CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL
CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL
Speed Limit: What does it mean to regulate AI?
Elena Esposito argues that artificial intelligence is misnamed and that a more accurate descriptor would be ‘artificial communication’.[1] Here, communication is closely connected to the idea of being informed: a communication is pertinent to the extent that it informs the addressee of something that is novel or not previously known to them. However, we need to be careful because Esposito, following the work of Luhmann, does not consider communication to involve the conveying of something ‘in the mind’ of the sender into the mind of the addressee. Rather, the addressee is akin to a system that, we might say, is triggered or irritated by a communication to produce a change of state in its own system. Such a change is information, closely aligning to Bateson’s definition of information as ‘the difference that makes a difference’.[2] Consequently, if AI produces a change of state in a human addressee then communication has taken...
ARTICLES
In Commemoration October 12, 1492: Manifesto of Decolonial Aesthetics
A transmodern world has emerged, reconfiguring the past 500 years of coloniality and its aftermath, modernity, postmodernity and altermodernity. A remarkable feature of this transformation is the creativity in/from the Non-Western world and its political...
The Most Important Thing in the World
I was honored to be invited to speak at Occupy Wall Street on Thursday night. Since amplification is (disgracefully) banned, and everything I say will have to be repeated by hundreds of people so others can hear (a?k?a “the human microphone”), what I actually say at...
Zizek in Wall Street — Transcript
We are all losers, but the true losers are down there on Wall Street. They were bailed out by billions of our money. We are called socialists, but here there is always socialism for the rich. They say we don’t respect private property, but in the 2008 financial...
The Derridian Performative & the Foundation of the Interim Transitional National Committee for Libya
In March of this year Jean-Luc Nancy published an article entitled “What the Arab Peoples Signify to Us” in the Libération newspaper. The article supported the NATO lead military intervention in Libya. Alain Badiou penned an acerbic response, claiming that Nancy had...
Killing is the New ‘Justice’: The Murky Morality of Target Killings
Today’s news [Ed: 30 September 2011] of the killing of US citizen Anwar al-Awlaki by US drones sparked a much overdue flurry of criticism and questions on the ethics and legality of Obama’s death-by-drone programme in the war on terror. Awlaki, al-Qaeda’s alleged...
From the nano to the macro-political: Reflections on Biodiversity & Food Supply
This is the latest editorial from the Journal of Human Rights & the Environment (Vol. 2, No. 2 (2010)). The full edition is available here. TW Lukes once observed that ‘[t]he discursive script of environmentality embedded in terms such as ecology or environment is...
The Chilean Winter: Student Revolt
Originally baptised as the Chilean Winter, the student movement in Chile has demonstrated that it is far from being the consequence of a seasonal emancipating spirit. After four months of continuous and massive protests for the establishment of a fair and integrated...
Occupy Wall Street & the State of Exception
On Friday, September 30, 2011 the United States announced it had legally murdered two US citizens without due legal process in Yemen. The following day, the police kettled and arrested 700 anti-corporate protesters who were marching peacefully on the Brooklyn Bridge...
Disrupting Links: Gender, Identity and Security
This paper is about, as the title indicates, disrupting certain pervasive and seemingly obvious links.[1] First, the link between gender and identity, wherein gender is assumed to be a stable, reliable determinant of an identity that also assumed to be fixed....
The Many Successes of Occupy Wall Street
The people who are occupying an enormously symbolic piece of ground are being criticized in some quarters for not doing enough. That may overlook some important accomplishments that have already happened, though. The Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement is less than two...
Law’s Environment: Critical Legal Perspectives
The following is the introduction to Ubaldus de Vries & Lyana Francot (Eds), Law’s Environment: Critical Legal Perspectives (Eleven International Publishing, 2011), published subsequent to the Critical Legal Conference 2010 held in Utrecht. Introduction Law’s...
The Revolution is Not Being Televised
During the Egyptian insurrection, the Mubarak regime tried to counter the multitudes on Tahrir Square by avoiding mentioning them on the state-run TV. The so-called liberal media in the United States highlighted that this authoritarian media blackout brought to light...
Towards an Acoustic Jurisprudence
In the same building in which Bob Dylan recorded much of his seminal album Blood on the Tracks, there is a room within a room within a room.[1] The outermost of these is lined with foot-thick concrete, the inner two have double walls of insulated steel. The central...
The Guise of Citizenship: Immigration & Liminal Spaces of Legality
Like all obviousnesses, including those that make a word 'name a thing' or 'have a meaning' (therefore including the obviousness of the 'transparency' of language), the 'obviousness' that you and I are subjects – and that that does not cause any problems – is an...
The Essence of Ecology: Uncanny Ipseities
Full Title: Uncanny Ipseities: presencing beenness – worlding-rootedness/rooted worldliness – political differend : be-ginning-steering of the west as the be-coming-gliding of the east ** The main move of this paper is to conceive Heidegger as a thinker about the...
The Dis-enclosure of Constituent Power: Tunisia, Agamben & Nancy
In much of the conventional analysis, constituent power is used to signify an opening of constitutionalism to its other. It is framed as an alterity that legitimates and facilitates the constitution. As such, the constituent moment has an intensely temporal quality....
Constitutionalism & the Time of the Political
In his book The Idea of Public Law Martin Loughlin outlines three ‘orders of the political’ that underpin and orient public law. The first order begins with Carl Schmitt’s famous formulation of the distinction between friend and enemy. Loughlin contends that it is...
The Heart of the World – Sovereignty & its Ground
This text appears as part of the exhibition For Inclusion in the Syllabi curated by Five Story Projects at the Pigeon Wing gallery in London (Sept 15th - 30th). The exhibition also features work by: Am Nuden Da, Ana Balona de Oliveira, Thomas Bush, Angus Cameron,...
The Hyper-Hermeneutic Gesture of a Subtle RevolutionR
Drawing upon the thought of Giorgio Agamben, this paper focuses upon the potential of a single act to change a political order. Agamben’s writings on the exception and the figure of whatever-being retain the possibility for a paradigmatic gesture that opens up a space...
Human Dignity and the Incomplete Arab Spring
The political power of a protest movement can be seen by looking at the protest group’s awareness of its own position and the balance of power in which the group finds itself. Another factor is the group’s ability to resist its own integration into the hegemonic...
Heartwarming Tales: The Story of a Fundamentally Decent Nation
It is not often I quote Richard Littlejohn, but today it will help kick off the story of how Britain became a Fundamentally Decent Nation. That sensitive and gentle man wrote this in a column in response to the earthquake in Japan: "Anyone who has visited or worked in...
KEY CONCEPTS
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