Book of panels and abstracts
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- Panel 2
- Inquiring the truth, misstating facts: Law, history and the holocaust denial prohibition
- The Taboo in Law the Law as a Taboo
- Panel 3
- Parrhesia and history
- Parrhesia as Challenge to the Symbolic Order in Political Trials
- 14. RESPONSES TO THE LOSS OF THE POLITICAL: INTELLECTUALS, HUMANITARIANS AND THE REVOLUTIONARIES
- Panel 1
- From anti-capitalist struggles to poverty alleviation policies: situating post-Marxist theories
- How to picture sovereignty: from image theory to image-nation
- Panel 2
Ethopoiesis and the law Samuli Hurri, University of Helsinki - samuli.hurri@helsinki.fi My topic is ethopoiesis, which is a Greek notion that broadly refers to the activity of self-making, especially through speech. So I will be moving in the field of ancient rhetoric. However, in the background of my paper stands a larger research project as well. This is about the effects of legal language on the moral constitution of individuals: What will happen, or will have happened, in the speaker’s self, at the moment when he or she starts to argue about rights and wrongs, duties and powers, and other such juridical matters? This problem of self-making through law may be related to Foucault’s discussion of judicial parrhêsia: the moral spectacle of someone weak standing up to the strong, and speaking about the wrongs they have have committed. I will focus on a certain historical text that to my mind resonates with the above problem of self-making. In his treatise on The Ancient Orators, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, who lived in Rome at the time of Augustus, wrote a sort of literary critique about Lysias. Lysias, in turn, was one of the most famous forensic logographers – lawyers, as we would say – in classical Athens. At certain point of his discourse, Dionysius made the remark that Lysias’s ingenuity lay in his mastery of ethopoiesis. What is ethopoiesis? And how does it appear in the ancient practice of lawyering? In English translations, ethopoiesis is rendered as ‘moral tone’, but the literary meaning of it is ‘production of ethos’. Dionysius himself explains that ethopoiesis is the way in which a composer of speeches makes ‘his characters seem by their speech to be trustworthy and honest’. In my paper, I will first consider the way in which, according to Dionysius, a legal speech may produce the speaker’s ethos. Then I will consider whether this may help, in one way or another, in understanding the broader problem of the effects of legal language on the moral constitution of individuals. Panel 2 Chair: Samuli Hurri Hate speech Eliska Pirkova, University of Helsinki - eliska.pirkova@helsinki.fi Hate speech is an irreducibly complex and contested idea, requiring weighing of competing rights in different ways in different legal traditions and jurisdictions. It is dependent on different legal understandings of speech and its potential consequences, framed by varying and conflicting assessments as to what constitutes ‘hate’; linked to particular identities that are the subjects of speech, as well as to particular speakers and ‘viewpoints’; and politically deployed as a strategy in a variety of ways, many of them deeply contradictory.[1] Thus, one can naturally assume that there is no accepted definition of the term “Hate Speech” in international law or indeed under European law, despite its most frequent use. Different definitions of hate speech are shaped by different historical, socio-political and disciplinary context and thus, provide for so-called anatomy of hate speech. By the words of Gavan Titley, such an anatomy includes various types of speech, potential consequences and targeted subjects. However and as Kenan Malik argues, hate speech is not a particularly useful concept. According to him hate speech restriction has become a means not only of addressing specific issues about intimidation and incitements but of enforcing general social regulation. This article will critically analyse how the classification of tolerable and punishable speech happens. [1] Gavan Titley, Starting Points for Combating Hate Speech Online, p. 9. Inquiring the truth, misstating facts: Law, history and the holocaust denial prohibition Daniela Bifulco, Seconda Università degli Studi di Napoli - daniela.bifulco@tin.it Traditionally, legal and historical methodology to inquire the truth are divergent. The former is inclusive, whereas the latter is exclusionary: if historians are supposed to be exhaustive in their search for truth and facts before deciding what’s trustworthy, judges, by contrast, select viewpoints. Historians often refer to this peculiarity saying that law ‘hides’ facts, meaning that during a trial, timely, certain resolution is achieved by restricting the flow of facts. From this standpoint, lawyers seem more concerned with resolution than with the truth (J. Lepore, YLJ, 2015). Hence, the assumption that law and history are incommensurable discursive practices, which can never be reconciled. Still, exceptions to the aforementioned divergences between history and law are possible. After the World War 2 (Nűrnberg trials), and then in the 80s and 90s (see statutes on Holocaust denial prohibition, historical Memory laws, judicial cases such as Garaudy v. France before the Strasbourg Court, the ‘Auschwitzlűge’ before the German Constitutional Tribunal, etc.), historical truth and judicial truth seem to converge, inclining toward each other, on issues related to the Holocaust. From Nűrnberg onward, historical truth has become a matter for legislators and courts. Since then, a proper ‘turning point’ occurred, which brought the historical truth closer to the judicial truth. Increasingly, legal regulations seem to frame our view of history and historical truth. In the light of this evolution, it is worth reconsidering the idea (not uncommon among legal scholars) that ‘truth is the basic purpose of all adjudication’ (M. Damaška, YLJ, 1997). Despite the influence of many currents of contemporary thought, which are skeptical of truth as a philosophical principle and doubt that any acquisition of objective knowledge is ever possible, law seems to defend the idea that the search for truth represents a crucial objective for the judicial proceeding (M. Damaška). The legitimacy of denial prohibition (currently, one of the most controversial issue related to the freedom of expression in Europe, especially since the 2008 adoption of the European Union Framework Decision on combating racism and xenophobia) can be framed in the light of parrhesia as to a conceptual basis, which can work both for those supporting the militant anti-racism of punishing denial and those supporting the libertarianism that fights any attempt to muzzle expression. In my paper, I will try to highlight the theoretical feasibility (or the weakness ?) of this hypothesis. The Taboo in Law & the Law as a Taboo Kati Nieminen, University of Helsinki - kati.nieminen@helsinki.fi In this paper I explore the possibility of detecting the taboo in law. Taboo is here understood as something profound, even something constitutive, to law / society, but simultaneously something that cannot be discussed or questioned. I approach the taboo in law mundanely through the case law of the European Court of Human Rights. Tentatively I suggest that the modern taboo that can be found in law relate to opposing the past and the present; and the human and the animal. The underlying taboo of the law, however, is the foundation on which the law is said to be built upon. In this context, the parrhesiastes, the truth-teller, is discussed as someone whose claim of justice exposes the taboo, and therefore threatens to challenge the fundamental presumptions on which our society rests upon. Panel 3 Chair: Samuli Hurri Counter-community and rights as friendship Bal Sokhi-Bulley, Queen's University Belfast - b.sokhibulley@qub.ac.uk In this paper, I want to explore the idea of rights as friendship – and the possibilities of how such a relation might allow the (irr)responsible (non)volunteer to act in struggle against an ethics of responsibility. Modern Britain has adopted an ethic of responsibility which is a reaction against rights discourse, emphasising community and opportunity over individualism and right. A kind of governing (through) community. It is the first of two objectives of this paper to unpack the rhetoric of community and its association with volunteerism as a technology of governmentality. The second objective, in the context on performing struggle and parrhesia, is to explore how the dissatisfied citizen acts to struggle against an ethics of responsibility, which by its nature stifles the enactment of an ethical right of refusal, and whether this is only possible outside of reclaiming rights discourse. The particular category of dissatisfied citizen I look at is the disabled citizen within the context of recent cuts to welfare spending and welfare reform. The dissatisfied citizen has an ethical right (as compared to a juridical right) to revolt. To speak fearlessly and with courage, that is with parrhesia, and for example protest. But what else can she do? Her struggle is enacted, I argue, through counter-communities as a form of struggle that is less of a spectacle but perhaps more spectacular because of its transformative potential. I present a re-imagining of struggle as counter-conducts – a new analytics for understanding the subject-object who is being otherwise. This understanding adopts Foucault’s formulation of a ‘relational right’ and allows for an imagining of new relationships that elude the normalising categories of ‘community’ and ‘disability’. Can we move towards a ‘disabled mode of life’? Towards a different kind of culture wherein rights become embedded in affective relations that we might call ‘friendship’? Parrhesia and history David Thomas, Birkbeck School of Law - davidncthomas@gmail.com My project is a genealogical study of the origins of human rights. Nietzsche in On the Uses and Disadavantages of History for Life (Nietzsche 1997), one of his Untimely Meditations, has no time for the writing of history for its own sake, or the idea of history as a science; he considers that it should always be secondary to the unhistorical, to life and action. He commands us to write history “in the service of the future and the present …” (77). In addressing the question of how such a study can be written in the service of the future and the present, my paper explores the possibility that the practice of writing history may be conceived of as parrhesia, conceptualized by Michel Foucault as a practice of truthful speaking in public. What might such a conception entail? And what modifications or alternatives present themselves? Parrhesia as Challenge to the Symbolic Order in Political Trials Karen Richmond, University of Strathclyde - karen.richmond@strath.ac.uk In his lectures on the history and evolution of parrhesia, Foucault describes a transgressive form of critique, which equates to ‘frankly telling the truth’. Parrhesia is characterised as a courageous political act - fraught with risk - through which the democratic subject is empowered and the polis enriched. Foucault indicates that the parrhesiastes bears an ethical duty, but one which is neither contextually situated nor bound by relations. This leaves open the question: ‘How can we recognise someone as parrhesiastes?’ Foucault provides a Platonic example, citing the trial of Socrates. But does the doctrine apply in the context of the modern political trial, and can we still identify examples of parrhesia? This presentation attempts to answer those questions. It adopts a position between the Critical Legal Studies approach (which stresses the political content of all trials) and the classical liberal approach (which equates political trials with “showcase trials”). It focuses on two twentieth-century political trials, comparing and contrasting the trial of ‘the Chicago Seven’ (Illinois,1968) with that of the core members of the Red Army Faction (Stuttgart,1975). The presentation utilises Lacan’s concept of the ‘symbolic order’ in order to describe the function of parrhesia. The presentation concludes that the de-subjectified power of parrhesiastical discourse derives, not merely from its provocative content, nor from its ethos, but from the parrhesiastes ability to question the norms and foundational values of the court itself. In so doing, the true parrhesiastes challenges the political foundations of evidence. It is this adjectival challenge - galvanised by kairos - which holds the potential to affect power relations. In response, the court may be driven to attempt to re-assert its authority with resort to disciplinary power. The presentation closes by considering the possible implications for those charged with the responsibility of policing ‘extremist’ discourses. 14. RESPONSES TO THE LOSS OF THE POLITICAL: INTELLECTUALS, HUMANITARIANS AND THE REVOLUTIONARIES Stream organiser: Ozan Kamiloglu (Birkbeck Law School) Loss of the political after the collapse of Soviets have been discussed by various critical thinkers, from Jacques Ranciere to Wendy Brown, Jodi Dean to Chantal Mouffe and various others. This stream will focus on the responses of the left, radical and critical thought in relation to the wider economical, political and social changes to the world in the same period. The question this stream asks is not only about the loss of the horizon, but more when the critical and radical thought, and emancipatory forces faced with the new monopolar world order, how they coped with it. Jacques Ranciere in his essay his essay The Ethical Turn of Aesthetics and Politics, defines the ethical turn and says “it signifies the constitution of an indistinct sphere”, the indistinction between “what is and what ought to be”. Rancière refers to it as the indistinction of fact and law. This creates the inclusion of “all forms of discourse and practice beneath the same indistinct point of view.” The panels in this stream will be responding to the question when the inclusion is so urgent and pushing, how did the ones that tried to be out, responded to the new constellation of politics, ethics and emotions? There will be three dimensions for responses, the critical thought (change of discourses), the law (particularly human rights law, but not only) and the question of violence (anti-colonial and revolutionary). Therefore the scope of this panel is very wide but at the same time very precise. On the one hand it will accept papers that considers rise and fall of certain thinkers (like Levinas, Rawls, Gramscians and others) in the critical thought in relation the wider changes in history. This discussions will go parallel with the role of human rights discourses and humanitarianism which seems to be colonising the political after 80ies. What can be said on the relation between human rights discourses and the critical thought, than and now? On the other hand this panel will accept papers that considers the anti-colonial struggles and the question of violence in the same period. What were the constellations of critical, radical and anti colonial thought after the ethical turn and in relation to the question of violence and what they are now? What were the ways of co-option in the West and different parts of the world for the radicals with the new all encompassing neo-liberalism and humanitarianism? Did the human rights discourses gave a chance to survive to the anti-colonial, or it was the end of the hope for emancipation? And finally what is the role of the intellectual in all this? The questions we are trying to answer are not limited to the ones below, and we will consider papers that will contribute to have a sense of the relations between the intellectual, the law, and the revolutionary in the neo-liberal times. Panel 1 Chair: Ozan Kamiloglu Co-operation and the Possibility of the Political Tara Mulqueen, Warwick School of Law While the fall of the Soviets has meant the loss of the political, the disappointment of socialist/communist projects has also enabled a 'retreat' of the political (to borrow from Nancy and Lacoue-Labarth), away from political programmes centred on the state and political economy. While on the one hand the failure of these political programmes has resulted in the near complete submersion of the political within the socio-technical and the ethical, and opening is also created through the separation of politics and the political. The retreat of the political creates the possibility of understanding ourselves and the past differently. In this paper I will offer a reading of the history of the co-operative movement in England, through a 'retreated' sense of the political. In this reading, the connection between co-operatives and forms of 'direct action' (food riots) associated with the moral economy of the eighteenth century becomes more pronounced. This in turn prompts a reflection on the role of the law and the state in regularizing and 'depoliticizing' these forms of direct action. Finally, this will be brought to bear on more contemporary issues such as the increasing prevalence of forms of 'social entrepreneurship' (as a form of non-politics) and how we might understand recent riots. From anti-capitalist struggles to poverty alleviation policies: situating post-Marxist theories Moniza Rizzini Ansari, Birkbeck School of Law, University of London In neoliberal times, a context characterised by various authors as the marketisation of all spheres of social life, anti-capitalist struggles have been facing yet new challenges. The idea that capitalism can be overcome is constantly being displaced as capitalism operates through its crisis, with appropriations of the revolutionary flows. This paper proposes an analysis of the recent history of critical theories identified as post-Marxist in the light of the issue of poverty. Beyond the working classes as the site of revolutionary potentialities, this involves a serious questioning of the conceptual models for the “unrevolutionary poor” of different periods: from Marx’s Lumpen to Foucault’s delinquent. Contemporary authors that might form this critical [Western] scholarship of post-Marxism are revisited with this intent, specifically the work of representative strands such as Rancière’s aesthetic of politics, Negri’s autonomism and David Harvey’s spatialized Marxism. This forms part of a study in progress concerning poverty as a political category, thus countering the usual socioeconomic analysis of poverty as scarcity – a depoliticised appraisal of social struggles that prioritises reformist projects of distribution of wealth and social inclusion. It is argued that philanthropic desires to “save the poor” have historically functioned as a mechanism for the management of surplus populations, a form of control that ‘keeps the world safe for capitalism’, adapted time and again in response to newer versions of capitalism: from religious charities to workhouses, from benefits in welfare states to social projects financed by international foundations. In the global south, charity have historically served colonial enterprise and recent neoliberal versions of corporate-endowed foundations perpetuate a sophisticated mechanism of corporate governance, NGO-isation of social movements and professionalisation of activism – a scenario described by Arundhati Roy as a neo-colonial response to the decolonial struggles erupting by the end of the 20th century. This is also a context of emergence of new fields of knowledge and liberal disciplines couched in the discourses of identity politics, multiculturalism and human rights. In this context, it is important to question the ways in which critical theories have addressed the issue of poverty and the subjects embodied in it: the poor. The endpoint of this research, as a search for a different angle to look at poverty, is potentially the reframing of traditional political categories such as masses, multitudes, crowds and, perhaps most centrally, populism. How to picture sovereignty: from image theory to image-nation Marcus V. A. B. de Matos, Birkbeck School of Law The expansion of the use of surveillance techniques by government and private sector, and the uncontrolled growth on the practice of torture and mistreatment of suspects, quickly became the main image of a global phenomenon that would introduce us to the beginning of the 21st century. This paper proposes to relate these two techniques, torture and surveillance, as the fundamental grounds on which the contemporary notions of sovereignty are based. It aims to overcome a more traditional debate over the notion of sovereignty (as a spatial or a temporal notion) by proposing a visual reading of sovereignty. When I say that I want to picture sovereignty, I am literally looking for ways in which we can re-think – or, rather, re-view – the theory of sovereignty and its consequences for us today. I want to propose that some pictures that you can see, like and perhaps share, are an important part of how we understand sovereignty. These pictures may constitute a particular way in which we see what sovereignty is, what it does, or even how it functions. These pictures might be used to produce and impose an order and, at the same time, link themselves to mental, dream and literary images that are also a constituent part of our-selves and of our civilization. They might even shape the very way in which we (are told to) see things and understand them, delineating consciousness and influencing how we see the world around us. We will test this hypothesis using an iconological strategy: looking at the discourses and pictures produced and inspired by mainstream film, media, government bodies and private institutions – a media apparatus of torture and surveillance. By comparing discourse, images and pictures that are either fictional and allegorical, or judicial and evidential, this paper aims to understand how, and if, these biopictures of torture and surveillance might even constitute themselves as a condition of possibility for contemporary politics. The theoretical background of this paper is based on the work of W. J. T Mitchell, Costas Douzinas, Giorgio Agamben and Jacques Ellul. It is also based on the methodological developments of critical legal studies on the interpretation, building and deconstruction of legal and political concepts. It is possible that these biopictures will reveal personifications and doubles of the State of Exception, in the sense that Carl Schmitt understands them: as “impersonations of the sovereign power”, which becomes visible only through archetypes. Finally, the paper proposes an innovative interpretation of the use of torture and surveillance techniques, as both operate as a reservoir of exceptional power. Panel 2 Chair: Tara Mulqueen Mapping the political: Spaces of collective action after the retreat of emancipatory projectsin Turkey Zeynel Gül, Department of Sociology, Koç University, Birkbeck This paper aims to delineate the shifts in the spaces of subversive collective actions in Istanbul occurring since the mid-1990s and the repercussions of these shifts in relation to (the loss of) the political. Starting from the mid-1990s, the concentration of the political actions in Turkey has drastically moved from urban margins to central spaces in the city. This centripetal move of Turkey’s radical left is accompanied the shift of subversive political demands and armed struggle towardsa politics revolving around human rights. This transformation in politics fundamentally pertains to the emergence of human rights as “the last utopia” that prevails over the remnants of radical political visions (Moyn, 2010; Badiou 2001; Ranciere 2010). Based onethnographic research in the left-stronghold neighborhoods of Istanbul and scan of radical left publications, this paper considers the “ethical turn” in emancipatory politics concomitantly with the changes in the spatiality revealed also through the discourses and modalities of political action. With the dramatic dissolution of subversive spaces, the political communities in Istanbul suburbs have become parts of a wider ethical community of human rights claims. Retreat of radical emancipatory projects also modifies forms of visibilities in spatio-political constellations.Militantly dissentingvisibility of 1990s, which is predicated on the demand of social equality, becomes colonized by an admissible visibility that is domesticated and incorporated into homogenizing realm of human rights discourse based on recognition of victimhood. As politics is a practice of dislocation for Laclau (1990), Ranciere (2010) articulates it as re-territorialization of the shares regarding the partition of what is sensible, sayable, and visible. Yet, apart from geographical grammar that is resorted, space embodies its share in the formation of the political that reconfigures available forms of visibility. Directory: law law -> Law in American Society Black History Month Essay Contest law -> A brand New Image? Should Personality Rights be law -> Jurisdiction of the Courts law -> Luther V. Borden: a taney Court Mystery Solved law -> ‘Intellectual Property Rights in Sport’ law -> The law of tort introduction a. What is a Tort? law -> Law of Delict Chapter 1: General Introduction law -> Appendix C: Federal and Minnesota Case Law Summaries Download 0.92 Mb. Share with your friends:
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