The Democracy To Come: Notes on the Thought of Jacques Derrida

By
3
16 April 2013
Francis Bacon Self-Portrait

“The demo­cracy to come” (la démo­cratie à venir) is per­haps the most endur­ing prin­ciple that emerges from Derrida’s later work. This dif­fi­cult little syn­tagm is developed in a num­ber of books, art­icles and inter­views, most not­ably in Spectres of Marx (1993) and The Polit­ics of Friend­ship (1994), finally given its fullest elab­or­a­tion in Rogues: Two Essays on Reason (2004). For a thor­ough elab­or­a­tion of the demo­cracy to come care­ful atten­tion would be needed to a num­ber of Derrida’s other key con­cepts and con­cerns, par­tic­u­larly différance, aporia and iter­ab­il­ity; con­nec­tions would need to be traced though Derrida’s dia­logue with Jean-​Luc Nancy and Maurice Blan­chot on the ques­tions of free­dom, fra­tern­ity and com­munity; the rela­tion­ship with Derrida’s “spec­tral” notion of justice would also need ...
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Sumak Kawsay, Interculturality and Decolonialization

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1
15 April 2013
Sumak

Many com­ment­at­ors have been high­light­ing the nov­elty of the Ecuadorian constitution’s recog­ni­tion of the right to nature and even the con­cepts of buen vivir and sumak kawsay (‘good liv­ing’ in Span­ish and Quechua respect­ively), ana­lyz­ing them as though they were simple vari­ations of lib­eral con­cepts that can be found in other Latin Amer­ican con­sti­tu­tions. How­ever, the sub­ject encom­passes themes that have not yet been suf­fi­ciently explored. First, the con­cepts of both sumak kawsay and suma qamaña, of the Quechua-​Aymara tra­di­tion, are loc­ated within an indi­gen­ous cos­mo­logy based on the fol­low­ing prin­ciples: (a) the rela­tion­ship of the whole as the life force by which it exists; (b) cor­res­pond­ence, where the dif­fer­ent aspects, regions and fields of real­ity cor­res­pond har­mo­ni­ously with ...
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On Human Rights: Two Simple Remarks

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3
10 April 2013
J-L Nancy

Today, political correctness demands that we say in French droits humains when we used to say droits de l’homme . This demand, which also occurs in other areas, is made because the French homme, like man in English, does not distinguish between the human race and the male gender. German is better equipped, differentiating between Mensch and Mann. Latin distinguishes between vir and homo, Greek between anèr and anthropos, etc. We could discuss the reasons for this. However, it is also important to note the introduction of another ambiguity. The adjective ‘human’ in French has a value that corresponds to the usual meaning we now give to the term ‘humanist’ and, more generally, to the ...
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Thatcher: a wound reopens

By
5
9 April 2013
Thatcher Parties

Last night in Brix­ton, Lon­don, George Sq. Glas­gow, Easton in Bris­tol, Derry in North­ern Ire­land, and in pubs and work­ing men’s clubs across Bri­tain, people cheered, raised a glass, partied, danced in the streets, to mark the death of Mar­garet Thatcher. Some people were shocked — young per­haps more than old — that in Bri­tain people could actu­ally over­come pre­vail­ing mor­al­ity and mass in the open streets to drink cham­pagne and sing the dozen or so songs writ­ten since the 80s in anti­cip­a­tion of this event. ‘Why?’, asked an Erit­rean friend, who said she remembered Thatcher the inter­na­tional Cold War­rior and friend of ‘liberty’. ‘Why would some Brit­ish people breach the fron­ti­ers of per­sonal respect and invade the ter­rit­ory of grief?’ Because it was pre­cisely this ...
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Deconstructing Copyright

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1
8 April 2013
Copyright Derrida

As Elton Fukumoto argues, the concept and ideology of the “author” developed in England during the 18th century as a product of John Locke’s notions about individualism, English Romanticism, and emerging copyright laws. Of those copyright laws, the most prominent is the Statute of Anne of 1710 (the first copyright law), which at the time utilized the notion of “authorship” (with the consequent Romantic associations of an original, irreplaceable creator of particular artistic and literary texts, and the Lockean individualistic notions of his/her inherent right to the products of his or her own labour) to protect the interests of booksellers. However, what are the consequences of post-structuralism and the critique of the homogenous, unitary “author”, and specifically within the ...
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Towards a Critical Arab Social ScienceArab

By
1
8 April 2013
Abstract Arabic

What does being a crit­ical social sci­ent­ist mean in the Arab world today? Or to ask the ques­tion dif­fer­ently: How can social sci­ent­ists think Arab soci­et­ies crit­ic­ally fol­low­ing or amidst the upheavals of the last few years? Such ques­tions do not demand pre­script­ive answers nor are such pre­script­ive answers pos­sible. Rather, they work to open up a space of reflec­tion that allows vari­ous social sci­ent­ists to be crit­ical in their own way in rela­tion to the par­tic­u­lar situ­ations they are ana­lys­ing. And it is to this space of reflec­tion that I want to con­trib­ute here. Per­haps it is use­ful to begin by mak­ing clear that ‘crit­ical’ is not the same as ‘rad­ical’. Crit­ical is an intel­lec­tual qual­ity of thought while rad­ical is a polit­ical ...
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Another Forum is Possible

By
6
5 April 2013
DSCF2038

I waited a couple of days before sit­ting in front of my laptop and try­ing to organ­ize the com­bin­a­tion of feel­ings that had been invad­ing me since I left Tunis and the 2013 World Social Forum. It was my first time, and, as every first exper­i­ence, I had charged it with expect­a­tions, hopes, desires, and curi­os­ity. Forty-​eight hours after my depar­ture, when the meet­ing had been offi­cially closed and the atten­tion is now focused on the pos­sib­il­ity that the WSF will have a long term impact over the Tunisian situ­ation, the time has come to col­lect my thoughts, and to say why I do not wish this WSF to become a term of ref­er­ence for the lib­er­a­tion pro­cess that hun­dreds of thou­sands of Tunisi­ans star­ted ...
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Debating BDS (Boy­cott, Divest­ment, Sanc­tions): Fraser v UCU

By
0
2 April 2013
images

On March 22nd, 2013 the Employ­ment Tribunal (UK-London) rendered judg­ment in the case of Fraser v Uni­ver­sity & Col­lege Union (UCU). Rul­ing in favour of UCU, the Tribunal’s judg­ment brought immense relief to UCU mem­bers, BDS (Boy­cott, Divest­ment, Sanc­tions) act­iv­ists, and oth­ers who were anxious about the poten­tial reper­cus­sions that a neg­at­ive out­come might have for free­dom of polit­ical expres­sion, par­tic­u­larly in the con­text of union act­iv­ism, anti-​racism and human rights. The rul­ing is an inter­est­ing read in its effort to come to grips with the spirit and let­ter of the 2010 Equal­it­ies Act legis­la­tion. The case is also sig­ni­fic­ant as one among many dif­fer­ent attempts to con­test BDS through the courts in a vari­ety of jur­is­dic­tions includ­ing France and the UK. The ...
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Abandonment: Notes on the Thought of Jean-​Luc Nancy

By
3
27 March 2013
Fernand Léger 1942 Dance

In his dis­tinct­ive con­cern for ety­mo­logy, Nancy notes that aban­don­ment con­tains the semantic unit ban­don, which is ‘an order, a pre­scrip­tion, a decree, a per­mis­sion, and the power that holds these freely at its dis­posal.’ (Nancy 1993, 44) A ban in this con­text should be under­stood as a gen­eral pro­clam­a­tion of the sov­er­eign rather than spe­cific pro­hib­i­tion. To aban­don, there­fore, is to be delivered over to the sov­er­eign ban and, as such, one always aban­dons to a law. What does such a law pre­scribe? Noth­ing but abandonment. Both law and aban­don­ment are con­ceived onto­lo­gic­ally, where ‘aban­don­ment remains the sole pre­dic­a­ment of being.’ (Ibid 36) Given the mul­tiple ways of think­ing and speak­ing being, aban­doned being is aban­don­ment to the very pos­sib­il­ity of such mul­ti­pli­city, to the law of exist­ence ...
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Happiness and Human Rights in Shangri-​La

By
1
25 March 2013
A Bhutanese refugee looks from a bamboo hut in the Ti Mai camp, Nepal. Photograph: Desmond Boylan/Reuters

In the early 1990s, Indra was forced to flee her home coun­try of Bhutan after her father had been imprisoned and tor­tured. “In prison they hung my father upside down and beat him. Then they hung him over chili smoke,” she explained. “After that they ordered him to leave the coun­try with all his fam­ily. That very night myself and my fam­ily left our house and our coun­try empty handed. There were many tears.” Soon there­after, Indra and her fam­ily found them­selves liv­ing in a refugee camp in neigh­bor­ing Nepal. More than 80,000 people endured the same fate as Indra when the Bhu­tanese gov­ern­ment for­cibly expelled eth­nic Nepalis in an act of eth­nic cleans­ing. The res­ult­ing refugee crisis has gone ...
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The Bias of Human Rights Watch

By
6
21 March 2013
hrw

Over the past thirty years, Human Rights Watch has become one of the most recog­nized non-​governmental organ­iz­a­tions in the world due to its global pro­mo­tion of human rights. But des­pite its claims to be an advoc­ate of inter­na­tional human rights law, the reports issued by Human Rights Watch over the past dec­ade have increas­ingly exhib­ited a bias towards cer­tain rights over oth­ers. More pre­cisely, Human Rights Watch repeatedly focuses on polit­ical and civil rights while ignor­ing social and eco­nomic rights. As a res­ult, it routinely judges nations through­out the world in a man­ner that fur­thers cap­it­al­ist val­ues and dis­cred­its gov­ern­ments seek­ing social­ist altern­at­ives. It is this bias that lies at the root of Human Rights Watch’s scath­ing attacks on the gov­ern­ment of ...
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The Public Life of Private Law: Seminar Series Update.

By
0
21 March 2013
images

By the end of Fri­day, we will be half-​way through our ESRC sem­inar series ‘The Pub­lic Life of Private Law’. The pro­gramme for our second sem­inar is here. The focus of the second sem­inar will be on the uses of private law in seek­ing repar­a­tions for ‘human rights abuses’. In set­ting this theme we had in mind a vari­ety of legal scen­arios. To name three, we are inter­ested in: the use of neg­li­gence to hold the state to account for the actions of its sol­diers; Bici v. Min­is­ter for Defence and Al-​Jedda , and to obtain rem­ed­ies for per­sonal injur­ies suffered by the employ­ees of Brit­ish com­pan­ies abroad; Lubbe and Oth­ers v. Cape and Guer­rer­rao v. Monter­rico. the use of neg­li­gence to obtain rem­ed­ies for past injustices, such ...
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Cypriots Discover the Debt Jubilee

By
1
17 March 2013
ATM Out of Service

Come again? Cyp­ri­ots dis­cover the debt jubilee? Well yes actu­ally, that is basic­ally how depos­it­ors at Cyp­riot banks have been treated by the Troika, even if the decision to grab up to 9.9% of cash depos­its to fin­ance a bail out of the fin­ance sec­tor is being presen­ted as a tax or levy. To under­stand this we have to view mat­ters from the banks’ per­spect­ive: every depos­itor is lend­ing money to the bank for a fee (paltry interest and illus­ory secur­ity) and this appears on the bal­ance sheet as a liab­il­ity which in toto in the case of Cyp­riot banks con­sid­er­ably exceeds assets. Treated as lenders, Cyp­riot deposit-​holders are being asked (ordered) to take a hair­cut on the debt so that the banks’ bal­ance ...
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Chávez and the Future of Chávismo

By
1
13 March 2013
Open Revolt

The most cha­ris­matic, demo­cratic polit­ical leader in dec­ades is dead. Whenever cha­risma plays a role in a demo­cratic con­text, it estab­lishes a par­tic­u­larly mobil­iz­ing polit­ical rela­tion­ship between rulers and the ruled, as it adds to demo­cratic legit­im­acy an iden­tity of belong­ing and a shar­ing of goals that go way bey­ond polit­ical rep­res­ent­a­tion. Well used to being hit by a dis­tant, oppress­ive power (which tends to thrive in low intens­ity demo­cra­cies), the pop­u­lar classes come to exper­i­ence a bridging of the gap between the rep­res­en­ted and their rep­res­ent­at­ives. Oppon­ents will then speak of pop­u­lism and author­it­ari­an­ism, but they will sel­dom con­vince any voters. This is because, in a demo­cratic con­text, cha­risma allows for levels of demo­cratic civic edu­ca­tion that are oth­er­wise very dif­fi­cult to attain. Such unique ...
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Jurisfiction: Notes on the Thought of Jean-​Luc Nancy

By
4
11 March 2013
Jurisprudence

Jean-​Luc Nancy notes three ways that fic­tions have been asso­ci­ated with law: 1) jur­is­pru­den­tial exer­cises that require ima­gin­ing the extent of the applic­ab­il­ity of the law, 2) the mys­ter­i­ous ground of the con­sti­tu­tion, and 3) in Roman law, the exten­sion of the law to cases it did not cover. (Nancy 156) Bey­ond this, Nancy demon­strates that jur­is­dic­tion itself — the extent of the power to make a legal decision or judg­ment — is ulti­mately a fic­tional con­struct. This he calls ‘jurisfiction’. What are the steps involved in the move­ment from jur­is­dic­tion to jur­is­fic­tion? Jur­is­dic­tion is lit­er­ally jus dicere, the declar­a­tion of right as law. Nancy notes that dicere (related to the Greek root deik-​, show) is con­stitutively jur­idical since it con­tains within it the ideas ...
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