Law’s violence

Reivew of Oishik Sircar, Violent Modernities: Cultural Lives of Law in the New India
Oishik Sircar, Violent Modernities: Cultural Lives of Law in the New India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2021). 370pp., £40.99 hb., 978 0 19012 792 3 This is a book that resists easy categorisation and, as a result, also resists the typical review process. 1 I could, for example, note that the book consists of […]

International law and capitalism

Reivew of Ntina Tzouvala, Capitalism as Civilisation: A History of International Law
Ntina Tzouvala, Capitalism as Civilisation: A History of International Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021). 276pp., £85.00 hb., £22.99 pb., 978 1 10849 718 3 hb., 978 1 10873 955 9 pb. At the heart of the post-World War II international order was a legitimating narrative premised on the idea that the world system was […]

Towards a juridical archaeology of primitive accumulation: A reading of Foucault's Penal Theories and Institutions

The virtual dimensions of a project The implicit diptych formed by the two successive courses delivered by Michel Foucault at the Collège de France between 1971 and 1973 – Penal Theories and Institutions and The Punitive Society – has already been the object of substantial commentary. The principal gains arising from philological or speculative soundings […]
Blue typewriter in a black box

Human rights in a wrong world

Reivew of Ratna Kapur, Gender, Alterity and Human Rights
Ratna Kapur, Gender, Alterity and Human Rights: Freedom in a Fishbowl (Cheltenham and Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2018). 307pp., £90.00 hb., £19.95 pb., 978 1 78811 252 9 hb., 978 1 83910 447 3 pb. Over the past few decades, various critical scholars have emphasised the limitations of human rights. Such scholars have, for […]

Racial properties of colonial appropriation

Reivew of Brenna Bhandar, Colonial Lives of Property
Brenna Bhandar, Colonial Lives of Property: Law, Land, and Racial Regimes of Ownership (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018). 272pp., £80.00 hb., £20.99 pb., 978 0 82237 139 7 hb., 978 0 82237 146 5 pb. Brenna Bhandar’s Colonial Lives of Property is a significant intervention into contemporary debates on empire, the property relation, imperial […]

Deadly Algorithms: Can legal codes hold software accountable for code that kills?

COMMENTARy Deadly algorithms Can legal codes hold software accountable for code that kil s? Susan schuppli Algorithms have long adjudicated over vital processes that help to ensure our wellbeing and survival, from pacemakers that maintain the natural rhythms of the heart, and genetic algorithms that optimise emergency response times by cross-referencing ambulance locations with demographic […]

The Right To Protest

News The right to protestAs Quebec erupts over plans to increase tuition fees by the equivalent of £200, and twelve people (including Professor Joshua Clover) who protested against a campus bank at University of California–Davis begin a trial that could see them imprisoned for eleven years and fined $1 million each, what of the scores […]

Constitutional state and democracy: On Jürgen Habermas’s Between Facts and Norms

In his Between Facts and Norms, [1] Jürgen Habermas offers a justification of the ʻdemocratic constitutional stateʼ from the viewpoint of his communicative or discourse theory, and gives a thorough exposition of his conception of democratic politics. In what follows I will attempt to give a general outline of Habermasʼs political philosophy and to suggest […]

Bodies and power, revisited

Foucaultʼs early approach to the question of bodies and power is perhaps best known in his analysis of the body of the prisoner in Discipline and Punish. [1] Many of us have read and reread this analysis, and tried to understand how power acts upon a body, but also how power comes to craft and […]

Systems theory and legal theory: Luhmann, Heidegger and the false ends of metaphysics

The political reception of Niklas Luhmann in the English-speaking world is still localized. His death in 1998 triggered a wider general interest in his work, and its susceptibility to reception in cultural theory has been clearly registered. [1] However, political debate on his writings is still largely confined to the theoretically tuned regions of legal […]

The exemplary exception: Philosophical and political decisions in Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer

The exemplary exception Philosophical and political decisions in Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer Andrew norris rights. More specifically, the Nazi death camps are not a political aberration, least of all a unique event, but instead the place where politics as the sovereign decision on life most clearly reveals itself: ʻtoday it is not the city but […]

Walter Benjamin and the Red Army Faction, Part 2

Critique of Violence: the deposing of the law Walter Benjamin and the Red Army Faction, Part 2 Irving wohlfarth Things fal apart; the centre cannot hold;Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world. W.B. Yeats, ‘The Second Coming’The ‘Critique of Violence’ (1921, hereafter abbreviated to ‘Critique’) is the only published statement of Benjamin’s on politics and […]