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
Another Merry Week in Greece: A diary in fragmented parts to come
04.12.2014 | Thanatopolitics is an everyday spectacle The head of the Hellenic Police decides to ban public gatherings for two days (05.12 and 06.12). The formal cause of this decision was the visit of the Turkish Prime Minister in Athens. The Athenians are becoming...
Interruption: Five Artefacts of International Law (Part II)
ANZAC in Egypt: Myths, Memories and Movement in the Monumental Imagining of the First World War Charlotte Peevers* The original Australia and New Zealand Army Corps (‘ANZAC’) Memorial at Port Said, Egypt (destroyed during the Suez Crisis of 1956 and replicated in...
The First World War Interrupted: Artefacts as International Law’s Archive (Part I)
Separated from us by the barrier of a century. Inaugurator of a fully mechanised modernity. Eye-opener for the birth of a new, horrified, global society. Premonition of a future to come. This is the Great War. As one supremely tragic bookend to the ‘long’ nineteenth...
From the CIA Torture Report to Ferguson and Palestine: Should anyone be prosecuted?
We did not need the CIA Torture Report, released a few days ago, on International Human Rights Day, to know that US officials of the highest ranks, including former President George W. Bush and Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, were aware of, and condoned, or even...
Homo Sacer: The Last Act (L’Uso dei Corpi)
Giorgio Agamben has abandoned Homo sacer. By his own admission in the foreword to his book, and having so acknowledged in the first lecture of his 2014 seminar at the European Graduate School, his latest L’uso dei Corpi—forthcoming in English translation as The Usage...
Pre-emptive States of Emergency: Martial Governmentality & the Crisis of Police
Commenting on the investigation into the police killing of Luis Rodriguez in Moore, OK in February 2014, an attorney for the Moore, OK police department declared, “In this country, it seems we are becoming anti-police and that the tide has turned in respecting law...
Deleuze and the Accelerationsists
We are expected, in the name of Deleuzoguattarian anti-fascism, to embrace capitalism as nihilist machine that has no ‘purpose’, because ‘purpose’=fascism, while forgetting that neoliberalism appeared in Germany as the form of governmentality that would immunize us...
The Hunger Strike of Nikos Romanos
We are currently witnessing one of the most beautiful and tragic moments of resistance in human history. Please join with us and sign the solidarity statement (link below) alongside educators, artists, philosophers and activists. We have now arrived at the 25th day in...
The Podemos Wave
The countries of Southern Europe are extremely diverse, both socially and politically. But they are taking the brunt of the impact caused by the same misguided policy imposed by Central and Northern Europe via the European Union (EU), with varying but converging...
The Further Criminalisation of Student Protest
The Chancellor’s Autumn Statement has served as a reminder of the wider politics of austerity and its beneficiaries in the form of tax cuts and those at its detriment experiencing wage freezes and cuts in services and benefits. It was also a reminder of how the...
Transgressive Substances, Transmogrification and the Tragedy of Michael Brown
The [police] chief was informed that a hitherto inoffensive negro was running amok in a cocaine frenzy … Being fully aware of the respect the negro has for brass buttons, the officer went single-handed to the negro’s house for the purpose of arresting him. … The...
Lessons from Gaza: Human Rights (2009/2014)
According to UN Human Rights High Commissioner, Navi Pillay, "there appears to be a deliberate defiance on the part of Israel in complying with its international obligations. We should not allow this kind of impunity. We should not allow this to go uninvestigated, or...
‘Why is no one counting the thousands of deaths of black youth in Brazil resulting from police actions?’
Two days ago, a US American friend of mine, who lives in Rio, asked this question on a Facebook post. I don't have an answer. I have a rant. Everyone who like me has lost friends and relatives to state violence never stopped counting. What we need is a political...
The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership
An oft told tale at the start of international economic law modules is the failure of the Havana Charter of 1946 to establish the International Trade Organisation (ITO). Unlike its sister the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank Group, the ITO failed to...
Resist “Lawful” Police Killings: Answering the Call from Ferguson
Almost a year ago (January 15 to be exact) I wrote an article here in response to the Duggan Inquiry. I remember being struck by two things when reading the verdict: a profound confusion over how they could reach the decision that his killing was lawful as well as...
Open Letter to the Young Women and Men of Mexico
To all my friends from Mexico. And if I may, I would particularly like to address this to you, the young men and women of Mexico. The whole world has been greatly shocked by the massacre of the young men from the rural teachers' college of Ayotzinapa, Guerrero, and in...
Hashtag Panelwatch: Accumulation by Discrediting
A common occurrence when organizing academic events these days is the inevitable encounter with a trigger-happy deployment of queries and condemnation regarding representation. In the age of immediate self-publication in social media, this “calling out” usually takes...
The TTIP: Back to the future?
In 1954 the ordo-liberal economist W. Roepke was invited in the Hague to deliver...
Legal infrastructure, differentiated space and the spectacle of ‘lawful protest’: The Australian G20 (Safety and Security) Act 2013
Queensland is this year host to various G20 meetings, most prominently the Finance Ministers’ Meeting that was held in Cairns on 20 & 21 September and next month’s Leaders’ Summit in Brisbane on 15 & 16 November. At a cost of over $450 million, a massive...
A Taste for the Secret: Interview with Mark Neocleous
This interview was originally conducted in March 2014 for Kampfplatz (a journal of philosophy, published in Turkish in Ankara, Turkey) and its Turkish translation was first published in the 6th issue of the Kampfplatz in May 2014. More information about Kampfplatz can...
Demanding the Future: The Right2Water and Another Ireland
The American abolitionist Frederick Douglass once observed that if you find out ‘just what any people will quietly submit to … you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them’ and that such injustices ‘will continue till...
KEY CONCEPTS
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