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Abstract
This article reads Peter Greenaway's 1989 film The Cook, the Thief, his Wife and her Lover for the way it deals with the relation between justice and desire. The authors discuss how the film portrays, on the one hand, a desire for justice that seeks a theatrical mode of legal procedure in the form of a rule of law that is systematically ethical; and on the other hand, desire as justice as the expression of what Gilles Deleuze called the "ethics of becoming." The two forms are brought in tension in the film's final scene, which can be read either as a case presented to the viewer as audience in the judicial theatre, or as a feud that plays out on what the authors read as a Brechtian podium, a space characterized by its radical openness and accessibility. On the podium the procedure is not structured by an audience that needs to watch the proceedings as a check on its fairness, but in which the audience actively participates in determining the situation. Through formal, cinematographic elements, The Cook, the Thief, his Wife and her Lover brings these two modes of desire and justice, and the ethical, theatrical and procedural forms they imply, in tension with one another. It makes the film a crucial jurisprudential text.