Abstract
This chapter sets out an argument for the significance of the superhero genre for the field of cultural legal studies. In contrast to the dominant reading of the superhero as an exceptional figure beyond the law and operating in a ‘state of exception’, the chapter reads the superhero as encompassing a certain ‘office’ represented by the ‘superhero image’ or persona. Taking as its site of analysis Grant Morrison’s run on Batman, it contrasts the personalist political theology of Carl Schmitt focused on the decision on the exception with that of Ernst Kantorowicz, which emphasises the importance of literary and legal fictions in conceiving the continuity of the sovereign over time. Such encompasses a contrast between a personalist decisionism that can only be borne by ‘real’ persons with the productiveness of the fiction of juristic personality and the concept of the corporation. The chapter takes up these readings in relation to Morrison’s run on Batman, which reflects the continuity of the ‘office’ of Batman despite the death of Bruce Wayne, as well as the deployment of a corporational body in the ‘Batman, Incorporated’ initiative. The chapter argues that the use of the superhero genre—and superhero comics in particular—for cultural legal studies is its ability to render visible the use and abuse of fictions, whilst emphasising the image as a site of social and legal relations. That is, the superhero image reveals the aesthetic constitution of sovereignty and authority, whilst forming part of a communal imagining of the world.