Critical Legal Theory

Adikia: On Communism and Rights

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2
30 November 2010
Beat-the-Whites-with-the-red-wedge

1. Back in the Eighties and Nineties, Marx­ist intel­lec­tu­als, shaken by the Gulag rev­el­a­tions and the col­lapse of the com­mun­ist states, star­ted wel­com­ing human rights. Claude Lefort, Jean-​Francois Lyo­tard, Etienne Balibar and Jacques Ran­cière1 amongst oth­ers par­ti­cip­ated in this move. It coin­cided with the ‘end of his­tory’ brag­ging of lib­eral cap­it­al­ists and the revi­sion­ist his­tor­ies of the French Revolu­tion, which emphas­ized its fail­ures, ter­ror and total­it­ari­an­ism. It was a time of defeat and demor­al­iz­a­tion for the left. All that has been solid in rad­ical think­ing star­ted melt­ing in the air. This period of defeat, intro­spec­tion and pen­ance came to an end with the fin­an­cial and eco­nomic crisis. The return of rad­ical the­ory and polit­ics revived the sus­pi­cion towards the facile mor­al­ism and ...
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Re-​Post: Political Economy, Lemon Socialism and the New Global Banana Republic

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0
29 November 2010

Admin: We think it is import­ant to repost this text from our early days (ori­gin­ally pos­ted in March 2009). The term ‘Lemon Social­ism’ power­fully con­veys the sense of social­ism for the rich and cap­it­al­ism for the poor. 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 most of the spec­tat­ors. The fin­an­cial and eco­nomic crisis rep­res­ents the oppos­ite phe­nomenon: appar­ently touch­ing the lives of all spec­tat­ors but largely invis­ible.There are only so many images ...
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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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1
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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Manifesto of Legal Surrealism

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2
25 November 2010
Max Ernst - Elephant (1921)

First Mani­festo (1988)  The ped­agogy of the ima­gin­ary: per­spect­ives of late sur­real­ism for legal teaching Not long ago I took part in an aca­demic selec­tion for the chair of Polit­ical Sci­ence at the Uni­ver­sity of Buenos Aires. The examin­ing board expressed that it could not assess my ped­ago­gic pro­posal for it was too innov­at­ive, its effi­ciency had not yet been attested aca­dem­ic­ally – an example of eru­di­tion try­ing to defeat auda­city. Logics is to the world as the skull to the body… I for­give them, I under­stand them, but I need to betray them. I feel that I have to repay my debt to all silences, which I imposed myself so far, in order to con­quer the com­pet­ence of my dis­course. Now that I have it, I regret it. I am ...
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An Introduction: Legal Surrealism

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2
24 November 2010
Acephale

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, par­tic­u­larly in the man­ner in which they open onto a post­co­lo­nial cri­tique of law. The ini­tial two texts come from the first wave of French surrealism. The first is not really legal as such. Breton’s Mani­festo of Sur­real­ism is the self-​proclaimed leader of surrealism’s attempt to con­sti­tute a move­ment. It was signed by many of the most prom­in­ent sur­real­ists. The second is a text by the French sur­real­ist col­lect­ive ...
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Anthropophagite Manifesto

By
3
24 November 2010
Hans Staden: Cannibali del Brasile (1557)

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 of man. Law of the anthropophagite. We are tired of all the sus­pi­cious cath­olic hus­bands put in drama. Freud put an end to the woman enigma and to other frights of prin­ted psychology. What hindered truth was cloth­ing, the imper­meable ele­ment between the interior world and the exter­ior world. The reac­tion against the dressed man. Amer­ican movies will inform. Sons of the sun, mother of ...
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Law

By
1
22 November 2010
Inside

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 by Brillouin’s the­orem.1 Law over­comes this fact and there­fore leaves a debt unpaid, that one that goes from real inac­cur­acy to impossible accur­acy. Because of that, law is viol­ent; it needs to hide what it owes. A sys­tem of particles (phys­ics) or a sys­tem of sub­jects (social) evolves with aleat­ory cloud move­ments. It is an impossible task to per­fectly order these sys­tems: lin­guistic codes that organ­ise the ...
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In Memoriam — Jose Luis Brea (1957 – 2010)

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0
25 September 2010

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 magazine he foun­ded, was not by any means a farewell or some auto­bi­o­graph­ical sketch, but the com­pre­hens­ive re-​issuing of a text that served as a the­or­et­ical basis for the exhib­i­tion ‘The Last Days’ (Seville, 1992). Dur­ing those years, José Luis Brea proved him­self to be ahead of his time when it came to lead­ing the way in new cur­at­orial prac­tices, with his exhib­i­tion ‘Before and After the ...
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Rights to be Specs of Human Capital

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0
20 September 2010
Wendy Brown

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. Rights are not demo­crat­iz­ing power, but about pro­tect­ing against power. The danger, how­ever, is when human rights takes over from broader justice pro­jects. Prof Brown expounds her work on tol­er­ance, dif­fer­ence and the dis­curs­ive power struc­tures within that; The ones doing the tol­er­at­ing always gets to call the shots. This leads to a ques­tion­ing of the Tea Party and Anti ‘Ground Zero Mosque’ move­ments in ...
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Nomadic Thinking

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3
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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Human Rights and the Crisis of Modernity

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1
19 October 2009

‘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 Human Rights emerged. For Rorty, we live in a Post-​Holocaust human rights cul­ture. It was in this spirit that the 60th anniversary of the Declar­a­tion was com­mem­or­ated last year. Such a con­tex­tu­al­iz­a­tion of inter­na­tional human rights law is sus­tained by a cer­tain inter­pret­a­tion of the crisis of mod­ern­ity. Crit­ical The­ory and Post­mod­ern philo­sophy –from Adorno and Haber­mas, to Der­rida, Lyo­tard and Agamben- share the assump­tion that ‘Aus­chwitz’ occu­pies ...
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Jerry Springer Politics in Greece

By
7
19 October 2009

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 Papandreou (grand­father and father of the oppos­i­tion leader) in the 70s and 80s. The Kara­man­lis and Papandreou fam­il­ies have dom­in­ated polit­ical life for 60 years, cre­at­ing two dyn­asties that have noth­ing to envy from the clas­sical Atreides or the Kennedy clans. Yet this remark­able fact was barely men­tioned dur­ing the cam­paign. Papandreou junior is uni­ver­sally called “Yior­ga­kis” or little George, a ref­er­ence to the — per­haps unjus­ti­fied – belief ...
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Hard Lessons From The Hard Right

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0
16 July 2009
BNP Rally

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 the pres­id­en­tial elec­tions. Most com­ment­at­ors at the time attrib­uted Le Pen’s suc­cess to the gen­eral dis­af­fec­tion with polit­ics, while those on the left lamen­ted the fact that the “false” issues stirred up by the hard right (the for­eign threat, Islamic con­tam­in­a­tion, etc.) appealed much more to voters than the “real” issues (neo-​liberal eco­nomic exploit­a­tion, uneven glob­al­iz­a­tion, etc). There was a col­lect­ive sigh of relief when Le ...
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The Left and Constitutional Reform

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0
4 June 2009
Monet, Houses of Parliament, Sunset 1903

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 at present), a few more rad­ical. This is rather strange for com­ment­at­ors who on the whole try to keep the influ­ence of law­yers at bay. New Polit­ics exhib­its the law­yerly men­tal­ity at its most imper­ial: if our polit­ics has gone wrong change the rules, improve pro­ced­ures, ulti­mately have a writ­ten con­sti­tu­tion and things will fast improve. Con­sti­tu­tional fet­ish­ism is a tri­umph of pro­ced­ure over sub­stance, of the legal ...
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At the Blunt Edge of the Cosh: Police Violence and the Anti-​G20 Protests

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0
15 April 2009
G20 Police Confront Protestors

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 the police and call for the Inde­pend­ent Police Com­plaints Com­mis­sion to invest­ig­ate any incid­ents of viol­ence (This is a link to the Guardian’s archive: Guard­ian Video Archive of Police Viol­ence). The prob­lem is that we have for­got­ten what the role of the police is. To jog our memory, we could look to Wal­ter Benjamin’s sem­inal Cri­tique of Violence, but Anti­phon has done this bet­ter than we could though ...
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