Critical Legal Conference 2010

Law’s Environment: Critical Legal Perspectives

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30 September 2011
Law's Environment

The fol­low­ing is the intro­duc­tion to Ubal­dus de Vries & Lyana Fran­cot (Eds), Law’s Envir­on­ment: Crit­ical Legal Per­spect­ives (Eleven Inter­na­tional Pub­lish­ing, 2011), pub­lished sub­sequent to the Crit­ical Legal Con­fer­ence 2010 held in Utrecht. Intro­duc­tion Law’s envir­on­ment is char­ac­ter­ized by socio-​structural devel­op­ments that demand, now more than ever, a crit­ical per­spect­ive, not only on law but also on legal schol­ar­ship. The envir­on­ment of law refers to soci­ety in the widest sense of the word. Of course, one may refer to the envir­on­ment of law in ter­rit­orial terms: the envir­on­ment of law is that what is under the author­ity of the state, lim­it­ing soci­ety to national soci­ety. Indeed, mod­ern lines of thought took the nation state as point of depar­ture for ana­lysis ...
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Utrecht Law Review : CLC Special Edition

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15 April 2011

The spe­cial issue of the Utrecht Law Review, containing
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We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families: A Cannibal, Surreal & Subaltern Approach to Human Rights

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25 November 2010
Sliced-Censored-Version-by-Inanis

This paper explores – briefly – four ideas: the concept of the ‘turn to emo­tions’, the notion of a can­ni­bal the­ory, legal sur­real­ism and the sub­al­tern per­spect­ive on human rights. How we are to think and feel human rights today? This ques­tion is situ­ated in a spe­cific his­tor­ical con­text, that of our times, which is defined here as the age of Neo-​colonialism – the intens­i­fic­a­tion of the pro­cess of glob­al­isa­tion ini­ti­ated by the Con­quest of Amer­ica and the form­a­tion of the world mar­ket. Such a pro­cess does not only con­vene the mil­it­ary and eco­nomic dom­in­a­tion of most of the world by mod­ern empires. To a greater or lesser extent, the col­on­isa­tion of lan­guages, cul­tures and ways of think­ing has also been accom­plished. Col­on­isa­tion and the expan­sion through­out the world ...
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Nomadic Thinking

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16 September 2010
Little Dots: By kind permission of "generative artist" Kristin Henry.

This present­a­tion is a few notes on a ques­tion. The ques­tion being: What does it mean to say: the free space of think­ing? As my title sug­gests, I would like to relate the free space of think­ing to what one might simply call nomadic think­ing. To this end, I will draw upon Deleuze and Guattari’s Nomad­o­logy and, in addi­tion, the work of Jean-​Luc Nancy in order to effect a kind of cross-​fertilisation. What I will try to present is the fol­low­ing: first, an impossibly brief con­spectus of Nancy’s ideas on free­dom, space, and what it means to think; second, a brief remark on the rel­ev­ance of Deleuze and Guattari’s nomad war machine; and finally, an all too hasty con­clu­sion that will affirm the neces­sity to think cri­tique ...
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Great Expectations: Multiple Modernities of Law

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10 September 2010

Crit­ical Legal Con­fer­ence 10 – 12 Septem­ber, Utrecht 2010 Since 1984, every first week­end in Septem­ber, the Crit­ical Legal Con­fer­ence brings together crit­ical and rad­ical legal schol­ars from all over the world. It has been a phe­nom­enal suc­cess des­pite its mod­esty. The CLC is also exactly that: a con­fer­ence. No organ­isa­tion, pres­id­ents and sec­ret­ar­ies, mem­bers and sub­scrip­tions. This con­fer­ence is a tran­si­ent com­munity; an inop­er­at­ive com­munity always to come, last­ing for three days every year, without ortho­dox­ies, exclu¬sions or stars and gets down to the busi­ness of think­ing and being together. In doing so, a vari­ety of crit­ical schools, such as post­mod­ern­ism, phe­nomen­o­logy, decon¬struction, fem­in­ism, post-​colonialism, crit­ical race, queer the­ory, the eth­ics of oth­er­ness, the onto­logy of plural sin­gu­lar­ity, and the cri­tique of bio-​politics have ...
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