CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL
CRITICAL LEGAL THINKING
LAW AND THE POLITICAL
From Hyper-Chaos to the Irreversible
My philosophical project of radical democracy stands on two foundational intertwined discoveries that offer a firm ontological grounding of power.[i] 1. The world is radically contingent but is simulated by a world that presents itself as necessary through potestas (power as domination) and Entelecheia (when becoming obeys an external finality). 2 Politics can only be grounded in democracy and democracy can only be grounded in Energeia (unqualified, anarchic, synergistic power). The point of this article is to show how both discoveries are necessarily grounded in what I consider the foremost radical philosophical creation of our times, perhaps of Modernity, Quentin Meillassoux’s Hyper-Chaos. Nevertheless, paradoxically, Hyper-Chaos concomitantly offers my project its primordial ontological mainstay: sheer contingency as the sole unfounded base of the world and thus of Energeia, and its...
ARTICLES
How the British Museum Changed its Story About the Gweagal Shield
When Lieutenant James Cook landed, uninvited, onto the continent now known as Australia, he began a colossal theft. The British colonial project initiated by his landing not only involved the mass theft of Aboriginal land, but also of sacred Aboriginal objects made...
Storytelling Round the Circle of Life & Death
Copyright: Sakaba Storytelling, confession, and bearing witness, circulates and is encircled by life and death. The promise of life, knowledge, truth, is always under the threat of death, fiction, forgetfulness. These conditions do not stand in opposition to one...
Lessons from the general elections in Portugal
The results of the 30 January general elections in Portugal, with the Socialist Party (PS) winning an absolute majority, came as a surprise. Portugal will now be the only European country ruled by a government based on the absolute parliamentary majority of a single...
Farewell, Alan
Bruce Curtis, Justin Paulson, John Manwaring, Stacy Douglas, and Jennifer Henderson farewell, alan Alan Hunt, Chancellor’s Professor of Law and Sociology, chose a medically-assisted death, with Rosalind Allchin, his partner of 42 years, by his side, on 8 December...
In Memory of Alan Hunt
in memory of alan hunt I never had the pleasure of meeting Alan Hunt, though I suppose that is hardly a necessary condition to be influenced by someone’s work. Alan’s constitutive theory of law formed and continues to form a cornerstone of how I think about law and...
A Reminder
Umut Özsu a reminder I was never able to meet Alan Hunt. My relation to him is mediated in a double sense—first, in that my only points of entry into his unique and impressive world are through his many and varied writings; second, in that I happen to teach in the...
Alan Hunt, intellectual, academic, radical
alan hunt, intellectual, academic, radical I met Alan in the summer of 1979 at the Communist University in London. The University, partly Alan’s idea, was a week-long series of lessons organised around the main academic disciplines. I was carrying out my doctoral...
Alan Hunt
alan hunt Alan Hunt passed away on Wednesday 8 December 2021. He was at home with his partner Ros in Ottawa, Canada. Many had complicated relations with Alan, but he was no doubt a towering figure in the Department of Law and Legal Studies and at Carleton, as well as...
António Guterres’s hour
There is a clear discomfort among international activists and commentators who follow the United Nations, as well as among former UN senior officials and special rapporteurs, with the organization’s growing irrelevance as the world is faced with increasingly complex...
The Politics of Erection
“Homo homini lupus” or “a man is a wolf to another man” has historically been one of the most popular dicta used in political philosophy to denote the hypothetical primal condition of human societies and justify their need for submission to a sovereign authority. In...
A Pagan Christmas
For early Christians, celebrations of birth were broadly viewed as sinful. With the death and resurrection of Jesus at the center of the early message, and with Jesus expected to return at any moment, early Christians recorded the dates of their deaths but not the...
To bell hooks & not being happy till we are all free
On the death of bell hooks, Dr Folúkẹ́ Adébísí published the following essay on her blog African Skies. We republish it here with her kind permission. I am writing this at the end of a tiring academic term, staving off burnout from overwork and the trepidation that...
A Reply — Obligations: New Trajectories in Law
We continue our series on contemporary critical (legal) books with a series of responses to Scott Veitch's, Obligations: New Trajectories in Law (Routledge, 2021). We have posted four responses to Scott's new work, each picking distinct themes which together testify...
On Veitch’s Obligations
We continue our series on contemporary critical (legal) books with a series of responses to Scott Veitch's, Obligations: New Trajectories in Law (Routledge, 2021). We will post four responses to Scott's new work, each picking distinct themes which together testify to...
Eco-Legal Bonds: On Veitch’s Obligations
We continue our series on contemporary critical (legal) books with a series of responses to Scott Veitch's, Obligations: New Trajectories in Law (Routledge, 2021). We will post four responses to Scott's new work, each picking distinct themes which together testify to...
The Structures & Subjects of Obligation: On Veitch’s Obligation
We continue our series on contemporary critical (legal) books with a series of responses to Scott Veitch's, Obligations: New Trajectories in Law (Routledge, 2021). We will post four responses to Scott's new work, each picking distinct themes which together...
Rights, Obligations and Torture: On Veitch’s Obligations
We continue our series on contemporary critical (legal) books with a series of responses to Scott Veitch's, Obligations: New Trajectories in Law (Routledge, 2021). We will post four responses to Scott's new work, each picking distinct themes which together testify to...
Many Worlds Interpretation, Critical Theory and the (Immanent) Paradox of Power
The Paradox and its Solution Conclusion: Allow me to begin with the conclusion and work my way back to it. Only in contingency is the world possible, when the world is harnessed in necessity it is simply a simulacrum of the world through a simulacrum of power....
Foucault in Context: Transitional Justice as a Heterotopic Object and Medium
In a lecture delivered in Tunisia in 1967, Michel Foucault referred to heterotopias as ‘des espaces autres’. A literal translation of this French phrase means ‘other spaces’. Foucault lists some such other spaces ranging from boarding schools and honeymoon...
Hugging
Photo by Anastasia Vityukova on Unsplash At 4.30 p.m. on August 28th, 2021, for the first time after five hundred and twenty-five days spent in isolation, on account of the pandemic, in my small village 30 km from Coimbra, I hugged and was hugged by...
Crits and the Chinese Party-state
Series: Critical Legal Thinking on China Critical theory borrows liberally from various anti-liberal thinkers , such as Karl Marx and Carl Schmitt, but what should critical legal scholarship on – and in – illiberal political regimes look like? This essay discusses the...
