CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL
CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL
Reclaiming the Ground: Lawful Expropriation and Land Justice in South Africa
Colonialism rarely dies; it mutates. Its uniforms change—from khaki to suits, from passbooks to policy papers—but the arrangement it protects remains the same: some live on the land, others live off it. Post-apartheid South Africa knows this intimately. Political rights were won; material power was not. Three decades on, the democratic state is asked to perform a contradiction: celebrate equality while administering an economic geography built to deny it. The debate over land reform—especially over compensation below market value, and in narrow cases at nil—turns on whether we still seek permission from the very market that grew fat on dispossession. Frantz Fanon warned that colonialism is not only a system of force; it is a pedagogy that trains the colonized to accept the master’s ledger as the measure of justice.[1] If decolonization begins with unlearning that pedagogy, then the first act is conceptual: stop asking the market to ratify the undoing of the market’s crimes. The...
ANNOUNCEMENTS
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ARTICLES
Murderous Humanitarianism
For centuries the soldiers, priests and civil agents of imperialism, in a welter of looting, outrage and wholesale murder, have with impunity grown fat off the colored races. Now it is the turn of the demagogues, with their counterfeit liberalism. But the proletariat...
Manifesto of Surrealism
So strong is the belief in life, in what is most fragile in life – real life, I mean – that in the end this belief is lost. Man, that inveterate dreamer, daily more discontent with his destiny, has trouble assessing the objects he has been led to use, objects that his...
The End of Politics (2): Europe
How different does Europe look today from ten years ago. In 2000, influential commentators hailed the dawn of the ‘new European century’ to replace the atrocious ‘American’ 20th century. Europe was on the way to becoming the model polity for the new world. The...
The End of Politics and the Defence of Democracy
In this month of the ‘Greek passion’ one thing is certain. The country will never be the same again. But while the commentators, academics and ‘experts’ discuss endlessly the economic crisis, the deep political malaise has gone unnoticed. The three ‘waves’ of...
Law
Law comes from “lex” (“legere”; to read). Who could read the law? And who can write it? The one empowered to do so. The law is always inaccurate because accuracy could only be achieved at the cost of an infinite negentropy, and it would an infinite amount of...
The Greek Tragedy
Few events in recent European political history have baffled analysts and commentators more than the widespread insurrection or ‘riots’ (according to right-wing commentators) that took place in Greece in December 2008. The catalyst was the unprovoked police killing of...
In Memoriam – Jose Luis Brea (1957-2010)
At the end of August 2010, the publication of what would sadly turn out to be the penultimate text written by José Luis Brea, Professor of Aesthetics and Contemporary Art Theory at the Universidad Carlos III of Madrid, awoke in many of us a deep feeling of sorrow and...
Rights to be Specs of Human Capital
I want to draw attention to the recent interview with Prof. Wendy Brown on Human Rights in Ireland. Prof. Brown engages initially with the question of critique, and its relation to rights. She refuses to reject rights, but instead seeks to question the premises upon...
Nomadic Thinking
This presentation is a few notes on a question. The question being: What does it mean to say: the free space of thinking? As my title suggests, I would like to relate the free space of thinking to what one might simply call nomadic thinking. To this end, I will draw...
Human Rights and the Crisis of Modernity
‘Truth’ emerges when a victim, from his present catastrophic position, gains a sudden insight into the entire past as a series of catastrophes that led to his current predicament. (Walter Benjamin) The horrors of the Second World War and, in particular, the ‘real...
Jerry Springer Politics in Greece
A sense of deja vu has dominated the Greek election campaign. The protagonists, Prime Minister Costas Karamanlis and leader of the opposition George Papandreou, have been repeating earlier skirmishes between Costas Karamanlis senior (uncle of the prime minister), the...
Rescuing Human Rights?
Natural and human rights were conceived as a tool against the despotism of power and the arrogance of wealth. Their co-option by governments means that they have lost much of their critical force and their initial aim and role has been reversed. (Douzinas, 2007: 24)....
Communism, the word: notes for the London conference 2009
The following are the notes that Jean-Luc Nancy prepared for the conference 'On the Idea of Communism', March 2009. An edited version is available in Costas Douzinas & Slavoj Zizek (eds), The Idea of Communism (Verso, London 2010) 145–53. Communism, the word. Not...
Hard Lessons From The Hard Right
When the British National Party finally managed two successes in the June 2009 European Elections, the mainstream media reaction was one of astonishment followed by intense curiosity and soul searching. This was a UK version of the 2002 success of the Front National...
Talking to Fictions – The People & Beyond (Ricardo Sanin Interviews Slavoj Zizek)
Ricardo Sanin: Do “the people” still carry any emancipatory potential? Slavoj Zizek: Yes – recent events in Iran display this potential. The green color adopted by the Mousavi supporters, the cries of “Allah akbar!” that resonate from the roofs of Tehran in the...
The Left and Constitutional Reform
What surprised me most in the Guardian New Politics articles was that the majority have little to do with politics. They are suggestions for changes in constitutional law - some relatively minor (reducing the number of MPs, shortening their holidays or abolishing the...
P(l)ot, Kettle, Black: The G20 Protests and Some Critical Legal Thoughts
So what stood out at the G20 protests? What was so important about such a mass of individuals swarming in their many creeds against a system that is in seeming decay? What, some said to me, was the point of such an endeavour when the leaders of the world were trying...
At the Blunt Edge of the Cosh: Police Violence and the Anti-G20 Protests
Much has been made in recent days of the violence of the police at the financial fools day G20 protests. In particular the manner in which police officers struck and pushed Ian Tomlinson and a number of others while policing their ‘kettle’. However, perhaps we are...
Constituent Power and this Summer of Rage
There has been much discussion and fear-mongering about this expected summer of rage. The idea is put forward by the media and political classes that we must expect the worst. However, in the light of the recent resurgence of the left and the countervailing ideology...
Class bites back in the European UnionEuro
What is left in Europe? Once upon a time in the 1970s, the left was clear: the European Community was a neo-liberal project,driven by capital interests and destructive of the social settlements established following years of class conflict within individual European...
Political Economy, Lemon Socialism and the New Global Banana Republic
The first decade of the 21st century witnessed two mass media events that stand out from the rest: the first was visible, the second was invisible. 9/11 and its aftermath offered a feast of visible shock and awe. These images were devoured by media consumers, but the...
KEY CONCEPTS
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SERIES / SYMPOSIA
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