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The Colonial Encounter and The Construction of a Sacrificial International
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- Christian Identities of the Law: A Post-Colonial Perspective
- Panel 3
- The Political Economy of Messianism
- When the Gods were born, what questions did they answer
- Panel 4
- Justice as Desire in Trans-Immanence
- The God Beneath: Towards a Trinitarian Political Theology
- 2. BIOPOLITICS AND DECONSTRUCTION
- Panel 1: Biopolitics, Deconstruction, Sovereignty
The Colonial Encounter and The Construction of a Sacrificial International Kojo Koram, Birkbeck - kojokoram20@gmail.com This paper will aim to add to the conversation of historicizing the colonial encounter between the European and Non-European worlds as the originating violence of the international legal order. Commencing from the juridical architecture produced to account for Spanish-Amerindian relations, this paper will engage with the work of Spanish theologian Francisco De Vitoria, reading him, in the manner of James Brown Scott, Carl Schmitt and Anthony Anghie, as a international law’s paterfamilias. However, drawing on Vitoria twin office of theologian and jurist, this paper will extend Anghie’s arguments regarding the accommodation of imperialism within Vitoria’s bold claim to a universal humanity, by reading them alongside Vitoria’s translation of a religious metaphysics onto the problem of the colonial encounter. This paper will make an intervention in Vitorian scholarship by emphasising his resonance with philosophical anthropologist Rene Girard’s understanding of community being produced through sacrifice. Vitoria’s ‘dynamic of difference’ betrays an ontological violence, through which the colonised subject is formed, underwriting the modern universal jurisdiction. I will argue how the Vitorian legal order corresponds with Girard’s social ordering through a sacred, legitimizing violence. The interior/exterior positionality that Girard mandates as necessary for the scapegoat to exorcise the intra-communal violence will be shown to marry with Vitoria’s inclusion of the Amerindian in a condition of primary exclusion. I will synthesise Girard’s scapegoat mechanism and Vitoria’s universalist schema, so as to illuminate the extent to which this category of colonial subject as sacrifice,- perhaps best captured by Frantz Fanon’s description of the colonised subject as ‘the damned’ –persists within the contemporary global order. Ultimately, I will conclude by exploring potential pathways through which we could imagine a non-sacrificial international law. Christian Identities of the Law: A Post-Colonial Perspective Vishavjeet Chaudhary, Jindal Global University - vchaudhary@jgu.edu.in Ideas of and from Christianity have undoubtedly shaped law in ways that are, more often than not, linear. The ethos and values of law are moulded by Christianity. Shared legacy and a common ‘starting’ point of the modern jurisprudence of the Indian subcontinent has meant these nations have, broadly speaking a similar legal system to the former colony. Even systematically, the organisation of courts, trials by jury and other legal matrix is dictated in many ways by ecclesiastical law. Using this as a starting point, this paper analyses the Christian identity of law using broadly two lenses. The first is that of literature. The main argument is that the literature, in subtle, yet sure ways has added to the law the ‘milk of human kindness’ that a strictly religious perspective could not have necessarily articulated. I rely on, for instance, characters from Shakespeare and discuss ideas of guilt, non-guilt and the gray area in between. This vibrancy, seeds of which are mostly seen during the renaissance period has added to the appreciation of law as a ‘humanised’ area. The second lens is that of a different culture and religion. The starting point is the ‘architecture of justice.’ I start with a brief discussion of the architecture of courts in India- how the buildings display the values of Indian understanding of law as well as the shortcomings from the colonial hangover. This is followed by a discussion of the history of law in India. The idea of Dharma (meaning ‘duty’- though this is a much more loaded term than that) and the treatise of Arthashastra is discussed. In the last century, post independence, the Indian courts did away with trial by jury (Nanavati)- an idea widely believed to be an epitome of justice and the cornerstone of English legal system. This was an era when the Indian courts asserted culture specific reasons and showed a drift away from colonial hangover. More recently, the Indian Parliament has ruled out the possibility of criminalising marital rape. Many have cited cultural reasons for this, as another drift from the colonial contemporaries to pre-colony era. The idea of this brief paper is to start a discussion to articulate law in ways that are not too familiar- especially to the Western World and have, for most part, been forgotten in the Indian world. This paper is multi-discplinary and I make constant references to literature and history. The purpose will be fulfilled if it provokes discussions in the direction of articulating law with diverse frame-works. Panel 3 Chair: John Ackerman The vacillating ultimate name: glitches in disinstalling "Christianity" Anton Schütz, Birkbeck - A.Schutz@bbk.ac.uk A few years ago, two superior minds, in order to make the world a better and safer place, decided to send troops to Iraq to root out its weapons of mass destruction. Not only were there none, and not only does one not find the most minimal announcement of a safe world in the Christian Gospel, but the care for the universal and the desire to make the world different – better, actually – than what it is, are effectively symptoms suggesting that Christianity is more than only a religion. A first argument concerns the hermeneutical levels on which “religion” and “Christianity” develop their respective sense-effects. A second one concerns (Western) Christianity’s peculiar slant of realizing itself courtesy of secularization, rather than against its resistance. Thirdly I shall focus on the attempts to find alternatives” [to Christianity] or to establish a world “after” Christianity, and on how to appraise their chances. My final question is to what extent our quest to dismiss Christian Law and Christianity should be seen itself as a particularly fine blossom on the flower of Christian reason. The Political Economy of Messianism Harvey Shoolman, London Metropolitan University - H.Shoolman@londonmet.ac.uk We shall explore a messianic trope or leitmotif that is peculiar to a number of Jewish thinkers in the western tradition and which has been enormously influential, albeit conceptually polymorphous, within modern philosophic culture. This is the connection between nomos or the juridical, human identity and time itself. We will explore the deep connections between the Pauline (and inevitably the Taubesian) conception of radical Judaism as inherently and paradoxically antinomian with respect to Halakhic prescriptivism whilst being simultaneously fulfilling of the loving geist that is the internally prescribed law and we will relate this to the Kabbalistic notion of law as a pre-lapsarian text, pregnant with all possible meanings, a pleroma of semantic potential that will be combined into new meanings and a new ontology with the advent of the Parousia. The eschatalogical ‘withering away’ of the external juridicality of Halakha is a prefiguration of another Judaic vision, which is the withering away of the liberally bourgeoise state-form and the advent of a utopian organic gemeinschaft according to Marx’s materialist conception of history. Capitalist labour time as commodified and fetishized time, composed as a linear sequence of homogeneously identical units which are inherently empty and meaningless to the worker, whilst exploitative of surplus value, can be redeemed, by those able to scientifically distinguish appearance from reality, in the establishment of an organic ‘gemeinschaft’ in which the individual achieves true species-being. The state of juridical suspension as sacred exceptionalism is also a form of withdrawal of the law from the sphere of meaning and appropriate semantic reference. The law retains its force yet signifies nothing. This, again was prefigured kabbalistically in the Lurianic conception of Tsintsum or divine withdrawal of its presence so as to leave a vacuum for the emanationist creation of the profane world of good and evil. Benjamin’s concept of time contrasts messianic homogeneous temporality as the commodity-fetishized nature of capitalistic time with the temporally disruptive notion of the jetztzeit , the ‘now-time’ as the redemption of sequentially homogeneous capitalist clock-time. Time and law are intimately connected, and so the disruption of meaningless commodity fetishized time is seen as the simultaneous overcoming of the exclusionary and manichaean state of juridical exception. Capitalism is forced to enact tsintsum and to contract, to withdraw, leaving a space to be filled by messianically redemptive time as the overcoming of that sequential and punctiform experience of clock-time which alone provides the capitalist and the worker with the illusory ontological equivalence between labour power and commodity value. This, in turn, heralds a revolutionary and dialectical withering away of production relations and indeed of all previously fetishized notions of ‘order’ and ‘disorder’ and their replacement by a non-durational and passionate form of ‘enchanted’ or intuitive engagement with the world. The cultic theology of capitalism, based upon fetishism, guilt and blame as the daily liturgical observance of a nihilistic rule of law is henceforward to be re-written and reconfigured as a return to the ur-state of profane inclusivity. We will conclude by noting many of these tropes as constitutive of the late metaphysics of another Jewish thinker, Spinoza, who also postulated a dialectical relationship between the perceiving human mind and the categorial framework of Nature (or God). Though Spinoza would appear to be an unequivocally non-messianic and deterministic thinker we shall discover that he entertains a covertly expressed, messianic, view of communal knowledge based upon the possibility that society can, one day, be entirely composed of purely rational citizens who can act together as one mind, representing one undivided state-body as a form of ‘conative aggregation’, able to produce a ‘frictionless’ polity or gemeinschaft in which there is no requirement for the existence of an externally imposed law, for that which is conceptually represented or perceived by the civil ‘mind’ is no longer an existing collective ‘body-politic’ but the continuum of Nature as such. Such a society would enact and perpetrate a politics based purely on intellectually eternal or non-temporally saturated objectives without recourse to mediating institutions, law, commodification or the exploitative economics of homogeneous clock-time. What is envisioned in each of the cases studied is the birth of a radically new, even if currently inscrutable, lebensform of both the individual and the community. When the Gods were born, what questions did they answer? Thanos Zartaloudis, Kent - t.zartaloudis@gmail.com In this paper I examine the manner of asking key questions about the relationship between law and religion through my research into ancient Greek religion and law. When one delves into, for example, the 18th to 20th century research in ancient greek religion, law and society one is not surprised perhaps to find 'ideological' or 'dogmatic' readings of the sources, whether Christian or Marxist and so forth. But that observation remains only a starting point if one wishes to explore the 'emergence' of ancient greek religion and law in a time when the two are both unrecognizable (to the contemporary senses of the terms) and inseparable. What can one learn from such a turn to the ancient traditions? It is my suggestion that one can find here a fertile field for questioning current assumptions as to, for instance, law and its relation to justice, 'political theology' and the understanding of how traditions form. Panel 4 Chair: Thanos Zartaloudis Possibilities of law making in alternative metaphysics Elena Paris, University of Bucharest - paris_elena@yahoo.com Current governance at various levels tends to operate with certitudes which take their authority from their alleged obviousness. Take EU economic governance for instance, where the austerity principle seems a necessity dictated by reason. Law’s function is, then, to declare how things are. How law was made matters less, since law’s legitimacy does not come from the democratic inclusiveness of the law-making process, but lays in its content being dictated by reason. Christos Yannaras is a political philosopher and theologian who suggests that the modern fascination with objective reason displays the same foundational impulse as the „pre-modern” reliance on natural law of a transcendental origin. He points to an alternative to „Western metaphysics”, to use Heidegger’s expression, a metaphysics that springs from an Eastern Christian theological concept of apophaticism, understood in two components, as acknowledgement of the relational, hence indeterminate character of language and as requiring the social verification of knowledge. In its first component, apophaticism offers theological support to the theory of law’s indeterminacy promoted in critical legal studies. However, it takes it to different effects, in light of an accompanying relational ontology which contrasts to the atomism at the core of the modern epistemic matrix. The perspective ensuing from this alternative metaphysics grants priority to no pre-set model, and invalidates the temptation to appeal to any a priori regulative principle with the function of disciplining the free unfolding of life. It results an enabling and inviting pose, a pluralist ethos that facilitates the making of the law in a participatory, horizontal fashion. In the words of the call, this might constitute a kind of „other-than-(Western)-Christian” critical resource that revivifies the law for today’s democracy, since it supports the plea to take seriously consent as the basis for law-making. Justice as Desire in Trans-Immanence Jan Patrick Oppermann, Independent Scholar - jpoppermann9@googlemail.com The problems with the “Christian” approach to both law and the critique of law (which converge to be the same thing, possibly), are based on two similar but distinct philosophical phenomena:
Both are metaphysical, and, from a certain point of view, ontological. There is in the history of metaphysics, at least prior to (but most likely including) Heidegger, the avoidance of the phenomenon of desire and of longing on the part of the human soul. Desire, to the extent that it is acknowledged, is sub-divided into desire for God, and thus radical and fully non-immanent transcendence - and desire as animal lust which is held to be incapable of transcendence and must instead be inscribed in the catalogue of sin. This is well-known, and constitutes the limitation of desire for the understanding of Christian hope. Indeed, this is how Christian doctrine traditionally works against itself - but it does so because the history of metaphysics works against its own subjectivist origins. To move out of this subjectivist conundrum - indeed this ontological prison - is to re-think the problem of desire. With respect to the law, this is a question of re-thinking desire as justice; with respect to grace as the Christian telos (the gift of grace, enhancing the self at the expense of the loss of subjectivity and thus the achievement of salvation in a state of possibility which is all human effort can possibly attain) it is a question of re-thinking desire as hope. It is curious that we can only hope for justice and only desire even desire as hope, whenever justice is to have salvationist content. If it does not, it remains merely functional and always the cause of further conflict, dissatisfaction, and ego-destruction, obviating the transcendent function of the self. My purpose in this paper is to take a few modest steps towards thinking what Jean-Luc Nancy terms “trans-immanence” with respect to the re-thinking of justice as desire and as hope. To do this, I propose to focus on a re-thought Christian notion of grace but set this notion into a context that metaphysical Christian thought has neglected and excised. I will also briefly seek to link Nancean “trans-immanence” with the transcendent function of analytical psychology (if time and space permit) Figures like Heidegger, Levinas, Meister Eckhart, Georges Bataille, Jean-Luc Nancy, Jean-Luc Marion, Keiji Nishitani, Jacques Lacan, and others may be considered, depending on whether there is space and time. A brief personal meditation may put the argument into the context of life-as-it-is lived. The God Beneath: Towards a Trinitarian Political Theology? Paddy McDaid, Birkbeck - paddymcdaid@hotmail.com This stream poses the question 'After Christian Law?', the question mark perhaps suggesting an uneasiness with regard to the 'situation in which we find ourselves', hence the further question of whether we have 'really even begun to wrestle seriously with the Christian character of present-day legal systems?' Taking this question seriously raises the issue of how one could even begin such a process. In The King's Two Bodies Ernst Kantorowicz reads Vergil's crowning of Dante as releasing the human from 'the Christian aggregate of thought'; Dante, representing humanity, now reigning supreme over himself. Arguably, much of the theorising of the transition from Royal to Popular sovereignty has followed this trajectory and, therefore, emerges from a 'form' inspired by the idea of the double-bodied king. Emblematic of this trajectory is the work of Claude Lefort. In his essay The Permanence of the Theologico-Political? he explores the symbolism of the execution of Louis XVI, concluding that the theological and political are now divorced. This paper suggests that if we are to wrestle seriously with the Christian character of present-day legal systems then we must re-consider the trope of the double-bodied king and its legacy against the backdrop of Merleau-Ponty's paraphrasing of Paul Claudel that: 'God is not above but beneath us - meaning that we do not find Him as a suprasensible idea, but as another ourself which dwells in and authenticates our darkness. Transcendence no longer hangs over man: he becomes, strangely, its privileged bearer'. Such a reconsideration, it shall be argued, calls for a re-orientation of Western Christian Political Theology, a re-orientation which must go beyond the idea of the Incarnation and give due cognisance to the idea of the Trinity in Christian theology. 2. BIOPOLITICS AND DECONSTRUCTION Stream organiser: Chris Lloyd (Oxford Brookes University) In an interview from 2007 the Italian theorist Antonio Negri was asked ‘What exactly is the biopolitical diagram?’ His reply was as follows: The biopolitical diagram is the space in which the reproduction of organised life (social, political) in all its dimensions is controlled, captured, and exploited – this has to do with the circulation of money, police presence, the normalisation of life forms, the exploitation of productivity, repression, the reining in of subjectivities (Multitudes 2008 (31)). Negri’s reply was of course an allusion to Michel Foucault’s concept of the ‘diagram’ which underpins his account of ‘panopticism’ in Discipline and Punish. Thereafter this concept develops into the governance of spatio-temporal relations and leads to the imposition of ‘regulatory controls: a bio-politics of the population’, as outlined in The History of Sexuality Vol. 1. As is well known Negri and other prominent Italian theorists such as Roberto Esposito, Maurizio Lazzarato and Giorgio Agamben have elaborated and expanded Foucault’s work on biopolitics well into the 21st century. The most well-known elaboration is found in Agamben’s seminal Homo Sacer series and illustrates that ‘the exemplary place of modern biopolitics’ is ‘the great totalitarian states of the twentieth century’ and therein, par excellence, ‘the concentration camp’ which is ‘the pure, absolute, and impassable biopolitical space’ (Homo Sacer, 119, 123). Agamben’s analysis of the biopolitical camp can be shown to draw on, amongst other influences, two key concepts. Firstly ‘abandonment’, or the ‘ban’, which Agamben adopts from the work of Jean-Luc Nancy (see Nancy’s 1981 essay ‘Abandoned Being’). In his recent monograph Giorgio Agamben: Beyond the Threshold of Deconstruction Kevin Attell comments that within Agamben’s works this concept ‘is the most evidently “deconstructive” in its derivation and function’ and that the ‘deconstructive provenance’ of this concept is crucial to understanding Agamben’s political theory (127). Secondly Agamben’s work draws on Jacques Derrida’s spatio-temporal concept of différance (see Derrida’s 1968 essay ‘Différance’). In Kalpana Seshadri’s recent work HumAnimal: Race, Law, Language she argues that ‘différance … [is] the site of the biopolitical’, because ‘biopower depends on a contamination, the trace, the différance between biological (natural) life and political (human) life, in order to produce the specter of bare life’ (xiii, 86). However, in opposition to these two recent works which connect Agamben’s biopolitical thought to the metaphysical critique of deconstruction, stands the work of Catherine Malabou. In her recent essay ‘Will Sovereignty Ever Be Deconstructed?’ she argues that Agambenian biopolitics is not influenced by deconstruction but rather that it was always already a causal result of deconstruction; ‘biopolitics is already, in itself, a deconstructive tool of sovereignty’ (see Plastic Materialities: Politics, Legality, and Metamorphosis in the work of Catherine Malabou, eds. Brenna Bhandar and Jonathan Goldberg-Hiller, 37). Consequently, when Malabou recalls Foucault’s assertion that ‘In political thought and analysis, we still have not cut off the head of the king’ (The History of Sexuality Vol. 1, 88–89) she laments at our continuing failure because biopolitics is ruled by the epistemic sovereignty of biology. From the accounts above it is clear that recent literature has begun to investigate the relationships between biopolitics and deconstruction, with differing views on the relatability of one concept to the other. These comparisons engage not only with Foucault’s original work but with later adaptations of it as well. But whether or not it is the case that these two disparate concepts can be connected – and this may seem unlikely given that the former is an administration of life driven by biological knowledge and the latter is a critique of the metaphysics of presence – it is nevertheless the case their respective individual contributions to an understanding of our contemporary world could hardly be more important. Amidst our (potential) ‘turning point’ of precarity, and from within our increasingly marginalised positions within the academy, this stream asks participants to reengage with, and investigate the relationships between, two of the most influential concepts to emerge from the contours of 20th century European thought. Panel 1: Biopolitics, Deconstruction, Sovereignty Chair: Chris Lloyd Plasticity, Jurisdiction and the Interruption of Sovereignty Daniel Matthews, University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong - danmat@hku.hk In a series of recent essays Catherine Malabou argues that Foucault, Agamben and Derrida all fail to properly ‘deconstruct’ sovereignty. Pursing a ‘plastic reading’ of sovereignty, Malabou claims that all three thinkers retain an operative division between ‘symbolic’ and ‘biological’ forms of life. This division has animated the history of sovereignty since Aristotle and is given a celebrated rendering in Kantorowitz’s study of medieval kingship. I argue that Malabou ignores the role of the juridical in giving form to sovereignty and this paper seeks to develop a ‘plastic reading’ of sovereignty through attention to the juridico-political rather than politico-biological nexus. Through a reading of ‘jurisdiction’, the paper examines legal technologies that give form to sovereignty, arguing that due regard to the juridical reveals an always already self-deconstructing sovereignty that supplements Malabou’s thinking in this area. The paper concludes by offering some brief criticisms of Malabou’s approach though a reading of José Saramago’s novel Seeing. 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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