There is a tendency in discussions of constituent power to focus on the groups involved, the subjectivities produced and the discursive significance of the events themselves. Revolts are full of conflict and violence, they pull down sovereign orders and generate...
With the widespread social unrest unfolding in the USA following the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, we are once again confronted by the horrifying exceptionality of public order enforcement. The problem, however, is that we understand the videos of...
Over the last few weeks we have received a large number of pieces on the pandemic, so we have decided to publish a small selection of them over the next few days, and then to continue to publish them as they arrive. In the past we would have called this intense blog...
The Metropolitan Police force have requested greater powers to deal with the threat of #ExtinctionRebellion. The exact details of the request are unclear, but some of the proposals have begun to emerge. And they are couched in what may be politely be called ‘utter...
Adieu Ammenotep, Leonora Carrington, (1960) By all accounts the secret society began before the Boston body was found. It started in many different places, small groups began to form who consumed the scraps and leftovers from other tables. Clusters of interested...
No one has really protested Brexit. Sure, lots of people have gone to the streets and politely walked around their major cities. But there is no real protest, no unrest, no potential for disorder. Instead there is an endless cycle of hot-takes: hot-air continuously...
The University and College Union (UCU) is going on strike. Following the refusal of the employer’s association (Universities UK – the UUK) to negotiate on their proposed cut to pensions, the UCU balloted members and 88% voted in favour of strike action. Barring a...
Violence is all around us. Our everyday practices, unwillingly and unknowingly, often support cultural, social, economic, and legal structures that cause and perpetuate physical and psychological harm. These structures, whether visible or hidden, tend to privilege...
The 2017 Critical Legal Conference will be hosted by the University of Warwick, and they have just opened their call for papers and panels. The general theme is Catastrophe, but there are a wide array of different streams. You are invited to propose a paper, panel or...
Ten years ago, the so-called ‘Invisible Committee’ urged that ‘It is useless to wait…. To go on waiting is madness. The catastrophe is not coming, it is here. We are already situated within the collapse of a civilization. It is within this reality that we must choose...
Biopolitcal Matters: What is biopolitics today? What are its discontents? Is there life after biopolitics? The Authority & Political Technologies (APT) network at Warwick aims to foster and support work in the critical social sciences that is informed by...
Since the global financial crash of 2008, we have witnessed increasing levels of unrest and social discontent around the world (the various Occupys, the Spanish and Greek Indignados, the Arab Spring, the continuing disturbances in Brazil). Each of these moments...
Paul O’Connell recently argued that human rights are not a trap for emancipatory and radical projects. They can be productively placed with different discourses like anti-capitalism, anti-racism or queer politics, generating productive moments of resistance. He argues...
We regularly get requests from students and activists looking for suggested readings on particular topics, so I thought it might be a good idea to supplement our critical concepts page with critical bibliographies on various important subjects for critical legal...
I want to follow up on a post from last year about the general strike, using the idea of silence as that which binds it together in its negativity (or catastrophe as Sorel would say). As I reread that piece for a book that I’m trying to write about crowds, I realised...
We know from Burke that it is the noise of the crowd or throng which leads to the experience of the sublime. The cacophony of the many, gathered in their discharged state, draws us like a magnet. But the crowd in strike has a number of very different...
Anyone familiar with ‘crowd theory’ will have been told repeatedly that Gustave Le Bon is an origin. This assertion is quickly masked by obfuscation. He is not a first, of course, preceded by the historian Taine and the early criminologists Lombroso...
Elias Canetti’s Crowds and Power provides a useful starting point for this project. In it, he identifies a wide number of different crowds. They are determined by the temporality of their aims, the space in which they manifest themselves, the...
The crowd is not a technology or a subject of sovereignty. It is neither the ‘agent’ who could take, create or destroy sovereignty; nor a ‘means’ for others to become sovereign. The crowd is remarkable because of its prevalence and excision. It is often there in those...
In 2007, Daniel Bensaïd suggested that we turn to the question of strategy. Traditionally, strategy is distinguished from tactics. Where strategy is the ‘use of engagement to obtain the plan of war’ in von Clausewitz, tactics are the short term acts which win battles....
In its traditional conception, the constituent is a power that constitutes and reconstitutes the state. This is a dangerous, though important salve for the problem of corruption in the body politic. The people or their representatives may overthrow the constituted...
Nancy repeatedly rejects the banal politico-legal insistence on human rights as the solution to every answer, suggesting that such a move is intimately bound to the ‘withdrawal of the political’ (See Politics/ The Political). However, he does not reject rights out of...
Nancy coins the term eco-technics to describe the current global politico-economic conjuncture. Hillis Miller explains: ‘“Eco” comes from the Greek word oikos, the house or home. The prefix “eco-” is used more broadly now to refer to the total environment within which...
In 2003 Nancy gave a brief, basic philosophical radio talk in which he discussed the question of politics and the political. Reprising his early work with Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe at the Centre de Recherches Philosophiques sur la Politique (the Centre for...
Legal scholarship on the relationship between private law and human rights is dominated by (i) ‘constitutionalisation’; the idea that private law will absorb human rights norms over time (ii) the instrumental use of private law to enforce compliance with human rights...
This is a quick reminder that the London Conference on Critical Thought 2012 call for papers is ending on the 19th of Feb. The call for papers is available here and full details of all the streams can be seen here. They are many and varied; dealing with radical...
The Southampton Centre for Law, Ethics and Globalization has two great speakers coming up this semester - Angus MacDonald and Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos. Angus MacDonald - Thinking Against Constituted Law; A Response to Oren Ben-Dor (15/02/2012, Law Building...
Spain has been the theatre of a prolonged speculative wave that ended abruptly in 2007, having been one of the world leaders in the cycle of real estate-financial accumulation. Spanish capitalism took advantage of an intensive use of the territory that guaranteed...
Recently, there have been the rumblings of an emergent pan-Latin American student movement. Crucially, this potential movement coheres around the demand for a right to education. In Colombia and Chile a new front is being fought against the creation and maintenance of...
In a recent brief exchange between Oscar Guardiola Rivera and Walter Mignolo, responding to an impossibly broad question about Europe’s current crisis, Guardiola Rivera quipped that Europe was colonising itself. Just think, he said, of the racialisation of Greek,...
In recent months the Irish crisis has disappeared from the international news. But that has not stopped the crushing cuts. Last sunday night the Taoiseach (the leader of the executive) addressed the nation. On monday and tuesday, an exceptional two-day budget was...
In much of the conventional analysis, constituent power is used to signify an opening of constitutionalism to its other. It is framed as an alterity that legitimates and facilitates the constitution. As such, the constituent moment has an intensely temporal quality....
Few are willing to make comparisons between this past year’s radical political activity – from the student protests to the major TUC demonstration – and the Tottenham riots. The reasons for this are fairly obvious: there is no unifying political goal of these...
Politics is back on the streets of Europe, that much is clear. The PIGS are striking back. Portugal, Ireland Greece and Spain. Except that’s not quite right. I will address the failure of Irish radicalism and contrast that with Greece and Tunisia, in order to begin to...
The war that has been escalated in Libya over the last week is not the same as the revolt that gripped the country months ago. Even today in Benghazi there are two orders – war and revolt – at work, but the logic of war is destroying the multiplicity of a revolution....
Equity is something of a problem. Aside from the blatant patriarchy of the Presumption of Advancement or Common Intention Constructive Trusts, it is often a little difficult to smuggle critical (legal) theory into an Equity and Trusts course. A long time ago now,...
We would like to welcome you to the first of our Critical Approaches to law seminars at Oxford Brookes University. Juliet Rogers of the University of Melbourne will present a paper (abstract below) on the 22nd of Feb (next Tuesday) at 5pm in the Music Room in...
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...
A conception of the Law which must be an essentially innovatory one is not to be found, integrally, in any pre-existing doctrine.... If every state tends to create and maintain a certain type of civilisation and of citizen (and hence of collective life and of...
Of late, I have been working on a deconstruction of the people variously through Derrida and Ranciere. But it seems to me that one of the more important theorists of constituent power is Schmitt (along with Sieyes, Negri, Benjamin and Bataille). So, with the spectre...
For excellent coverage of the Irish Bailout-Budget, please keep an eye to BudgetJam over on politico.ie. Here is their introduction to a week of blogging: On Wednesday 24 of November we learnt that "Securing Ireland's Future" involves cuts to the minimum wage and a...
We thought it might be an interesting idea of post a number of texts of a legal surrealism. We will publish a series of texts from and on the juridical writings of surrealism. As a jurisprudence it has, essentially, been written out of the canon. However, if time is...