We thought it might be an interesting idea of post a number of texts of a legal surrealism. We will publish a series of texts from and on the juridical writings of surrealism. As a jurisprudence it has, essentially, been written out of the canon. However, if time is taken over the texts we think they reward a careful reading,…
Only anthropophagy unites us. Socially. Economically. Philosophically. The world’s only law. The masked expression of all individualisms, of all collectivisms. Of all religions. Of all peace treaties. Tupy, or not tupy that is the question.1 Against all catechisms. And against the mother of the Gracchi. The only things that interest me are those that are not mine. Law…
Law comes from “lex” (“legere”; to read). Who could read the law? And who can write it? The one empowered to do so. The law is always inaccurate because accuracy could only be achieved at the cost of an infinite negentropy, and it would an infinite amount of information and time, as it is evidenced…
At the end of August 2010, the publication of what would sadly turn out to be the penultimate text written by José Luis Brea, Professor of Aesthetics and Contemporary Art Theory at the Universidad Carlos III of Madrid, awoke in many of us a deep feeling of sorrow and anxiety. The article in salonKritik, the online…
I want to draw attention to the recent interview with Prof. Wendy Brown on Human Rights in Ireland. Prof. Brown engages initially with the question of critique, and its relation to rights. She refuses to reject rights, but instead seeks to question the premises upon which they stand and the power relations in which they emerge.…
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…
‘Truth’ emerges when a victim, from his present catastrophic position, gains a sudden insight into the entire past as a series of catastrophes that led to his current predicament. (Walter Benjamin) The horrors of the Second World War and, in particular, the ‘real hell’ of Auschwitz’, are usually seen as the background from which the Universal Declaration of…
A sense of déjà vu has dominated the Greek election campaign. The protagonists, Prime Minister Costas Karamanlis and leader of the opposition George Papandreou, have been repeating earlier skirmishes between Costas Karamanlis senior (uncle of the prime minister), the rightwing leader of postwar Greece, and George Papandreou senior in the 50s and 60s, and Andreas…
When the British National Party finally managed two successes in the June 2009 European Elections, the mainstream media reaction was one of astonishment followed by intense curiosity and soul searching. This was a UK version of the 2002 success of the Front National in France, when Jean-Marie Le Pen managed to get through the first round of…
What surprised me most in the Guardian New Politics articles was that the majority have little to do with politics. They are suggestions for changes in constitutional law — some relatively minor (reducing the number of MPs, shortening their holidays or abolishing the archaic protocol — although this reform zeal may end up with a Parliament even less fun than…
Much has been made in recent days of the violence of the police at the financial fools day G20 protests. In particular the manner in which police officers struck and pushed Ian Tomlinson and a number of others while policing their ‘kettle’. However, perhaps we are getting it wrong when we try to find the ‘bad apples’ in…
There has been much discussion and fear-mongering about this expected summer of rage. The idea is put forward by the media and political classes that we must expect the worst. However, in the light of the recent resurgence of the left and the countervailing ideology perpetuated by mainstream politics and the media, it is worthwhile…
Over the last two hundred years, the theory of right, now known as normative jurisprudence, has discovered its vocation in a frantic attempt to legitimise the exercise of power. It carries out this task by declaring that law and power are external to each other ontologically, politically, morally, the two are involved in a zero-sum game. In…
What is left in Europe? Once upon a time in the 1970s, the left was clear: the European Community was a neo-liberal project,driven by capital interests and destructive of the social settlements established following years of class conflict within individual European nation states. The Community was to be actively resisted in the effort to secure long fought…
The first decade of the 21st century witnessed two mass media events that stand out from the rest: the first was visible, the second was invisible. 9/11 and its aftermath offered a feast of visible shock and awe. These images were devoured by media consumers, but the human realities they portrayed remained at a safe distance from…
At a time when the end of History and the rise of Empire have been proclaimed, as borders lose their significance and cultural specificity increasingly gives way to the grim homogeneity bequeathed by capital, we are bizarrely told that we should feel at home. The reduction of differences and the championing of plenitude and entitlement accompany…