CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL
CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL
Militant Democracy as Neurosis
Walter Benjamin invites us to think language in a radically different way: not as a neutral medium of communication, but as something living, something creative. For him, language is not exclusively human: everything that exists speaks. It may do so through gesture, through form, or simply through presence. In short, everything expresses itself. Humanity occupies a distinctive position within this field: human beings do not merely speak, they are capable of naming – and in naming, they bring the world into being. Act of Creation Benjamin therefore reads the Book of Genesis as a moment of linguistic philosophy: “And God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light” (Gen. 1:3). In the Gospel of John, this linguistic act is rendered even more explicit: “In the beginning was the Word” (John 1:1). The Word is the point of origin of all things. Naming, then, is not simply descriptive; it is world-making (Benjamin 1977, 140-157). In other words, naming draws things out of the unnameable...
ARTICLES
The Weight of Our History
This is the long version of an essay that was first published on November 20, 2015 in L’humanité. Translation by Philippe Theophanidis with the help of Marie-Ève Morin and Marc James Léger. We would rather remain silent. In the face of the horror and emotion....
The Blind Leading the Blind: the Paris Attacks and the Construction of Infinite Evil
After the horrific attacks in Paris, the painting of the great Bruegel, The Blind Leading the Blind is in my mind. Bruegel finished this work in the year 1568. It was the year when the notorious Duke Alba arrived with his troops on behalf of the Spanish King in order...
Open Letter to the Australian Government
The following open letter was sent to Australian PM Malcolm Turnbull and Immigration Minister Peter Dutton. It was signed by 600 refugees who are currently indefinitely imprisoned in the detention centre pursuant to Australia's 'Operation Sovereign Borders'. 30/11/15...
Concerning a Critical Legal Pedagogy: Exposing Race-Thinking in Political Canon
Locke’s philosophy worked to entrench slavery as a politically justifiable practice, effectively extending property rights to a select few while encouraging the political legitimacy of race-based persecution. John Locke is considered the most influential of...
Financial Indebtedness as a Political Strategy
Money in law is a form of debt Lawyers are not much concerned about, and economists have never really known, what money actually is. In microeconomics the issue of money does not appear at all: indeed, mainstream microeconomics has eliminated money entirely from the...
The folly of vengeance: Thinking through the Paris attacks with Simone de Beauvoir
‘…we said ourselves in an outburst of anger ‘They will pay’. And our anger seemed to promise a joy so heavy that we could scarcely believe ourselves able to bear it. They have paid. They are going to pay. They pay each day. And the joy has not risen up in our...
Capitalism and the Production of Difference
The defence of capitalism as a system of economic organization often takes the form of strangely pious declarations about how we have strayed from the path. This could involve over taxation, limiting incentives, government takeovers of industry. Crises, it is claimed,...
A Conversation with Duncan Kennedy
The recently published volume 10 of Unbound: Harvard Journal of the Legal Left reflects on the career of Duncan Kennedy, Carter Professor of General Jurisprudence, Emeritus at Harvard Law School and a leading figure in the US Critical Legal Studies movement....
The Importance of the Women-y Fringe-y Excesses of Irish Pro-choice Activism
In the past year or so, Irish pro-choice protesting has taken on a new vitality. Some pro-choice actors have adopted the language of satire, humour, scandal and disobedience to show up the limits of the abortion regime. I have written before about the abortion pill...
On Selective Grief: Can we recognize all lives as equally precarious?
In the aftermath of the terrorist attacks in Paris on 13/11, mounting criticism can be seen with regard to the outpouring of solidarity for Parisians and, at the same time, scarce expressions of empathy towards victims of other nations that have experienced similar...
The Redundant Refugee
“In the first place”, Hannah Arendt wrote in 1943, “we don’t like to be called “refugees”. She had escaped Germany, survived...
One Piece at a Time
On work, theft and the age of automation through a reading of Johnny Cash's classic song https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=18cW_yHo3PY Johnny Cash's One Piece at a Time is a song about how he makes his own dream Cadillac by smuggling out all the parts from the factory...
Break The Chains: Precarity in an Age of Anxiety
In our Age of Anxiety, society assaults us from every possible angle with an avalanche of uncertainty. How do we fight back under conditions of precarity? An Age of Anxiety is upon us, one where society assaults us from every possible angle with an avalanche of...
Human rights without humanism
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations in Paris on December 10, 1948. The result of two years of drafting by a committee of the Commission on Human Rights—whose famous chair was Eleanor Roosevelt—the text of...
14½ Truths Modestly Addressed to a Young Academic
1. You are always at a loss. This is not a problem. 2. A view cannot be anything but variable, you do not hold it, nor should an audience hear it as held. 3. Distrust anyone who all too willingly wishes to exercise his or her supposed benevolent power on you....
Izmir, International Law, and the Past and Present of Forced Migration
In September 1922, the city of Izmir served as the site of one of the most brutal episodes of forced migration of the early twentieth century. The event occurred toward the end of the 1919–22 Greek-Turkish War, a bloody and protracted struggle over western Anatolia...
Cynicism
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....
Indigenous Peoples and the Legacies of Colonialism in International Criminal Law: The Challenging Crime of Genocide.
The Nazi Holocaust has become an essential reference point to identify the concept of genocide, marked by intensive and industrial scale murder. Nevertheless, long before the term was coined there were different cases of genocide. The genocide of indigenous peoples in...
Cameron, Slavery, History and the Enlightenment tradition
General Sir James Duff was an army officer and MP for Banffshire in Scotland during the late 1700s. Following the Slavery Abolition Act 1833, he was paid £3 million because 'reasonable Compensation should be made to the Persons hitherto entitled to the Services of...
Dysfunctionalism – the financial order
So there I am sat in a room with central bankers, ex-central bankers, central bank lawyers, people from the IMF, Canadian Development Bank, Federal Reserves of a couple fo US states, and assorted financial academics, and I am clawing at my ears to make it all stop. ...
To Be Read in 2050: Reflecting on Utopia
One day, when we finally find we can describe the age we now live in, the greatest amazement of all will come from the realization that we lived it all with no sense of before and after, replacing causality with simultaneity, history with news, memory with silence,...
KEY CONCEPTS
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