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- Archiving Bodies Through Forms of Life
- Panel 2: Biopolitics, War, Terror
- The interplay of Rights, Bio-politics and Necro-politics in the Regulation of Speech
- Can the subaltern speak international criminal law Authority, jurisdiction, and the politics of international criminal justice
- Panel 3: Sex, Gender, Bio-Deconstruction
- The Biopolitics and Body Protests of Extreme Hindu Nationalism
- Queer Bioethics: What Is It, What Could It Be
- Panel 4: Biopolitics Otherwise
- Legitimacy and Life: humanity discourse and biopower in global law and policy
- The empowerment of human being through a micro-physics of power: elements for an instrumentalization of human rights
- Panel 5: Postcolonialism, Justice, Biopolitics
Sovereign Iconography Stacy Douglas, Carleton University, Canada - StacyDouglas@cunet.carleton.ca In 1922 Carl Schmitt declares that “sovereign is he who decides the exception” (Political Theology). In 2004 Marie-Jose Mondzain claims that there is “no power without an image” (Image, Icon, Economy). This paper explores these competing theological-historical accounts of the true place of political power to consider the role of the visual in formations of sovereignty. Although Schmitt conjures up an image of his decider as absolutely autonomous, I propose – via a reflection on his interest in Herman Melville’s novella Benito Cereno – that this moment of sovereignty is deeply dependent on its legitimation through visual iconography. Archiving Bodies Through Forms of Life Stewart Motha, Birkbeck College, University of London - s.motha@bbk.ac.uk In this paper I examine the growing interest in a ‘form of life’ as a mode of law’s archival of sovereign violence. The label attached to a form of life signals the extent to which it is regarded as part of a political community. Life is characterized through distinctions such as human/animal, citizen/subject, migrant/refugee, and constructs such as ‘illegal maritime arrival’ in migration law. Sovereign power has been characterized as constituting itself through the production of such ‘forms of life’ (e.g. as biopolitical life, or bare life). The constitution of sovereignty through a form of life is – whether by script or neglect - mediated by law. Agamben’s elaboration of ‘homo sacer’ or bare life served as an important point of departure for contemporary articulations of the relationship between law and life. While much that is critical can be said about the veracity of this ‘bareness’, it signals a turn to a ‘form of life’ as central to the theoretical optics of recognition. Other influential studies on a ‘form of life’ include Judith Butler’s characterization of the body under the extremities of sovereign subjection as ‘precarious’ – and her attempt to orient an ethical response to the other through a universalization of the ‘vulnerable’ and ‘grievable’ subject. Similarly, Eric Santner has explored ‘creaturely life’, and developed a notion of living in the ‘middle’ in order to resist the orientation of metaphysical essences of life. More recently Catherine Malabou has suggested that sovereignty is not fully deconstructed until the symbolic register of representing ‘life’ is fully materialized. This new materialism asserts that the “structural meaning of the empirical [body]” can be found “within the empirical itself”. The symbolic no longer needs to serve as supplement, surplus, or excess of the real. The assertion in Malabou’s argument is that life can be a sign of itself. Or, to put it another way, and now more critically, Malabou seems to displace homo sacer with homo cerebrality – a return, I suggest, of the metaphysical register that she eschews. Through a discussion of the work of these writers I explore the sign and form of life by which law mediates sovereign power. Panel 2: Biopolitics, War, Terror Chair: Chris Lloyd A Metaphysical Reading of the Biopolitical Subject Teagan-Jane Westendorf, Monash University, Australia - twes4@student.monash.edu Torture may be ineffective for intelligence and evidence-gathering purposes, however it is far from mundane. Extensive research interrogates the efficacy of ‘enhanced interrogation methods’ under different variables from a policy perspective regarding national security in response to post-9/11 terrorism. The increasing acceptance of such policy in the post 9/11 political climate and correlative counter-terrorism legislation (e.g. In USA, Australia, UK) however circumvents the question of what the scene of torture, particularly by agents of liberal democratic governments, illuminates regarding both the fundamental nature of sovereign juridical power and the subject it administrates. What does torture signify? This post-structural analysis of the interaction between the perpetrator and victim, perpetrator and sovereign authority, explores the scene of torture as a discursive matrix of law. I synthesize juridico-political theories of lawful subjectivity with reference to the testimony of US military personnel who have participated in torture interrogations. I argue that understanding torture to be the real performance of juridical power as a regulatory system, in what is commonly considered by influential jurists like Schmitt and Agamben to be a site of legal exception, illuminates how the legal matrix produces the systems and subjectivity theorized by Foucault and renders the subject coherent within the discursive matrix of law. The interplay of Rights, Bio-politics and Necro-politics in the Regulation of Speech Jen Higgins, Birkbeck College, University of London - jhiggi06@mail.bbk.ac.uk Bio-politics may be used to describe a collectivist approach to governance, a governmentality that focuses on the wellbeing of the population in the long run. As such it can be contrasted with the individualism of human rights. This is not to suggest that human rights are not often promoted for bio-political ends nor that the two approaches are never complementary; rather it is argued that where there is a perceived conflict between the two, it is the collectivist approach that takes precedence, as demonstrated most strikingly in the realm of counter-terrorism. This paper uses this juxtaposition of bio-politics and rights to explore the regulation of speech in England and Wales, specifically examining the origins of Section 5 and the ‘stirring up hatred’ provisions of the Public Order Act. It is argued that although discussions on hate speech laws are always imbued with the language of individual rights, the limitations of these rights are drawn at the point at which they infringe the rights of others. Thus, there is much scope for negotiating which rights and whose rights should be prioritised. This is demonstrated throughout the evolution of the stirring up provisions, where freedom of speech is balanced at every turn with public order and the public good – what changes over time is who is deemed as belonging to that public, and who is deemed a danger to it. In the increasing legal overlap between hate speech and terrorism offences, it is especially apparent how the bio-political governance of a population is necro-political for those who are excluded from it. Critical race, feminist and queer theory perspectives can subsequently be used to argue that concern for ‘the public’ produces a necro-politics for some in the defence of the rights of others. Can the subaltern speak international criminal law? Authority, jurisdiction, and the politics of international criminal justice Roberto Yamato, Institute of Int. Relations, PUC-Rio, Brazil - roberto.v.yamato@gmail.com At present, there are ten “situations under investigations” and seven “preliminary examinations” before the International Criminal Court (ICC). On the one hand, all “situations”, except that of Georgia, involve African countries (Democratic Republic of Congo; Uganda; Central African Republic; Darfur, Sudan; Kenya; Libya; Côte d’Ivoire; Mali; and (again) Central African Republic). On the other hand, the “examinations” involve two other African countries (Nigeria and Guinea), one Latin American (Colombia), as well as Afghanistan, Iraq and Ukraine, plus the case of Palestine. Although the ICC has jurisdiction only over individuals, it identifies its situations and examinations by reference to states, providing in its own homepage a very telling “world map” of international criminal justice. Inspired by Gayatri Spivak’s Can the Subaltern Speak?, this paper aims at critically engaging with such a geopolitical-jurisdictional “world map”, questioning who can – and who cannot – speak international criminal law. Drawing on the works of Costas Douzinas and Jean-Luc Nancy, the paper first explores the political philosophy of jurisdiction, focusing on the fundamental relationship between authority, jurisdiction, and, hence, the “speaking of the law”. In so doing, the paper wants to draw attention to the foundational politics of law and language (or, law as language), in order to pose the political question of who is authorized to speak the law. The paper then focuses on the ICC’s “world map” of international criminal justice, giving particular attention to its jurisdictional grounds. Here, the paper offers a close reading of the jurisdictional grounding of the Darfur, Sudan case, questioning, in particular, the structural relation between the UN Security Council and the ICC. Finally, considering certain structural asymmetries, inequalities and hierarchies, such as the exclusivity of African “situations under investigations”, on the one hand, and the US “immunity”, on the other hand, the paper concludes with a reading of the politics of international criminal law and justice. In what regards the IRI/Newcastle workshop more specifically, the final part of the paper will engage the politics of international law in terms of its relation to both “neoliberalism” and the “international”. Panel 3: Sex, Gender, Bio-Deconstruction Chair: Stacy Douglas Legitimizing Legal Sexual Policies: Normalization as Affective Regime Barbara Kraml, University of Vienna, Austria - barbara.kraml@univie.ac.at When it comes to de-/legitimizing legal sexual policies, normalization plays a vital role: Whilst sexualities perceived as ‘normal’ are legitimately decriminalized, legally protected and acknowledged on the one hand, those sexualities perceived as ‘anormal’ are legitimately criminalized, excluded and remain unprotected. The term ‘normalization’ already hints at its process-like conceptual quality: Following Michel Foucault and Isabell Lorey, normalization needs to be conceptualized as a mode of collective immunization against existential threats. Its modus operandi is closely intertwined with Foucault’s understanding of normalization and biopolitics, and can be conceptualized as follows: Perceived threats are identified via processes of othering and are subsequently neutralized via partially taking them in into an endangered (living) social collective – the population in a Foucauldian sense. Within the field of sexuality, the discursive construction of threatening sexualities is – implicitly or explicitly – related to the question of their alleged non-/reproductivity (Repo 2013). Due to its process- like and never completed character, normalization is a pretty diffuse and impalpable matter. The paper focuses at affective aspects of normalization which are constitutive of its conceptualization: The ongoing discursive construction of harmful and threatening others, the legitimating effects of concern, fear and anxiety in view of social/legal exclusion of these others and feelings of rightness attributed to phenomena in the course of their normalization. What gradually becomes normal is perceived less and less worrying. In this regard, normalization as an affective regime mainly performs a legitimating function in political discourse: It determines whether – and when – certain legal sexual policies can be successfully claimed and are accepted. Taking the example of decriminalization of homosexualities in Austria (1971-2002), the paper shows how such an affectively enriched analytical perspective helps to explain shifting legal policies in the – from a biopolitical point of view highly relevant – field of sexuality. The Biopolitics and Body Protests of Extreme Hindu Nationalism Oieshi Saha, West Bengal National University of Juridical Sciences, India - oieshisaha09@nujs.edu At the heart of the debate on Biopolitics is the argument propagated by Foucault that the life and body of the individual is at the heart of the modern political battle. There is a clear shift from the Aristotelian notion of the life of the individual being of primary importance and their political existence being an additional and largely secondary feature. The dominant idea of our times is that the politics of the individual often places their existence as a living being questionable. The introduction of the zoe into the sphere of polis has been (for both Agamben and Foucault) the decisive event of modernity. When life becomes the object of the exercise of sovereign power, the notion of freedom and the capacity of life to resist such control therefore necessarily come in as a corollary. In this paper, I will be analysing the idea of biopolitics in the context of extreme nationalism and saffronisation. Further, I will look at the body protest movements that attempt to resist such exercise of power and in doing so create forms of subjectification that attempt to escape its control. In Part I I will be arguing that the biopolitics of Hindu nationalism is evident in the propagation of the archetypal Hindu male as one who is essentially hyper-masculine – who is dominant and in control of both the home and the political sphere and necessarily superior not only to Hindu women, but also to men and women of all other religions. The ruling party in its propagation of the concept of Hindu masculinity attempts to assert the ideology of the ‘Ram Rajya’ with the Hindu male becoming the protector and guardian of the State against all externalities that are believed to be corruptive in nature. In Part II I will be analysing this link between Hindu Nationalism, Masculinity and State Construction. I seek to show that the psychology of violence against the ‘other’ and the characterization of non violence as being equivalent to impotence (a product of male insecurity which in itself is a natural by-product of the very construction of masculinity), is linked to the desire to be ‘real men’. The hypothesis that I seek to argue is that the idea of masculinity does not exist a priori. Rather its genesis lies in the construction, concomitant suppression and control of femininity. In Part III, I will be arguing that in the masculine construction of gender roles, the greatest horror and revulsion would be reserved for precisely those males who would adopt practises of the ‘weaker sex’. Hence, in revolting against this model propagated by the government, the human body has become the chief tool of registering dissent, and herein comes in the concept of body protests. Queer Bioethics: What Is It, What Could It Be? Tiia Sudenkaarne, University of Turku, Finland - tiijun@utu.fi Queer bioethics is a latterly explicated field of bioethics focusing on LGBTQI-related questions. On the one hand, queer bioethics discusses issues such as gender reassignment or sex affirmation of trans and intersex people, or reproduction justice for same-sex couples in accessing assisted reproduction technology. On the other hand and further, however, queer bioethics interrogates the basis on which socio-medicalized views on gender and sexuality are produced and reproduced, by critically deconstructing these concepts with the analytical tools of gender binary system and heteronormativity. When analyzing specific treatment and care practices around LGBTQI and the socio-historical context in which these positions continue to be reconstructed as anomalies from “normal” within the Western thought of bioethics, we can deconstruct the heteronormative sense-making system that operates via gender binaries. Yet even further, I suggest, queer bioethics can lead us to places unimaginable to strictly medicalized views of bioethics, those places existing both inside and out the human condition. What is the relationship between (queer) bioethics and biopolitics? How does queer bioethics and biopolitics relate to feminist projects? What does the queer patient reveal about health as a public good? What could queer bioethics as a moral theory be and what could it do medical legislation, practices and politics? What could posthumanist responsibility mean in terms of embodiment, ability and justice – bioethical, biopolitical and beyond? Panel 4: Biopolitics Otherwise Chair: Daniel Matthews Resisting the Present: Biopolitics in the Face of the Event Thomas Clément Mercier, Kings College, London - thomas.mercier@kcl.ac.uk In its hegemonic definition, biopolitical governmentality is characterised by a seemingly infinite capacity of expansion, susceptible to colonise the landscape and timescape of the living present in the name of capitalistic productivity. Indeed, the main trait of biopower is its normative, legal and political plasticity, allowing it to reappropriate critiques and resistances by appealing to bioethical efficacy and biological accuracy. Under these circumstances, how can we invent rebellious life-forms and alternative temporalities escaping biopolitical normativity? In this paper, I provide a deconstruction of the conceptual and temporal structures upholding the notion of biopolitics, in view of laying the ground for new forms of resistance. The articulation between life and power has a long philosophical history, which has been largely ignored by social theorists and political thinkers when they use biopolitics as an interpretative model. I wish to re-inscribe this model within the tradition of critical materialism, by articulating Foucault’s ‘critical ontology’ to Marx & Engels’s conception of ‘real life’ and to recent philosophical works on biological plasticity (Malabou). In all these discourses, the logic of biopower depends on a representation of life – ‘the living’ – as living present. Biopower is thus anchored in the authority of the present, that is to say, of being-as-presence (ontology); it sustains presentist definitions of life and materiality, be it under the form of a ‘plastic’ ontology. By drawing on Derrida’s notions such as ‘spectrality’ and ‘life-death’, I wish to deconstruct these discourses on life and materiality, and to dissociate them from their ontological grounding, in order to suggest new paths of resistance to biopower. This exit from the authority of the present is the condition for imagining a politics of the event, hospitable to otherly life forms – life-beyond-life – and anachronistic timescapes. Legitimacy and Life: humanity discourse and biopower in global law and policy Ukri I Soirila, University of Helsinki, Finland - ukri.soirila@helsinki.fi This paper deals with what I call ‘humanity discourse’ in global law and policy – that is, a discourse that aims to shift focus from states to humanity and human individuals on the global sphere. I pay special attention those most radical and constitutionalizing forms of the discourse, which try to posit ‘humanity’ as some kind of tangible core of global law and policy. In contrast to most work done on the topic, I do not try to advocate for the change towards what some have called ‘humanity’s law’, nor do I try to prove that it has occurred. Rather I am interested in tracing the shifts it would entail in relations of power, were it to actualize. In other words, I explore what new forms of power the discourse enables, and what are the links between the discourse and social change. My main observation is threefold. First, the narrative corresponds to a surprising extent to that of a fluid deterritorialized empire as told by Hardt and Negri – although voiced from a very different political perspective. Second, the legitimacy the power described and actualized by the discourse seems to derive from “sacredness of human life”. Third this kind of bio-legitimacy is, however, used in practice in struggles of different regimes and actors to re-distribute legitimacy at the international sphere, and tends to lead to oppressive forms of biopower and the kinds of bio-inequalities and immunizing practices studied by Didier Fassin and Roberto Esposito, respectively. The empowerment of human being through a micro-physics of power: elements for an instrumentalization of human rights Guadalupe Satiro, Independent Scholar - guadalupesatiro@gmail.com The < Panel 5: Postcolonialism, Justice, Biopolitics Chair: TBC Has Transitional Justice Reached a Critical Juncture? Catherine Turner, Durham University, England - catherine.turner@durham.ac.uk Since its emergence less than twenty years ago, transitional justice has become established as a coherent field of activity, held together by a set of common assumptions about the value of justice in times of political transition. The requirements of transitional justice are increasingly institutionalised in international law and policy, creating a clearly defined model. This approach is rooted in the consistent opposition of violence with law, thereby providing the foundation for a reliance on law as a tool of transition. However a range of critical perspectives have also been brought to bear on the emergent policy and practice of transitional justice. These critiques have highlighted the blind spots and the ways in which the model of transitional justice itself has set the boundaries of inclusion and exclusion in the transitional space. Deconstructing the nature of the relationship between violence and law casts considerable new light on some of the perennial problems of transitional justice. In particular it helps to provide a coherent framework for analysing why opposition to transitional justice arises. Using Derrida’s concept of the economy of violence this paper explores the relationship between the past, the present and the future in transitional justice discourse. It asks whether justice is ever possible in the present, or whether the quest for an elusive end goal of justice simply generates new forms of precarity that in turn threaten the model of transitional justice itself. 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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