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...
Key Concept Philosophy can only hypocritically live out what it says, it takes cheek to say what is lived. (Critique of Cynical Reason)Peter Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, trans. Michael Eldred (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1987) 102....
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...
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...
Following on from my Impressions of the Critical Legal Conference 2012, in which I proposed a return to thinking in terms of definitions of law (emphasis on the plural), I here offer a version of my forthcoming entry on ‘Law’ for The Nancy Dictionary (Edinburgh...
The Critical Legal Conference (“CLC”) 2012. I thought I’d leave it until a week after the event, to allow time for the dust to settle, before reflecting on the connections between the diverse papers, the intense conversations and my own theoretical preoccupations. It...
The Silent Voice of a New Beginning was a talk given by Slavoj Zizek at the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities on the 20th November 2011. Upon recently hearing a recording, it struck me as an incredibly rich session in terms of political substance—what is to be...
October 15th saw more than 950 protests in more than 80 countries take place against the injustices of the global financial system. This may be just the beginning. Drawing inspiration from Tahrir Square, Puerta del Sol and Occupy Wall Street, people around the world...
On 14 April 2011, the High Court of England and Wales ruled, in R (on the application of Joshua Moos and Hannah McClure) v The Commissioner of the Police of the Metropolis, that the police had acted unlawfully in “containing” (aka kettling) certain G20 protestors on 1...
Over the coming week there will appear on Critical Legal Thinking a series of posts on the theme "Punk, Law, Resistance". The idea for this series was inspired by some of the highly creative forms of protest that have recently taken place in the UK by, for example,...
The Ground of Law: A Symposium with Jean Luc Nancy Birkbeck, University of London 2 July 2011 Cancelled
Jurisdiction is the fact of saying right… (7) Hence, jus [i.e. right (ed)] is essentially articulated by a subject, but a subject that is less substance (this is rather what it loses, as Hegel said) than a potency or potentiality (an ability, will, desire, power,...
With the release of the Afghan and Iraq War Diaries earlier this year and the current release of 250,000 confidential US Embassy cables, who at the end of 2010 does not know the name of Julian Assange and the associated website WikiLeaks? Officially launched in 2007,...
Education is a hazard. On the one hand, it is deeply implicated in the ideological state apparatus, churning out hordes of ‘disciplined’ workers to maintain the injustices of the political and economic status quo. Education is hazardous to emancipatory thought. On the...
This presentation is a few notes on a question. The question being: What does it mean to say: the free space of thinking? As my title suggests, I would like to relate the free space of thinking to what one might simply call nomadic thinking. To this end, I will draw...
A Transcription of part of a workshop held by Jean-Luc Nancy at the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities as part of the Adieu Derrida series of lectures in May 2005. Jean-Luc Nancy: There are two ways of thinking the relationship from finitude to infinitude: One is...
When the British National Party finally managed two successes in the June 2009 European Elections, the mainstream media reaction was one of astonishment followed by intense curiosity and soul searching. This was a UK version of the 2002 success of the Front National...