Coughing out the Law: Perversity and Sociality around an Eating Table

By
0
18 January 2013
Ham Sandwich

It was lunch­time at Sydney’s David Jones, Australia’s up-​market depart­ment store chain. So I headed down to the ‘food floor’. Whenever I have to shop at DJs I try to make sure I go there around mid­day, pre­cisely so I can go down to the food floor and order the excep­tion­ally suc­cu­lent off the bone ham sand­wich at the roast carvery sec­tion. You can buy it and sit and eat it at a large ‘com­munal’ table nearby. So here I was enjoy­ing my super sand­wich with a bottle of min­eral water and read­ing the approach­ing Sydney Film Fest­ival pro­gram when oppos­ite me across the roughly 1.5 meter wide table came and sat an older woman. She seemed in her sev­en­ties, well, but con­ser­vat­ively, dressed, and not a single ...
Read More »

Mining Projects and Popular Movements in Colombia: Chasing AngloGold Ashanti

By
1
17 January 2013
13ede7788c591f582248c40209bdc538_L

The road to Doima (Colom­bia), at best unpaved and bumpy, is today crossed by rivers in flood. The rivers have sub­merged the low con­crete bridges and at the second bridge the river is so high the bus has to stop and wait for the waters to sub­side. The rain­storm that caused the flood gradu­ally dies and so the river begins to sink again. It leaves behind a large branch block­ing the bridge. A truck comes for­ward to haul it out of the way and is then the first to cross the rush­ing waters. Cheers go up as it reaches the other side safely and every­one piles back into the bus. Once across that river there is another river in flood to ...
Read More »

The People Returns: A footnote to protests in Slovenia

By
5
16 January 2013
cv_mors

His­tory repeats itself first as tragedy and then as farce, Marx wrote in his Eight­eenth Bru­maire. This fam­ous remark fits well to the cur­rent situ­ation in Slov­e­nia, when the coun­try exper­i­ences the largest protests since 1989. The per­son stand­ing in the centre of these protests is the same, Janez Janša. In 1989 he was a journ­al­ist of the left­ist weekly Mlad­ina, who revealed mil­it­ary secrets of the Yugoslav army. Today he is Slov­e­nian prime min­is­ter, who has become a syn­onym for both polit­ical cor­rup­tion and the cor­rup­tion of polit­ics. The 1989 mass demos took the legal pro­cess against Janša and three other prot­ag­on­ists of the affair as a case of what was wrong with the former social­ist régime. Today the protests demon­strate ...
Read More »

Slovenians Demand Radical Changepr

By
2
15 January 2013
Slovenia Dec 2012

Dur­ing the clos­ing months of 2012, Slov­e­nia has seen a series of mass pop­u­lar protests. Thirty thou­sand demon­strat­ors gathered on Novem­ber 17 for the first protest, organ­ised by trade uni­ons, stu­dents, and organ­isa­tions of retired people and artists. Dozens of protests fol­lowed, large and small, tak­ing place in vir­tu­ally all of the urban set­tle­ments of Slov­e­nia, often organ­ized spon­tan­eously through Face­book and other social media. We would like to cla­rify to inter­na­tional observ­ers that these demon­stra­tions are not “rebel­lions against aus­ter­ity meas­ures and neces­sary reforms“, as the rul­ing rightwing neo-​liberal auto­cratic gov­ern­ment of Janez Janša has tried to depict them. The demands made by Slov­e­nian cit­izens on the streets of their coun­try are not merely for improved eco­nomic con­di­tions, but ...
Read More »

Compliance: The Uncomfortable Reality of Docile Bodies

By
14 January 2013
Claude-Nicolas Ledoux (1736–1806), Coup d’oeil du Théâtre de Besançon, 1804

The movie 'Compliance' is disturbing on many different levels, and left me with a feeling of extreme discomfort, and even disorientation, long after the credits rolled, no less because it is based on true events, referred to by the American media as the “strip search prank call scam’. As the story unfolds in the movie in the same sequence as it did in reality, Sandra, the manager of an Ohio "Chickwich" fast-food outlet, receives a call from a man falsely claiming to be a police detective. Referring to himself as “Officer Daniels” or “Sir”, he accuses a young female cashier, Becky, of stealing money from a customer. He then enlists Sandra's assistance in physically detaining Becky in the store ...
Read More »

The People’s Law Tribunals in Pakistan

By
4
10 January 2013
Okara 09/01

QM: A set of move­ments you have been involved with in Pun­jab is the sath, a form of people’s law. What is a sath and how does it trans­late? What areas are gov­erned by sath? What is your involve­ment? Finally, can you explain how the exper­i­ence of law and justice dif­fers between state law and the people’s sath? AF: The exper­i­ence of sath began in South­ern Pun­jab. Before we begin to explain the sath, it is import­ant to under­stand the pos­i­tion of South­ern Pun­jab within Pun­jab and Pakistan. The com­munit­ies settled in the South are heav­ily impov­er­ished, mar­gin­al­ised and sub­ject to a pecu­liar form of dis­place­ment within their own ter­rit­ory. This form of extrac­tion involves the set­tle­ment of Cent­ral Pun­j­abis and the estab­lish­ment ...
Read More »

We must resist the cunning of judicial reform

By
0
9 January 2013
Indian women mourning gang rape victim, New Delhi, 2 Jan 2013, Photo by Dar Yasin | AP

The death of the 23 year old woman fol­low­ing the bru­tal gang rape and assault on a mov­ing bus on 16 Decem­ber 2012 at a hos­pital in Singa­pore early this morn­ing leaves all of us in states of deep mourn­ing. This is a polit­ical death. Rape and murder of women is polit­ical viol­ence against all women, whether or not, the polit­ical class recog­nises and accepts this. In the course of the last two weeks, many body blows have been endured. We felt a body blow after the polit­ical death of the 17-​year-​old gang rape vic­tim in Patiala who took her life after she was humi­li­ated and pres­sur­ised to com­prom­ise. The numb­ing list of such polit­ical viol­ence continues. We have ...
Read More »

Ireland, Suicide and the Virtual Reality of a Political Elite

By
1
8 January 2013
fear

It has been appar­ent to many people in Ire­land, across Europe and much fur­ther afield that the pro­fes­sional polit­ical class are liv­ing in a sort of vir­tual real­ity. we have a polit­ical sys­tem that has been described as cor­rupt in all areas of pub­lic life in the Mahon report . We have elec­ted gov­ern­ment min­is­ters who come onto the state broad­caster stat­ing clearly that lying is an elect­oral strategy, and we have polit­ical organ­isa­tions that oppor­tun­ist­ic­ally use the massive rise in sui­cides in the state to try to deflect the role their decisions play in the rising tide of mater­ial and emo­tion misery of our soci­ety. We have suc­cess­ive gov­ern­ment min­is­ters ...
Read More »

Chastity, Virginity, Marriageability, and Rape Sentencing

By
0
7 January 2013
Protestors want capital punishment for rapists | Saurabh Das : AP

The hor­rific gang rape incid­ent in Delhi has led to demands for amend­ing the law to provide for more strin­gent pun­ish­ment for rape, includ­ing intro­du­cing the death pen­alty. Over the last few days, there have been vari­ous debates about the advis­ab­il­ity of mak­ing such changes to the law. An issue that has not been high­lighted in these debates is the exist­ing state of rape sen­ten­cing. Any attempt at law reform needs to include an exam­in­a­tion of this issue. In this piece, I provide a brief account of a few prob­lems plaguing the cur­rent rape sen­ten­cing régime in India. This is based on my doc­toral study at Yale Law School, in which I examined all rape cases decided by all High Courts and the ...
Read More »

Law: Jean-​Luc Nancy

By
3
19 December 2012
Lex Dictionary Entry

Law The concept of law is tor­tured by an internal com­plex­ity that renders it par­tic­u­larly dif­fi­cult to define (Hart 1983, 89 – 98). When con­sid­er­ing how Jean-​Luc Nancy thinks about law, we have the added prob­lem of a semantic slip­page that is the bane of trans­lat­ors between com­mon and civil law jur­is­dic­tions. The dif­fer­ent use of legal sig­ni­fi­ers between lan­guages is there­fore significant. The com­mon law ori­gin­ates from a cus­tom­ary and case-​based sys­tem that is prag­mat­ic­ally evol­u­tion­ary. Civil law hails from a Roman-​law inspired sys­tem of codes that are writ­ten down in order to be read. In Roman law this is known as lex, which comes from legere, mean­ing to read. Yet if lex is read, from an early Roman point of view, lex ...
Read More »

The ‘Politics’ in Ethiopia’s Political Trials

By
0
10 December 2012
Fed Court

The Ethiopian régime is using the legal sys­tem to elim­in­ate dis­sid­ent voices and drag pro­test­ers to court under ter­ror­ism charges. Far from guar­an­tee­ing equal­ity and justice, the country’s courts serve as an instru­ment in the Government’s hands to legit­im­ize per­se­cu­tion of polit­ical adversar­ies while jus­ti­fy­ing its prac­tices to the west. The deploy­ment of laws and the devices of justice for oppress­ive polit­ical pro­jects are as old as antiquity. From Socrates to Jesus of Naz­areth, from Joan of Arc to Susanne Anthony, from Nel­son Man­dela to Ethiopia’s own Bur­tukan Midaksa and Eskindir Nega, the site of the courtroom has been used to intim­id­ate, har­ass, silence, exile, and elim­in­ate polit­ical foes per­ceived to be a threat to the author­it­ies of the day. The ...
Read More »

Greece and the Future of Europe

By
0
3 December 2012
Direct Democracy, Syntagma Square

In the summer of 1918, Constantin Cavafy met E. M. Forster in Alexandria. Cavafy compared the Greeks with the English. The two peoples are alike, quick-witted, resourceful, adventurous. ‘But there is one unfortunate difference. We Greeks have gone bankrupt. Pray, my dear Forster, oh pray, that you never lose your capital.’ Giorgio Agamben, commenting on Cavafy’s mysterious statement, writes: ‘The only certainty is that since , all the peoples of Europe and perhaps the whole world have gone bankrupt'. Greece was declared bankrupt in 2010 albeit in ‘orderly fashion’ and only temporarily. Temporary default is a little like temporary death. It lasts forever. What if Greece, and perhaps Europe, have been bankrupted not economically but morally, culturally, politically? What ...
Read More »

Pasolini’s Salò: Torture is Political

By
6
29 November 2012
Salo

Pasolini’s con­tro­ver­sial final film Salò (1975), based on Mar­quis de Sade’s The 120 Days of Sodom (1785), poses sig­ni­fic­ant ques­tions regard­ing the inter­sec­tion between sad­istic tor­ture and sov­er­eignty. The film is divided into four seg­ments, heav­ily inspired by Dante’s Inferno: Ante-​Inferno, Circle of Manias, Circle of Shit, and Circle of Blood. Salò focuses on four cor­rupt sov­er­eigns after the fall of Italy’s fas­cist ruler Benito Mus­solini in 1944. Four fas­cist lib­ertines — the Duke, the Bishop, the Magis­trate, the Pres­id­ent — kid­nap the most beau­ti­ful young people in town and take them to a villa, to an enclosed space called ‘The Repub­lic of Salò’, a Nazi pup­pet state. From now on, the Repub­lic of Salò becomes a fas­cist enclave from which there is no escape. Thus starts ...
Read More »

Human Rights or a Bill of Rights?

By
2
27 November 2012
Failed asylum seeker living rough in UK-Birmingham 2010, photo by Fabio de Paola

The debate over the future of the Human Rights Act (‘HRA’) has been some­what sur­real. The Labour pos­i­tion is schizo­phrenic. Labour intro­duced the Act but was jus­ti­fi­ably accused of viol­at­ing most of its prin­ciples in its obses­sion with secur­ity. But schizo­phrenia is not a Labour prerog­at­ive. The Tory pro­pos­als are equally con­fus­ing. Memor­ies of the Thatcher years with their many viol­a­tions and huge cent­ral­iz­a­tion made David Cameron prom­ise that his Bill of Rights would strengthen liber­ties and ensure proper demo­cratic account­ab­il­ity over new rights. Imme­di­ately behind the civ­il­ized part, the loony Right attacks the Act as a vil­lains’ charter, stop­ping the deport­a­tion of ter­ror­ists, offer­ing porn to mur­der­ers and vot­ing rights to con­victs. The Act is a left-​wing con­spir­acy, it claims, cre­ated ...
Read More »

Blustering over the European Convention on Human Rights

By
1
27 November 2012
Watercolors by John Guthrie

One would think that it’s the Battle of Bri­tain all over again. On 21 Novem­ber 2012 the Daily Mail car­ried the head­line “Defi­ant Chris Grayling says Bri­tain can ignore Stras­bourg fines if we ban pris­on­ers from hav­ing the vote”. Cameron said that the idea of enfran­chise­ment of any pris­on­ers made him feel “phys­ic­ally ill”. Non­ethe­less, on the same day, 21 Novem­ber, Grayling intro­duced a Bill offer­ing at least three options for MPs to vote on: the right to vote for pris­on­ers serving four years or less, the right to vote for pris­on­ers serving six months or less, or no right to vote at all. And Joshua Rozen­burg com­men­ted on 22 Novem­ber that by giv­ing this choice the Gov­ern­ment appeared to be ...
Read More »