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Beyond the Frame of Practical Reason: The Indian Evidence Act and Its Performative Life
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2024
Abstract
This article is about the Indian Evidence Act. It explains how evidence is the script that carries law's unconscious. One one hand, evidence is the site of reason, and on the other hand it is the performative site of the unconscious. The operation of the Evidence Act requires a court, arguments, ways of producing evidence, counter-arguments, scrutiny of the nature of the evidence submitted, and finally the disputation around what constitutes an evidence – and then the judgement. This article argues, through a brief presentation of the history of the Act, how law in this way combines the normative and the performative – science of inquiry and the unpredictable script of the outcome, procedure and the spectacle built around elements such as live deposition and the hermeneutic power of the image, rational considerations and emotion, virtuality and the event, serious business in the court and the element of drama. The article suggests (with a bit of irony) the injunction that to see what law is and how it functions we can go to the cinema, and to see what cinema is we can go to the court.
- Type
- Articles
- Information
- Diogenes , Volume 60 , Issue 3-4: The Boundaries of Law. Justice, Powers, and Politics , November 2013 , pp. 58 - 73
- Copyright
- Copyright © ICPHS 2015
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