Ari Hirvonen

Ari Hirvonen is Pro­fessor in Jur­is­pru­dence, Fac­ulty of Law, Uni­ver­sity of Hel­sinki, Finland.
No Future: Punk Against the Boredom of the Law

No Future: Punk Against the Boredom of the Law

Punk is … the transgressive politics of boredom. Being nothing other than a pawn in their game – who has not sometimes woken up in the middle of the night imagining this. The Big Other that pulls the strings has various figures: national and transnational law and order apparatuses, global capital and the alleged economic necessities, bureaucratic and administrative regulations, the demands of social security, educational standards, images, ideas and idols constantly produced and re-produced by the mass-media, and so on and so forth. Things go from bad to worse when one starts to wonder who really is in charge, since today sovereignty is fragmented, which does not make it less pervasive and omnipotent. Then again, you may find some comfort from the fact that this is not your paranoid delusion but reality, “the only things we got today” as The Clash already told us in “Hate and War”, which you’ll find from their first LP, The Clash, released in 1977: “An’ if I close my eyes / They will not go away / You have to deal with it / It is the currency”.

Refugee Struggles: From Helsinki to Paris

Refugee Struggles: From Helsinki to Paris

Even if refugees have lost their political community, their “society of equals” comprising “reciprocity and commonness” and “mutual agreements and promises,” as Hannah Arendt says, they are able to become and act as political subjects.Hannah Arendt (2005), The...