Book review:
Anti-Nietzsche. LSE
Review of Books (12 Nov 2012) Blog Entry
'Seizing Truths: Art, Politics, Law', in O.
Ben-Dor (ed.), Law and Art: Justice, Ethics and Aesthetics
(Routledge, 2011), pp. 73 - 92
Illusion and Betrayal : The City, the Poets, or an Ethics of
Truths?' Utrecht Law Review 7 (2) pp.160-179 (2011)
A nagging feeling of great expectations turned sour is
in the air, at least at this end of the globe. The illusion appears to
have been twofold. Those liberals who after the Cold War had imagined
finally to see the Western city win over competing forms of
self-regulation, self-reproduction, and homeostasis can no longer fail
to see how, by the time the twenty-first century has commenced,
democracy and the rule of law, the West's own blueprint for living
together, have lost some of their lustre, when they have not been
bluntly rejected. Those amongst the poets who, by contrast, had argued
all along that another world was possible or, alternatively, that
democracy and the rule of law could at most be promised or tendered
rather than fully achieved or imposed, sometimes today worry whether in
the process they may not have become somewhat problematically if
unwittingly fixated with what in the age of mass culture and information
technology some argue might be a potentially self-defeating aesthetics
of the Other. Alain Badiou's Platonism of the multiple and,
specifically, his ethics of truths invite us to consider whether the
widespread sense of disappointment and closure which follow from such an
unsatisfactory situation should not be grasped as a figure of nihilism,
specifically as a figure of 'betrayal', and whether, on the other hand,
what is required may not be discernment, courage, and caution and to
remain alert to the possible occurrence of new signal events. Thus to a
poetics of illusion and of consequent disappointment Badiou prefers an
ethics of truths which starts from the obvious existence of certain
generic truths and yet is never closed-off to the invention of new ones.
As presented, Badiou's ethical proposal is far from being fully
developed and it is bound to be contentious. And yet it does contribute
to a unique and powerful critique of current events as they ceaselessly
appear on the horizon of a more interconnected world, specifically a
critique which purports to offer a more affirmative, and even
optimistic, message than many competing analyses of democracy and the
rule of law.
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'Le
regard de la comparaison : Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida', in P.
Legrand (ed.) Comparer les droits, résolument (Paris: PUF,
2009), pp. 147 - 178
'Badiou's Nocturnal Jurisprudence', 29 Cardozo Law Review
2361-2393 (2008)
How, in the philosophy of Alain Badiou,
is the relation between thought and language, the true
and the legal, between philosophy itself and the
impersonal transcendental field made possible through
the occurrence of unexpected events? With and against
Badiou, I argue that such a relation is one of
subtraction and so similar to that which from time
immemorial has permitted the somewhat enigmatic dominion
of night and day in nature and culture alike. What then
might be at stake in Badiou’s nocturnal jurisprudence,
in his subtractive discourse of the truth of the legal?
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'Categories and Concepts: Mapping Maps in Western Legal Thought',
1 International Journal of Law in Context
411–426 (2005)
'Francesco’s Devilish Venus: Notations on Legal Space',
41 California Western Law Review 147–240 (2004)
‘Meditating Comparisons, or the Question of Comparative Law’, 4
San Diego International Law Journal 57-90 (2003)
Many today claim that,
after WWII, the fall of the Berlin wall and, now, 9/11,
the changing nature of nation states, democracy, and the
law can no longer be sensibly ignored. How can
comparative law contribute to such an important debate?
In this essay, I argue that one way of contributing to
the debate over the changing nature of nation states,
democracy, and the law would be to engage in 'poetic
comparisons' of law's many domains. What then are poetic
comparisons of law, and what do they invite us to do?
Learning from Martin Heidegger's life-long advocacy of
meditating thinking, poetic comparisons of law are
'meditating comparisons'. Neither poetry nor any such
form of representational thought, poetic comparisons of
law encourage us to begin by thinking legal thinking
afresh and, in particular, by thinking again the
long-forgotten question of comparative law - what 'is'
comparative law? A radical answer to such a question
clearly shows how it is only by bringing language as
well as difference firmly at the centre stage of
comparative analysis that we may be able ever again to
conduct meaningful comparisons in today's rapidly
changing societies. Poetic comparisons of law, however,
take language and difference to mean something quite
unlike their ordinary, everyday meaning.
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‘At the Margins of the History of
English Law: The Institutional, the Political and the “Blotted
Out”’, 22 Legal Studies 420-447 (2002)
So much of what, so far,
has constituted the grammar of mainstream historical
discourse on English law can be broadly characterized as
being primarily concerned with either formal legal
institutions or their socio-political context. While
such histories are generally useful, they fail to see
what other-histories - what radically different stories
- could be told instead. Such a web of other-histories,
it is here suggested, require both time and imagination.
By temporarily leaving mainstream historical accounts
and entering into the time of legal history, the
centrality of so many institutional and socio-political
histories of English law may have to be reconsidered. In
particular, what would become clear is that one type of
legal history needs urgently to be told - a history of
the 'blotted-out'. Neither included in mainstream legal
history, nor excluded from it - neither visible nor
memorable - the history of the blotted-out is the
history of what can be found, so commonly and
ordinarily, in everyday life. Mainstream legal history
is either unaware of, or uninterested in, the
blotted-out. Yet, it is precisely a history of the
blotted-out which, importantly, would guard, in history,
the possibility of law's most original imagination.
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'At the Dawn of Part Performance : a Hypothesis', 18 The Journal
of Legal History 32-46 (1997)
Igor Stramignoni
