Costas Douzinas: The Dalkey Archive by Flan O’Brien (First publication 1964, Fourth Estate, 2007) 

‘Suspended Sentences”, a theatrical play that was published as a chapter in Postmodern Jurisprudence by Costas Douzinas and Ronnie Warrington with Shaun McVeigh (Routledge, 1991), was written with the help of  “whiskoletterosmotron”. The invention of this amazing contraption, recently extenisively commented on by Peter Goodrich (“The overfetestation of Costas Douzinas” in Alexis Kanagawa and Illan Wall eds, Rights, Critique, Resistance: The Critical Theory of Costas Douzinas (Routledge, 2026, 44), owes a great deal to the eminent physicist, ballistician, philosopher and psychologist De Selby. De Selby was initially presented to the world in a number of learned footnotes in The Third Policeman (Written 1940, Harper Perennial, 2007). He comes fully to life as the protagonist of magical Irishism in The Dalkey Archive. The amazing de Selby develops radical theories challenging the scientific and theological orthodoxy, such as that the night is caused by the accummulation of “black air”. His major invention is DMP, a substance that extracts oxygen from airtight spaces stopping the passing of time and leading to the distillation of the best whiskey in a week. His major discovery is the “atomic theory of the bicycle”. It explains that osmosis takes place between atoms of people and atoms of bicycles riden by the same policemen for decades. As a result, bicycles can stand upright without support while policemen have to lean on the wall to stand.   Hackett and Mick, the main characters in Dalkey Archive, are taken by De Selby to an underwater cave where DMP has created timelessness. They meet St Augustine who debates De Selby on theology, later James Joyce who runs a pub in Skerries, does not know his literary fame and acknowledges only Dubliners as his own work. Joyce is keen to expel the Holy Spirit from Church doctrine but fails. The “whiskoletterosmotron”, similarly, is an “apparatus for the osmosis of graphic characters representing sounds used in speech with spirits distilled from grains”. Spirits and letters, the spirit and the body, whiskey and law. This Deselbian invention, a kind of automatic jurisprudential  writing, an “aesthetics, feminsim, critical race theory and intersectionalityavant la lettre” (Goodrich 47). The Dalkey Archive written by O’Brien, the Irish Borges, is not just a book for the beach and the swimming pool. With radical insights on philosophy, theology and ballistics, on policing, criminal justice and physics it inspires the reconceptualisation of legal theory. 
 

Luis Eslava: Ants, Roads, and Aliens: Three Suggestions

Let me share three recent readings: one that lasts an afternoon, one a weekend, and one several seasons. I have read them during my Australian winter, which remains stubbornly a North in the South. Perhaps that is why they all orbit, one way or another, around empire. I now pass them to friends enjoying the summery North, which this year is facing an end-of-the-world heat, once thought to belong only to the sweaty South.

On this theme of the South and the North, and their climatic and otherwise divides, let me begin with H.G. Wells’s The Empire of Ants (1905).

Written by an already mature Wells, The Empire of Ants belongs in many ways to the late Victorian imperial universe of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899). Yet where Conrad turned empire into a moral landscape through which his protagonists wandered in search of ethical certainties, Wells treated it as a cognitive structure demanding denunciation. In The Empire of Ants, a Portuguese captain and his motley crew, armed with every imperial cliché about the hot South, its peoples, and its mosquitoes, are dispatched into the thick of the Amazon, only to discover how pitifully unprepared both they and the world that produced them are before a forest where the more-than-human reigns large.

Christian Kracht’s Eurotrash (2021) is an extraordinary road novel written, intentionally, for a miserable present, in which empire still drags on. Deeply personal, cathartic, disheartening, and furiously humane and intelligent, Kracht stages the misadventures of a mother and son drifting through the heart of contemporary Europe, a Europe unable to escape empire, fascism, or its own hideous irrelevance. If Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958) rendered the violence of empire from the most public to the most intimate, Eurotrash, in the shadow of Benjamin’s Angel of History, compels us to sift through the debris it has dragged to the metropole today: hidden fortunes, inherited guilt, all sorts of intergenerational wealth and trauma, absurd orientalisms, and the quiet terror of colostomy bags.

Liu Cixin’s Remembrance of Earth’s Past, better known through the title of its opening volume, The Three-Body Problem (English translation, 2014), is among the great achievements of contemporary science fiction. Celebrated first in China, a universe unto itself, and later carried across the globe through its Netflix adaptation, the trilogy is nothing less than an outstanding thought experiment about the futures that become imaginable once humanity encounters extraterrestrial life, and what happens along the way not only to the laws of physics but also to the laws of more worldly fields, including law, politics, economics, sociology, and anthropology. If you want to experience first-hand the contingency of the world we have built, with all its empires and miseries, through the imagination of one of China’s finest contemporary minds, this is your trilogy.