Moreover, Arkham Asylum configures the threat of law's unconscious as the lawyer's severed head inside the house of law. A threat to this dominant knowledge can be seen in Two-Face's reliance on his coin to ‘judge’ his victims. Batman's exploration of the Asylum is symbolic of the legal unconscious, and reflects the processes of repression that can be seen in dominant legal knowledge. Reading Arkham Asylum jurisprudentially, we encounter a story of the meeting of reason and unreason in the context of justice – of conscious law and its unconscious threat. In navigating Batman’s jurisprudential dimensions, we are ultimately reminded that private desires and motivations are enfolded within the public structures of justice. This fight for justice is fuelled by a deeply private trauma: the murder of Bruce Wayne’s parents: a private desire for vengeance that Batman transcends. He thus sacrifices his own safety to ensure the safety of others-he is a Dark Knight, a sentinel, fighting the nasty and brutish underworld of criminality in his effort to bring rational order to the world and protect the people of Gotham from criminal harm. But alongside his rational means, Batman also employs violence as he moves beyond the boundaries of the civilised state into the dark and violent world outside law’s protection. This vision of justice is a protective one, with Batman existing as a guardian-a force for resistance against the corruption of the state and the failures of the legal system. Batman is allied with modern natural law in the way he relies upon reason to bring about his vision of ‘true justice’, operating as a force external to law.
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