CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL
CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL
Crimmigration and the Ontology of Guilt: On Subjectivity and the Negation of Law
The contemporary figure of the foreigner is not judged for what they do, but for the fact of who they are. In regimes of crimmigration, guilt no longer follows the act—it precedes it. It attaches to presence, to mobility, to the mere fact of inhabiting without prior authorization. What emerges is not simply a transformation of migration policy, but a deeper reconfiguration of law itself: a shift in which the juridical order produces subjects already outlawed, already exposed to sanction, already constituted as bearers of guilt. Law does not operate as a neutral framework regulating conduct. It constitutes and maintains order through a force indistinguishable from negation. The juridical order is one in which norm and violence are inseparable, just as law is inseparable from power, and where its force persists precisely because it is indistinguishable from negation. Order is not an affirmative arrangement of social relations; it is sustained through the continuous opposition to what...
ARTICLES
Critique in times of Corona
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...
Let’s not be fooled: There’s nothing external & symmetrical in the global economic downturn
On January 23rd, the lockdown of 60 million people in the Hubei province, where CBNC calculated that almost 80% of the Chinese Gross Domestic Product is realized, had already dealt a severe blow to the global offer of goods. For the whole month of February, global...
The Tragic Transparency of the Virus
Today’s cultural, political and ideological debates are imbued with a strange opacity, the result of their remove from the concrete day-to-day experience of the vast majority of people — ordinary citizens, or la gente de a pie, as they say in Latin America. That is...
Crying for Repression: Populist and Democratic Biopolitics in Times of COVID-19.
We live in very Foucauldian times, as the many think-pieces published on biopolitics and COVID-19 show. Yet what is remarkable—biopolitically—about the current situation has gone largely unnoticed: We are witnessing a new form of biopolitics today that could be termed...
International Economic Law & COVID-19
International economic law (IEL), broadly defined, refers to the rules governing the cross-border movement of goods, people, technology and finance capital, as well as the institutions created to design and enforce such rules. IEL has, over the past three decades,...
Must Society be Defended from Agamben?
Many European countries have by now been in lockdown for more than a week. This has given everyone ample time to reflect on our current condition. Many of the world’s leading critical thinkers have shared their thoughts with us through op-eds, blog posts, and so on....
A Corona Utopia in Three Parts
“This episode of Black Mirror sucks!” The slogan that briefly went viral in the United States after the election of Trump has now acquired an even more infectious, irresistible irony for many in coronavirus-stricken Europe. The fear of loved ones and ourselves getting...
Covid-19 and the Continuity of the Familiar
The outbreak of Covid-19 is billed as a ‘once in a century event’. It has appeared as the prophesised rupture in our social, economic and political fabric of the world, with the recognition that what follows may not resemble what humanity has become used to. It is...
Never Waste a Crisis: A Practical Guide?
It is too early to predict how the COVID-19 pandemic will unfold and over what period of time. But we should expect that, much like September 11, the world afterwards will be very different to the world before. We know we should never waste a crisis, but the right...
Virus: All That Is Solid Melts into Air
There is a debate within the social sciences about whether it is easier to ascertain the truthfulness and quality of a society’s institutions under normal daily circumstances or in exceptional situations, during times of crisis. One can probably learn from both types...
Covid: The Ethical Disease
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kNJwioSoyGA This morning, as I was cycling down a road I frequently take on my way to work, I came across a blockage, big orange plastic net boards cutting across the way, stopping all traffic from going through. Some road works,...
Decolonisation Is Not About Ticking a Box: It Must Disrupt
As academics in a post-truth world, I believe we have an urgent and important task. In a world where emotional appeals and emotive decision-making are seemingly the norm, academia should be in the business of truth. Rather than lament reality, we should be revealing...
From historiography to historiographical theory, or looking for politics where there can be none
Not long ago, at an international law conference, in my panel was a scholar whom I admire a lot (still do). After presenting their paper, said scholar was asked a methodological question to which they briskly retorted—I quote—that they don’t give a shit about...
Toward a New Universal Declaration of Human Rights (I)
Baruch de Spinoza, the great 17th century philosopher, wrote that the two basic human emotions (or “affections”, as he called them) are fear and hope, and he suggested that a balance needs to be struck between the two, because fear unmingled with hope leads to despair...
Digging for Failure
Dig Station is an idle tapping game, with grinder overtones, produced by C6H6 and available on the Amazon app store. The premise is that you are in control of a station that is digging into the earth’s crust in order to mine resources. You begin simply with a drill:...
Hong Kong, or How Social Struggles Can Reinforce the Cartography of Capitalist Enclosure
If the debates incited by the 2019 Hong Kong Protest Movement, known as the Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill (or Anti-ELAB) Movement, have revolved around conflicting interpretations that favor differently weighted readings of geopolitics and more fundamental...
Dangerous Spaces
In radical or alternative left movements, the idea of safety is paramount. It is rare to go to a meeting about feminist, anti racist, queer, or otherwise progressive politics without a safe (or safer) spaces policy being presented. This document, whether read aloud or...
Marxist Legal Theory: Dictatorship of the Proletariat
This is one of a series of key concepts in Marxist legal theory organized in collaboration with our friends at Legal Form: A Form for Marxist Analysis of Law. All articles in this series, including the present one, will appear concurrently on Legal...
Marginalisation of Expertise & Media Bias
We write as members of the UK academic community. We are deeply concerned by the marginalisation of expertise in the media coverage of the general election. In particular we would like to highlight the lack of attention paid to recent analyses by economists and...
Dear White, It’s OK to be white
In October 2018, the motion ‘It’s OK to be white’ was introduced in the Australian Parliament by White Supremacist Senator Pauline Hanson. The motion called for the ok-ness of Whiteness while denouncing ‘anti-white racism’ and ‘attacks on Western civilization.’...
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...
