CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL
CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL
The Culpable Liberal, The Latte Legalist and the End of the Settler Siege at Sea
**We are delighted to say that this post has been translated into Japanese by Yota Negishi, available here** It is the early hours of the morning on the 8th September 2025 and I am in Tunis at Sidi Bou Said Port listening to the sounds of stress, solidarity, and the song of the sea…the Mediterranean Sea whose on whose rupturous surface the Global Sumud Flotilla (GSF) will set sail to break the siege on Gaza. I am in the port documenting the first of two drone attacks on Global Sumud Flotilla vessels that will take place in a 24 hour period for the legal support unit adjacent to the GSF that I am serving from Tunis. The praxis undergirding the words ‘from the river to the sea’ feels tangible in its surreality as Sumud sets sail amidst tides where waves of words move in a sea of deeds, steadfast.[1] Less than a week after the drone attack morality figures indicate that Israel and its accomplices have murdered nearly 700,000 Palestinians in the course of the...
ARTICLES
Austerity by way of the Colonies: Workfare in the UK
The taxi took an alternate route to the airport that day, the day before the Queen’s Jubilee parade, to avoid the very early morning rehearsals of military personnel, horses, and others involved in orchestrating the impending celebrations. Arriving at my destination...
Galloway on Rape and Law’s Own Repugnant Diatribe
On August 18th, the youtube channel ‘molucca Red,’ ‘[t]he only fully authorised GG channel,’ posted ‘Good night with George Galloway (Episode 5).’ This episode featured Galloway discussing various issues relating to the Wikileaks founder Jullian Assange. In watching...
Health, Safety and Publicness: Athens, August 9–14, 2012
Five days in Athens. Five very varied days. I used to frequent Athens as a teenager with my parents. We were always transit visitors, en route to Kano, Nigeria where my late father used to work. Those visits where quick, two days in Athens, visiting ancient monuments,...
Pussy Riot: Maria Alyokhina’s Closing Statement
This trial is illustratory and illuminating. Not once will the authorities blush over it and be ashamed of it. Every stage of it is quintesential of iniquity. How has this happened that our performance being initially a small and somewhat awkward act has grown into a...
The True Blasphemy: Zizek on Pussy Riot
Pussy Riot members accused of blasphemy and hatred of religion? The answer is easy: the true blasphemy is the state accusation itself, formulating as a crime of religious hatred something which was clearly a political act of protest against the ruling clique. Recall...
Jakob Böhme: The Tragedy of Freedom and the Curse of the Law
The following text is the first study of a two-part monograph written by Nikolai Berdyaev, the former Marxist militant turned autodidact and Christian existentialist, and was published in the journal Put' in Febraury 1930. It seems...
De Gandillac’s Cusanus: Order of Justice and Nexus of Love
As Nicolaus Cusanus' thought developed from the ground-breaking Docta Ignorantia one can detect that movement that each thinker must make as they pass to the limit, and pass right through. In the following selection, Maurice de Gandillac shows us how Cusanus (here de...
Cusanus on the Just at the Limit
To see the debt of Nikolaus von Kues (Nicolas Cusanus, Nicolaus de Cusa) to Meister Eckhart, it perhaps suffices for the casual reader to compare yesterday's post here to the selection translated below, this being the primary purpose of presenting the two texts...
Eckhart on the univocity of justice and equivocity of the just
The following selected extracts from Meister Eckhart’s extremely fecund Expositio sancti Evangelii secundum Iohannem have been picked because, while ostensibly working through the difference between justice and the just, they do so using theoretical tools of...
ECB Frankfurt Occupy camp cleared
The Occupy camp situated in Frankfurt's financial district, at the foot of the European Central Bank, was cleared this afternoon in a lightning raid, approved by the city's Administrative Court. The police admitted they had chosen a moment when the majority of...
Racism, Sexism and Swimming at the London Olympics
I've been a little taken aback this week at the level of racism against China in the British and US media, and on longer-than-usual comment threads on various friends’ facebook walls. I mean, I know that racism in sport and in the media is nothing new, and I know...
Signs From The Future
So where do we stand now, in 2012? 2011 was the year of dreaming dangerously, of the revival of radical emancipatory politics all around the world. Now, a year later, every day brings new proofs of how fragile and inconsistent the awakening was, with all of its many...
Capturing The Social Sciences: An Experiment in Political Epistemology
According to the title that identifies this panel, we are here to enter into a discussion around the productive powers of something called “critical theory”. At first sight, critique and productivity might strike anyone as being opposite terms. Isn’t critique related to a certain form of negativity? To saying “no” to power? And isn’t the demands for capitalistic “productivity” what some of us criticise, or at least attempt to do so?
The title of this panel, however, seems to put such a taken-for-granted relationship at risk. “The Productive power of critical theory”– can we think of a productive criticality? or a critical productivity? What might it mean to engage in a form of critical-productive thought and how might such engagements contribute to challenging and transforming our knowledge-practices within the social sciences and the humanities? These are some of the questions with which I will attempt to experiment in what follows.
To be sure, these questions are not new, and many researchers and thinkers in the social sciences and the humanities are becoming increasingly interested in them, to the extent that arguably none of the latest so-called turns within these fields, be it the “ontological turn”, the “practice turn”, the “affective turn” and so on, leave the question of the relation between critique and productivity untouched.
UPDATED Occupy in Frankfurt – rally against eviction
UPDATE: on 31 July 2012 Frankfurt's Lord Mayor (Oberbuergermeister) Peter Feldmann (SPD) granted cautious support to the aims of the Occupy Camp insofar as these were about initiating a dialogue about the financial system. This effectively amounts to granting a stay...
New Report Documents ‘Total Policing’ Clampdown on Freedom to Protest
[Drawn from Netpol's own release] A detailed new report launched today by the Network for Police Monitoring (Netpol) highlights how promises made by the police to ‘adapt to protest’ after 2009′s G20 demonstrations in London have been forgotten in a remarkably short...
Finance’s contribution to GDP – another sleight of hand?
Yesterday's publication of further dismal GDP data for the UK is an opportunity to reconsider its basis as the justification for many aspects of the current neoliberal order. Bracketing out the question of whether economic growth is a valid lodestar for any just...
Frankfurt as protest-free city? – hunger strike begins
With the swift decision to evict the Occupy camp that has spent nine months at the foot of the European Central Bank's Eurotower, the peaceful protest appears to be entering another juncture of resistance against the city authorities, who have once again shown...
Securitisation outfit fined USD125m for obtaining false credit ratings
In my previous post I asked somewhat rhetorically what else banks had felt able to do during the credit crunch if the belief had arisen that "market stability" (sc. bank survival") trumped criminal law. The U.S. Securities and Exchnage Commission ("SEC") has...
LIBOR: City absolutism and raison de marché
What's the difference between Monaco and the City of London? One is a micro-territory governed by absolute fiat, hollowed out by property speculation, gambling, and the concealment of great crimes of wealth, and the other is Monaco. In case your wondering, Monaco...
Investment Arbitration: Restricted Area
With a Procedural Order issued on June 26th, an ICSID Arbitral Tribunal has made a decision concerning an amicus curiae petition filed on 23 May 2012 by an ensemble of Petitioners formed by an international NGO and four Zimbabwean indigenous communities. Reversing the...
Art as Disobedience: Liberate Tate’s Gift to the Nation
This weekend was an eventful one for the Tate Modern. Late Saturday morning, pursuant to section 7 of the Museums and Galleries Act 1992, art collective Liberate Tate presented the gallery with an unexpected ‘gift to the nation’. That gift was a 1.5 tonne, 16.5...
KEY CONCEPTS
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SERIES / SYMPOSIA
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