CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING

LAW AND THE POLITICAL

CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING

LAW AND THE POLITICAL

Metaracial: Notes on the Thought of Rei Terada

Metaracial: Notes on the Thought of Rei Terada

Rei Terada’s concept metaracial emerges from her 2023 book, Metaracial: Hegel, Antiblackness, and Political Identity, the result of a sustained engagement with Hegel’s enduring influence on how we think about race — or rather, how race structures our thinking. In this respect, Terada’s work can be placed closely alongside Denise Ferreira da Silva’s, particularly the latter’s book Toward a Global Idea of Race (2007). An important contribution to the catalogue of critical race studies and black studies, Metaracial helps clarify the racial trajectories inhibiting the radical imagination, and the violent promise of collectivity when it is met with antiblackness. While metaracial posits the racial, rather than racism, as its primary object of concern, Terada finds the distinction between the two terms ‘difficult to maintain’ (2023, 4). If only because, engaged by both liberal and radical thinking, both terms—the racial and racism—position race as extraneous to a Subject...

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CRITICAL LEGAL CONFERENCE 2023

Durham 11–13 September

ARTICLES

Women’s Body Under Secondary Colonialism 

Women’s Body Under Secondary Colonialism 

This is Behnaz Amani, one of the political prisoners of Iran’s recent revolt, “Woman, Life, Freedom”. I’ve been in Gharchak prison for 46 days and have seen things which make me wonder and ponder upon the concept of the female body and capitalism and how the state can...

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Uprisings in Iran and their historical origins

Uprisings in Iran and their historical origins

The world media is once again full of images, stories, discussions, and trending hashtags about ongoing mass protests in Iran. Those who are familiar with Iran’s social-historical context know that this country is the land of popular uprisings, political struggles,...

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The Disaster of the Century

The Disaster of the Century

In Lieu of a Beginning… On February 5, 2023, we experienced two earthquakes in Turkey that were massive and their consequences extremely severe. The government officials called it “the disaster of the century”. The earthquake we experienced was itself destructive but...

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We do this for each other

We do this for each other

It’s a tip, a trickle. I’ve read international law and international relations in three institutions and three countries. In each, I’ve twisted and turned, tripped and fallen willingly into rabbit holes and inexplicable complexities. People wrapped in clothes that...

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Critical Phenomenology as a Good Friend

Critical Phenomenology as a Good Friend

Aspiration concept and ambition idea as a chopped trunk casting a shadow of a tree as an achievement recovery and hope for futur success symbol in a 3D illustration style. When people ask me ‘why phenomenology?’ I usually point to emerging research in psychology and...

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Art as Legal Method

Art as Legal Method

Initially, our project was an experiment. What would happen if an artist created a visual response to a piece of legal scholarship that criticised how law regulates public spaces? What insights into art, law and justice might be generated?  What started as an art...

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Orienting oneself in the archive

Orienting oneself in the archive

"Let us then make up our minds to go forward untrammelled by the narrow and transient interests of nationalism in civil aviation towards the wider and more lasting goal of international welfare. If this Assembly achieves no more than to inculcate a lasting devotion to...

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Staying in Shape:  Writing, Questions, Method

Staying in Shape:  Writing, Questions, Method

The way one asks a question affects the way one is able to respond. This seems to be a truism. It also means that the way one shapes a question to turn it into the magical scholarly formula – a research question – is something that both enables and constrains...

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OVER A DECADE OF ARCHIVES

On Colonial Universality and other Legal Prerogatives: Reflections on Peter Fitzpatrick’s The Mythology of Modern Law

Following the death of Peter Fitzpatrick this month, we are reposting this series on The Mythology of Modern Law (first published on CLT on 3 August 2018) to mark the 25th anniversary of the book.2017 marked the 25th anniversary of Peter Fitzpatrick’s The Mythology of...

Against Agamben: Is a Democratic Biopolitics Possible?

Giorgio Agamben’s recent intervention which characterizes the measures implemented in response to the Covid-19 pandemic as an exercise in the biopolitics of the ‘state of exception’ has sparked an important debate on how to think of biopolitics. The very...

Law, Reading, and Power: The ‘S’ Joke, Why You Find it Funny and Why I Don’t (with Reply)

A guy walks into a bakery known for making fancy cakes. He says, “I’d like to have a cake shaped like the letter S.” The baker says he can do it, but the cake will be expensive. The man confirms that price is no object. The baker tells him to come back after three...

Law is a Fugue

BWV 895 Law is, metaphorically speaking, a fugue.Desmond Manderson has previously deployed the fugue metaphor to describe the mode with which he would present the aesthetic dimensions of law and justice. Here I am intensifying the metaphor in direct relation to...

Jacques Derrida: Deconstruction

Key Concept Img: Annie Vought | annievought.com Deconstruction by its very nature defies institutionalization in an authoritative definition. The concept was first outlined by Derrida in Of Grammatology where he explored the interplay between language and the...

Cupcake Fascism: Gentrification, Infantilisation and Cake

The Cupcake as Object The cupcake is barely a cake. When we think about what “the cake-like” ideal should be, it is something spongy, moist, characterized by excess, collapsing under its own weight of gooey jam, meringue, and cream. It is something sickly and wet that...

White Feminist Fatigue Syndrome

In her recent piece in Comment is Free, "How feminism became capitalism's handmaiden - and how to reclaim it” Nancy Fraser draws on her own work in political theory to argue that feminism at best has been co-opted by neoliberalism and at worst has been a...

Decolonizing the Teaching of Human Rights?

According to the new Bolivian constitution, education is "one of the most important functions and primary financial responsibilities of the State”; it is “unitary, public, universal, democratic, participatory, communitarian, decolonizing and of quality” (art. 78, I);...

#ACCELERATE MANIFESTO for an Accelerationist Politics

01. INTRODUCTION: On the Conjuncture 1. At the beginning of the second decade of the Twenty-First Century, global civilization faces a new breed of cataclysm. These coming apocalypses ridicule the norms and organisational structures of the politics which were forged...

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

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...

Palestinian Resistance: The Political, Social and Human Right of Self-Defense

Once again the bombs are falling on the Gaza Strip, a stretch of territory excised from Palestine proper as a result of continuing illegal and illegitimate actions by Israel. In fact, Gaza has become a closed ghetto, first cut off from Palestine in violation of the...

Punk, Law, Resistance … “I have set my affair on nothing”

1. I, Punk In 1977 I was sixteen. Everything I have to say about punk is coloured by that fact, because sixteen was precisely the right age to be if punk was going to have a decisive impact on you. Because punk was not about your social class, gender or race, it was...

Anonymous & the Discourse of Human Rights

In the last months, we have seen the emergence of ‘Anonymous’. In particular, in the days after the widespread attack on Wikileaks (following their publication of leaked US diplomatic memos) they emerged with a fairly credible threat to take down major global internet...

Power, Violence, Law

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...

CRITICAL LEGAL CONFERENCE 2023

Durham 11–13 September