mémoire d’Anna Politkovskaïa, 123.
121 Norén, À la mémoire d’Anna Politkovskaïa, 166.

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144 Ari Hirvonen

in front of a church, after which: “Some men come out of the church, they make
the sign of the cross before Girl’s body, then they go on. Boy [Stoijko] comes in,
makes the sign of the cross, takes Girl’s shoes and runs away.”122 There is as
little light as there is law in this state. Norén says, “if there is some light, it is
among the audience.”123
Morire di classe shows how Norén, at the end of the 1990s, turned from
the tragedies of the modern family to those of contemporary society. This also
means that positive and moral laws become the points of reference. The fail-
ures of the law, the law of the speaking and desiring subject, remain. The
effects of its dysfunction are seen in the tragedies of the characters in these
plays. At the same time, the question of how positive and moral laws function
in contemporary societies becomes increasingly important.
On the one hand, statutory laws criminalize, label, punish and exclude
people. The prison lays bare the violent core of the law. Behind the welfare
state and its social control mechanisms, there is always this legitimized and
institutionalized violence of the law. On the other hand, the failure of positive
law means the lawless world of À la mémoire d’Anna Politkovskaïa, where
everything is allowed for those who have means to do it. In this world, positive
and moral laws are absent, but the symbolic order does not function, either.
If the initial normativity of the symbolic order and the initial processes of
codification do fail, legal and moral normativity are also doomed to fail. In
this total anomie, there are no effective legal and moral norms. Personkrets 3:1
shows that this world of anomie is not just out there: it is, in perhaps not so
complete a form, in the midst of Nordic welfare states.
Norén’s Morire di classe trilogy, which presents the tragedies, traumas and
destruction of the welfare state, modern society, family, and the subject, who
attempts to survive anomie, brings together various forms of law. How people
survive in a situation where positive law is not efficient, has no legitimacy, or
is merely violence and repression, where moral law has no significance and
where the symbolic order in general fails, is one of the main questions of the
trilogy. Moreover, the trilogy reveals that legal and moral norms, which make
up part of the symbolic order, are also indispensably connected to this order
that institutes the subject of the law. The symbolic order is an entity in which
the failure of one part affects the other parts.
For example, an absolutely unjust state that blatantly violates the idea of
justice lacks an ability to command fidelity to the law.124 This can be compared

122 Norén, À la mémoire d’Anna Politkovskaïa, 125.

123 Westerstad, “Lars Norén letar efter ljuset”.
124 Lon L. Fuller, “Positivism and Fidelity to Law – A Reply to Professor Hart,” Harvard Law
Review, 71 (1958): 630–672.

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 The Subject of the Law 145

to a situation where the infant confronts, not the paternal law that would
institute her/his subjectivity, but merely unlimited domination, pure violence,
and arbitrary commands. As a result, she/he may later consider all social,
legal, and moral norms merely as menacing and persecuting commands that
threaten her/his existence. The initial failures of the law have a strong impact
on the capability of subjects to weigh legal and ethical considerations, as dem-
onstrated by the characters in Norén’s trilogy. To become a legal subject with
legal capacity and an autonomous moral subject, one has to stand in the posi-
tion of the subject. Legal and moral norms do not function properly if the
symbolic order in general is not efficient enough.
The symbolic order is the ultimate source of signification and the forma-
tion of the subject that credits a particular social, economic, political, cultural
and legal institutional system with its coherence.125 Legal science, which
focuses solely on legal norms and practices, does not see this truth of the law:
Without structures of normative limits and boundaries, both the subject and
society disintegrate. The failure of the law may end in the disintegration or
destruction of the subjectivity made possible and instituted by the symbolic
order.126

Conclusion: The Subject and the Law

Here is one of the cornerstones of Norén’s writing: the ineffectiveness of the
paternal function and the failure of the symbolic order in modern society,
which is “without a stable, symbolic code, which regulates individuals’ roles,
identity positions and mutual relations.”127 The result of fragile paternal meta-
phors and the precarious and tenuous position of the Name-of-the-Father is
that the paternal codification that the subject might internalize and assimilate
is in danger of collapsing, that the transition from the imaginary identification
with the phallus and the dual relationship with the mother, to symbolic identi-
fication with the paternal metaphor does not truly take place, that the symbolic
order does not replace the original signifier of the desire of the mother, which

125 See Anton Schütz, “Sons of Writ, Sons of Wrath: Pierre Legendre’s Critique of Rational
Law-Giving,” Cardozo Law Review, Vol. 16 (1995): 979–1022, 990; see also Pierre Legendre, Le
Dossier occidental de la parenté. Textes juridiques indésirables sur la généalogie. Leçons IV
(Paris: Fayard, 1988).
126 See Anton Schütz, “Sons of Writ,” 986; see also Pierre Legendre, Le crime du caporal
Lortie: Traité sur le père. Leçons VIII (Paris: Fayard, 1989).
127 Nylander, Den långa vägen hem, 29.

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146 Ari Hirvonen

leads to the heterogeneous and fragmented realm of the mother, to the pre-
symbolic space.128
Norén presents the results of the withdrawal of the law, the absence of
authoritative norms and limits. In his poetry, there is a constant struggle
against the symbiotic relationship with the (m)other’s body, psychosis, or the
overwhelming real. In his plays, one sees how the symbolic order is corrupted,
how it has become merely the repressive family or socio-economic-political
system of pure power, domination, and subjugation. If instead of the symbolic
father and his reign as the symbolic agency of the law, the obscene figure of
the sadistic father beyond all limits and laws reigns, the process of becoming
a subject is prevented. The failure of the law may also create the experience
of the dissolution of oneself, and the nothingness of one’s being, which the
subject attempts to avoid by indulging in various addictions, instant enjoy-
ments, paranoid constructions, experiences of limitless power and violence,
totalitarian ideologies and leader figures, symbiosis with maternal bodies, or
submission to primal fathers.
By this, I do not mean that Norén’s writing entails praise of the order of
things, or the normative content of the existing symbolic order. It would be a
grave error to consider his poetry and drama as some kind of apologia for
conformity. He is far from being an ego-psychologist who expects an individual
to adapt him or herself to the external world, that is, reality as the existing
order of things, or the set of common normative standards, attitudes, beliefs,
and morals. Images and characters in Norén’s writing constantly rebel against
the conventional models, roles, positions, morals and ways of being that are
forced upon them by parents, institutions, and normative systems. His writing
is critical of the criteria and ideals of normality. He both questions the prede-
termined and fixed positions of the subject, and deconstructs the ego’s mastery
and authority by demonstrating how the unconscious subverts the coherence
and consistency of the ego. Since the determining order of the subject, that is,
the symbolic order, has always already de-naturalized the subject, who is the
effect of the symbolic order, there is no natural and self-evident reality to
which the subject might adapt. Thus, in Norén’s texts we see that the precari-
ous function of the historical patriarchal order and its paternal norms may
create radical possibilities for the subject, whose process of constitution is not
predetermined by the hard and fast norms and models of the authoritative
father-figure, family, church, and society. The subject may also escape the fail-
ures of the law by retreating into a paranoid construction or a fantasy, where

128 See Stefan Polatinsky & Derek Hook, “On Ghostly Father: Lacan on Hamlet,” Psychoana-
lytic Review, 95 (2008): 359–385, 368, 372, 374, 383.

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 The Subject of the Law 147

an imaginary scenario masks or conceals the flaws of the symbolic order. More-
over, the maternal sphere may manifest as a horrible space of annihilation of
self, separation and individuation, as the loss of subjectivity. It may also create
new ways of being for the subject, as the paternal codification withdraws.
Or, to use Althusserian terms, the law interpellates the speaking being into
subjecthood in the existing symbolic order, but this normative interpellation
fails to give the subject a ready-made, consistent identity, which may have
both destructive and emancipatory consequences. Actually, not only does tem-
poral law fail, but the symbolic order itself is never a coherent and consistent
system that might fatalistically determine the essence of the subject. It is
always an inconsistent order, consisting of gaps, and marked by lack. The law
is grounded in the being of lack (the ontology of the law) and because of this,
the truth of the subject is the lack of being (the ontology of the subject). There-
fore, the ruptures and breaks in the law, the symbolic community, and the
symbolic identification may disclose something absolutely particular about a
singular being.
Norén’s writing diagnoses the failures of the law and the symbolic order,
which have not only disastrous, but also emancipating effects. There are
always already alternative ways to become the subject, alternative symbolic
processes, and alternative master-signifiers with which the subject can identify.
Therefore, there is always a light in the darkest shadows of Norénian closed
rooms, which are stages of tragedies of subjects who must survive the crisis of
normative systems of families, societies, and states. In Orestes, Orestes seeks
an answer from within himself, and attempts to become a reasonable, sound
human being who can share the world with others.129 Or, the way forward goes
towards the primal scenes and traumas, and only from there one can start
once again. It is through this process that the self becomes a subject.130 As
Norén says, “There is always a place in plays, where there is the possibility of
a meeting, love, and tenderness.”131 Then again, for him, theater cannot be a
reserve that always gives hope, and in which a human being is always rational.
“On the contrary,” he says, “I think that looking into darkness gives some kind
of hope. A play like Skuggpojkarna is a positive act against darkness. Whereas
to deny, to repress is most dangerous.”132 In another interview, Norén reveals
the truth of his plays: “The reality of a scene can be as concentrated as reality

129 See Apelkvist, Moderskonflikten, 61; Magnus Florin, “Att komma hem i utplåningen,” Entré
1 (1982): 31–39, 38.
130 Mikael van Reis, “Den omänskliga komedin. Efterskrift” in Lars Norén, Döda pjäserna IV
(Stockholm: Bonniers, 1995), 260.
131 Florin, “Den nattliga festen,” 30.
132 Londen, “En röst från mörkret”.

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148 Ari Hirvonen

is in psychoanalysis. But it does not mean anything, if you don’t give the public
a feeling that it is possible to change the life one lives.”133

133 Schwartz, “Jag var naiv”.

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