CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL
CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL
The Wrong of Law and Marx’s Second Secret (Symposium)
I feel honored to have been invited to comment on Valerie Kerruish’s The Wrong of Law, a book bringing a great range of methodological approaches to bear on a problematic of great interest to me. The book’s focal point is the self-seriousness of legal discourse. It is a constitutive feature of law that it ‘thinks itself as right,’ and this makes it unable to recognize the outside on which it depends (Kerruish 2025, 5). Although the specific injustices that result from colonial legal practices form a part of the analysis (building on her earlier Jurisprudence as Ideology [Kerruish 1991]), the overall focus on the constitutive wrong of law means that law’s empirical wrongs play an illustrative, thus secondary, role (primarily in chapter 5). As Kerruish frames it, the wrong of law is an internal quality prior to any external effects that this or that legal regime might have: ‘The idea of the wrong of law… is a metaphysical/logical idea’ (Kerruish 2025, 6). Coming to terms with law’s…
ARTICLES
Another Greek Myth: Freedom of the Press
A warrant for Greek journalist Kostas Vaxevanis' arrest was issued today [Ed. 28 October 2012] for the alleged crime of "violating privacy legislation" related to his bi-weekly magazine HOT DOC which published a list of 2,059 names and associated professions of Greek…
#14N: European General Strike
Last month, Portugal ’s largest trade union CGTP called a general strike for November 14 against the “exploitation and impoverishment” of the Portuguese population. The union stressed the need to change government policies “for the sake of a better future” and urged…
In Germany insolvency law becomes financialised
The Amendment of the German Bankruptcy Act, which came into effect six months ago, has opened the door to widespread abuse alleges the industry association VID, which claims to represent more than half of liquidators. "A few influential and wealthy creditors now…
The Right against the City
“Reclaim our cities”. “Self-organise”. “Take neighbourhood action”. Consider these slogans for a moment. Sound familiar? Indeed they should, echoing as they do a body of scholarship (e.g. Amin & Thrift, 2005; Butler, 2012; Chatterton, 2010; Dikeç, 2001; Harvey, 2003; Leontidou, 2006, 2010; Marcuse, 2009; Mayer, 2009; Simone, 2005) stemming from Henri Lefebvre’s idea of the Right to the City (Lefebvre, 1996; henceforth RttC). Despite this common origin, interpretations of the Lefebvrian “right” have been most diverse; perhaps his own often-times abstract writing has inadvertently caused this scholarship to reach outside the confines of his own political allegiance and thought: ten years ago, Mark Purcell (2002) protested that the original RttC notion was more radical than his own concurrent literature would make it appear. But today, a reformist interpretation of Lefebvre might be the least of the worries we are faced with here, on the south-eastern shore of the Mediterranean that is the Greek territory.
The Criminalisation of Political Dissent: Huckstering the Law
The subversion of law begins with the reduction of politics to a crime. What is never questioned is the bourgeois state of law upon which modern capitalism depends. This remains the sacred cow that even the most radical critics from the likes of Occupy Wall Street…
End the Criminalisation of Protest: The Case of Trenton Oldfield
On the 7th of April 2012, Trenton Oldfield undertook a direct-action protest at the Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race. The aim of his protest was to focus attention on the long-standing and entirely unjust inequalities in British society that are being severely exacerbated by government cuts and reductions in civil liberties. Trenton chose the Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race because it is a symbol of class, privilege and elitism in Britain.
An astonishing 70% of the cabinet in the current government are Oxford or Cambridge graduates. This government is protecting the privileges of the wealthy while cutting the essential necessities of the majority and the poor and reducing people’s rights and freedoms. In the three days before Trenton’s protest, the coalition government (1) received royal assent for its bill to privatise the NHS, (2) introduced the Communications Data Bill to legalise surveillance of all digital communications of UK subjects, and (3) called on people to ‘shop their neighbours’ if they suspected they might protest at the 2012 Olympic Games. Trenton’s protest aimed at drawing attention to these injustices. He swam into the course of the boat race. The race was halted and restarted 25 minutes later. The action was seen by an international audience but it affected just 18 rowers and a handful of event organisers on a closed river, on a long weekend. The direct-action protest was wholly consistent with Trenton’s decade+ work in London on addressing this city’s unnecessary poverty and inequalities. The audience for the free event experienced a minor delay of 25 minutes. The BBC coverage ended at its pre-scheduled time-slot. Not a single complaint was received from the public by either the Metropolitan police or the BBC.
Are we aware of the current recolonisation of the South?
It would not be surprising if, in the context of an international conference, a group of jurists from different nations identified a set of common juridical references based on different legal systems. This occurrence would be attributed to the process of…
The Need for Public Protest
Earlier last week, Trenton Oldfield was convicted of ‘Causing a Public Nuisance’ by a jury at the Isleworth Crown Court. Previous instances of this rarely prosecuted offence include impregnating the air with “noisome and offensive stinks and smells” causing “a nuisance to all the King’s liege subjects living in Twickenham” But Oldfield was the man who had the temerity to disrupt the Oxford and Cambridge Boat Race last April, by choosing to take a swim, just as both boats were getting into their stride.
The prosecutor explained to the court that his actions had “spoiled the race for hundreds of thousands of spectators” and for this, the judge has adjourned sentence, commenting that she is not ruling out a prison sentence.
Five reasons why it was a bad idea to award the Nobel Peace Prize to the EU
1) The reporting on the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to the European Union has been substandard in its simplification of perspectives to a “for or against” binary. It has been assumed that a view on the awarding of the prize has correspondingly also been a view…
The Politics of Spinozism – Composition and Communication (Part 2 of 2)
Étienne Balibar approaches Spinoza as a thinker of interaction, of the constitutive character of relations. Spinoza’s question, in Balibar’s view, is the following: ‘What is the mode of reciprocal action that characterizes the existence of a body politic?’
In this respect, the uniqueness of Spinoza is that of taking the movement (both outer and inner, so to speak) of the masses as the object of political science, and not just the legitimacy of sovereignty or the claims of order. (Of course, we may be tempted to ask, to what extent are the masses, or rather the multitude, the subject or object of politics?)
From here derives, in Balibar’s reading, both the centrality and aporetic character of the notion of democracy. Democracy is defined as a ‘united body of men which corporately possesses sovereign right over everything within its power’, as the combination of the reciprocity of duties and the equality of rights. As both Macherey and Negri note, this is not to be understood simply as another figure in a political typology of forms of government, but is an immanent tendency of political life, inscribed in the dynamic of reason and into the vicissitudes of human nature. Or, as Balibar puts it, democracy is both a kind of political order and the truth of every political order. Democracy can also be understood as the power of the multitude coordinated, cultivated and instituted without the imaginary displacement represented by sovereignty, by the alienation of the power of human singularities into the empty and formally unified place of power (the Hobbesian option, as it were). Whence the radical novelty of Spinoza’s question: How does power originate in the multitude? And, one should add, how does it continue and persevere, how is power not just originated, but also continuously constructed, in and by the multitude?
The Politics of Spinozism – Composition and Communication (Part 1 of 2)
As many scholars have noted, Spinoza’s relation to the history and practice of philosophy is unique. Though often portrayed in the academy as a thinker integrated into the ‘rationalist’ tradition, Spinoza has repeatedly emerged as what Antonio Negri famously called a ‘savage anomaly’. Whether in the radical enlightenment of the late 17th and 18th centuries, the Pantheism controversy that played such a formative role within German Idealism, or in the philosophical radicalism catalysed by May 1968, Spinoza has been repeatedly invoked as a point of reference and inspiration at moments when the very meaning of philosophy and its link to the contemporary world was at stake. Toscano’s initial question is therefore the following: How is it that a philosopher renowned for thinking, with supreme detachment, ‘sub specie aeternitatis’, could play such a forceful part in debates over what Michel Foucault called ‘the ontology of the present’? In order to address this matter, Toscano concentrates specifically on the latest ‘wave’ in the long history of Spinozism, and focuses on three thinkers who have played a crucial role in the recent resurgence of interest in the work of the Dutch philosopher: Gilles Deleuze, Etienne Balibar, and our guest in this colloquium, Antonio Negri. More specifically, Toscano is concerned with how Spinoza has served as a spur for these three thinkers in their radical interrogations of the meaning of politics, democracy and the common. He does this by fleshing out three concepts through which Deleuze, Balibar and Negri respectively affirm the relevance of Spinoza’s ontology and ethics to any reflection on the contemporary status of the political: composition, communication and constitution.
On the Militancy of 2011 and the Time of Revolution
New York Police officers attack protesters with batons, pepper spray and horses in an attempt to prevent them from gathering in Times Square. Police officers’ rage is understandable, for in this photograph, we witness angry protesters who have turned the world upside down. What the image suggests is that people are no longer determined by capitalist excess, but determine the conditions that determine them. It shows the interaction between the virtual (a philosophical ideal, revolution) and the actual (angry protesters) that is at war with visible reality (neoliberal capitalism). The image, therefore, captures a moment in which the stability and the certainty of neoliberalism became yesterday’s bad memory. Times Square, the capital of consumerism and the capitalist spectacle, makes a powerful setting for this picture: “shiny walls of towing glass, the citadels of corporate entertainment, dazzle among the giant screens” (Jones, 2011).
The Political Economy of Indigenous Dispossession: Bare and Dispensable Lives in the Andes
The expansion of the extractive industries has, as counterparts, first, the reaction of indigenous communities in the defense of their communal goods (land, water, grazing, etc.), and second, the violent counter-attack of the state through police and military repression, legitimated many times by the of exception (in Peru the “state of emergency”, a kind of state of exception, has been applied by governments in previous years to control socio-environmental protests). Political economy and legal policy are both relevant to this situation and both are functionally connected.
In respect of political economy, let us bring to mind what David Harvey calls “accumulation by dispossession”, which is just the theoretical update of the “primitive accumulation” described by Karl Marx, that is to say: capitalist expansion requires the violent transformation of common goods into commodities in order to be appropriated and then used by exchange mechanisms.
A Tribute to Eric Hobsbawm
‘If one thinker left a major indelible mark on the twentieth century, it was Karl Marx’ Eric Hobsbawm wrote in his last book ‘How to Change the World’ published in 2011. Perry Anderson entitles his review of Eric’s autobiography ‘Interesting Times’, ‘The age of Eric…
Rights and property paradigms: challenging the hegemony
The interrelationship of (human) rights and property paradigms raises particularly profound questions when played out in respect of environmental claims. It is therefore no surprise that contributions to this edition invoke ontological and epistemological concerns…
After the Indignation: A Speech from within the Spanish Resistance
Last 25S (25th of Sept) we called to surround the Congress of the members of parliament to rescue it from the kidnapping of the popular sovereignty carried out by the Troika and the financial markets. An occupation executed with the consent and collaboration of most…
LIBOR (and other mythical beasts)
Martin Wheatley, British financial regulator charged with solving the LIBOR crisis, has returned from his Crusade carrying, we are told, a splinter of the True Cross which he assures us is capable of procuring miracles. Not common or garden miracles involving the…
Interview with ‘Bifo’: Reactivating the Social Body in Insurrectionary Times
David Hugill and Elise Thorburn [1] have kindly agreed to publish this extended dialogue with the Italian Autonomist Marxist theorist Franco Berardi - known as 'Bifo'. It has just been released in the Berkley Planning Journal as part of an excellent special issue on…
The sacred dilemma of inoperosity. On Giorgio Agamben’s Opus Dei
With this book, the journey Agamben began with Homo Sacer seems to have come to an end. It was a long road, from the early ‘90s until today, nearly twenty years. An archeology of ontology conducted (with a rigor that not even the bizarre and misleading game of little…
Interview with leader of the Greek Syriza Party: ‘The Euro is a Powder Keg that is Going to Explode!’
Euro or no euro. That was the grand dilemma in which Greece, and in particular, the Syriza movement that you lead, was framed. How do you analyse the period of crisis that Europe is currently undergoing, and which seems to put in question much more than the sacrosanct stability of the euro?
I believe the European model has to be rebuilt from below. We can’t be satisfied with what today is called Europe. The current crisis is not a European crisis but a global one. Europe today does not have the mechanisms to confront it or control the worldwide financial attack against its peoples. Hence why Europe became a continent where the attack of the global financial system was ferocious. We have no defences.
Impressions of the Critical Legal Conference 2012
The Critical Legal Conference (“CLC”) 2012. I thought I’d leave it until a week after the event, to allow time for the dust to settle, before reflecting on the connections between the diverse papers, the intense conversations and my own theoretical preoccupations. It…
KEY CONCEPTS
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SERIES / SYMPOSIA
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