Coda / Cauda / Cado

Appearing at the tail end of this volume, I begin with a brief meditation on the coda. A (musical) ending, the vulgar form of cauda (tail or privy member), figure of our fallen state, the coda may also be a whip or goad to inspiration or even exaltation. Attempting to turn my posterior position to good ends, I have, in the place of an ending, used the chapters here as provocations and inspirations. Recognizing in them a more expansive account of legal performance than my own, I point to how they unbind law and performance from the rigid definitional strictures on which I have relied, how they challenge the boundaries between text and performance, performance and law, law and world, world and fiction (the veritas falsa of theatre and the falsitas verus of law), how they show the methodological Über-Ich (with its rules and dogmas) to be unseated by an ontological Id that scoffs at its laws. That force – like the comedic cauda in the courtroom – answers legal solemnities with impudent laughter and other “minor jurisprudences of refusal,” creating heterotopias, wild zones, rehearsals for alternative futures.