Papers by Connal Parsley
Routledge Handbook of International Law and Humanities, 2021
In Shane Chalmers and Sundhya Pahuja (Eds) Routledge Handbook of International Law and the Humani... more In Shane Chalmers and Sundhya Pahuja (Eds) Routledge Handbook of International Law and the Humanities (2021).
Pólemos, 2022
A growing movement in contemporary art takes legal forms and materials as its subject matter. In ... more A growing movement in contemporary art takes legal forms and materials as its subject matter. In this article, I argue that a key strand of this 'legal turn' should be historicised in two entwined ways. It can be seen as an extension and reformalisation of some central concerns of late twentieth-century contemporary art; namely relational and participatory aesthetics, and the dematerialisation of the art object. But the artworks considered here can also be analysed as a fragmentary site of 'juristic subjectivity' in the aftermath of legal positivism. According to Carl Schmitt, the positivisation that took hold in the nineteenth century exiled the jurist from their role in formally elaborating the substantive law created by social praxis-turning the jurist into a "mere scholar" in relation to law. In this sense, the separation of juristic thought from law is the aftermath of this destructive event. Yet the etymology of aftermath also links it to a secondary growth that re-emerges after a mowing or harvest. Similarly, the 'contract artists' analysed here evidence a 'regrowth' of juristic thought that relies precisely on its position outside of law 'properly so-called', and inside the conditions of contemporary artistic production and consumption. Analysing contract artworks by artists Adrian Piper and A Constructed World, this article suggests that they differ markedly from the contract art, usually connected to the Siegelaub-Projansky agreement, that has received the majority of academic attention. Whereas that so-called "legal moment in artistic production" prioritises the author function, the abstraction of value, and the commodification of social relations, through the above double historicization I will argue that this 'other' contract art repurposes legal forms to institute a lived experience of juristic social relations, presenting a new kind of material jurisprudence.
Interdisciplinaries: Research Process, Method, and the Body of the Law, Eds Didi Herman and Connal Parsley, 2022
In this account of a hypothetical book chapter on 'the body', I describe how I would devise a cha... more In this account of a hypothetical book chapter on 'the body', I describe how I would devise a chapter using the technique of writing through a single example--particularly, a single representation of the body. The chapter discusses some methodological aspects of this choice of method, as well as its appropriateness to the theme of 'the body' in relation to law. It addresses practical concerns like selecting an example, and the 'enabling constraint' the method offers to the writing process. Working with a single example is presented as a matter of bringing disparate materials into a 'constellation' in order to make the example 'more itself', by exploring the conditions and patterns that it makes uniquely visible. The aim of this approach would be to bring together interrelated reflections on how bodies are made meaningful through representational techniques in concrete instances and for specific purposes; the political ontology of representationalism in relation to legal thinking and methods; and scholarly work as an active, critical participant in the acculturation of techniques and ontologies, via the reflexive repurposing of elements of legal thinking.
Griffith Law Review, 2018
The papers gathered in this special issue began their lives as plenary presentations at the 2016 ... more The papers gathered in this special issue began their lives as plenary presentations at the 2016 UK Critical Legal Conference, hosted at Kent Law School by the editors of the special issue and a committee of Kent Law School colleagues. This conference was arguably the 30th anniversary of the first CLC, also held at Kent, in 1986. The theme of the 2016 conference, 'Turning Points', was designed to provoke and accommodate a plurality of critical (legal) reflections on the specificity of the contemporary political situation. If the conference theme may now seem slightly prescienthaving been decided well before June's Brexit referendum and November's US presidential electionit is worth remembering that an air of change, upheaval and crisis already prevailed. The European migrant crisis was at its peak. 1 The worsening impacts of the Global Financial Crisis and Eurozone Crisis continued to be felt. Debt, social and economic precarity, polarised public discourse and the transformative effects of new technologies were already inescapable facts. Being located in Kent, at 'the UK's European University', the 'centrality' of Europe and its legal, political and intellectual traditionsand their constitutive relations with their 'others'were already at the front of our minds. Far from being prescient, the conference committee was as surprised as anyone by the results of that year's fateful ballots, and the 'turning points' they will forever be taken to mark. If anything, the coincidence of conference theme and political events speaks less to the latter's novelty, and more to the continuities that they made visible: deeper questions about the political and cultural imaginaries of both the UK and USA as nations (or empires). Their familiar clusters of social, economic, political and legal problems (immigration, (ethno)nationalism, and sovereignty, to name just one) were perhaps merely given new faces in the form of post-2016 populisms, echoes of fascism, and the effects of new media technologies. For critical legal scholarly traditions, these recent events have offered new spurs to consider the interaction of legality and legal rules with the operation of political, governmental and economic power. The nature of that interaction has always been a matter of fundamental significance for the liberal legal project, as well as its criticsfrom the earliest Marxist approaches, right through to today's cresting (or breaking?) neoliberal wave. Our interest was not at all in determining the new truth of the relation between law and the political, but rather in reflecting on how the present moment affects the pursuit of something like a critical legal project. Contemporary conditions are never separable from the critical impulse and the shape of its enterprise: in each moment, they provoke it, and give it its object, whilst also conditioning and constraining it, and suggesting the
Interdisciplinarities: Research Process, Method, and the Body of the Law, 2021
(eds Didi Herman and Connal Parsley). In this account of a hypothetical book chapter on 'the body... more (eds Didi Herman and Connal Parsley). In this account of a hypothetical book chapter on 'the body', I describe how I would devise a chapter using the technique of writing through a single example-particularly, a single representation of the body. The chapter discusses some methodological aspects of this choice of method, as well as its appropriateness to the theme of 'the body' in relation to law. It addresses practical concerns like selecting an example, and the 'enabling constraint' the method offers to the writing process. Working with a single example is presented as a matter of bringing disparate materials into a 'constellation' in order to make the example 'more itself', by exploring the conditions and patterns that it makes uniquely visible. The aim of this approach would be to bring together interrelated reflections on how bodies are made meaningful through representational techniques in concrete instances and for specific purposes; the political ontology of representationalism in relation to legal thinking and methods; and scholarly work as an active, critical participant in the acculturation of techniques and ontologies, via the reflexive repurposing of elements of legal thinking.
In Desmond Manderson (ed) (2017, Toronto UP) Law and the Visual: Representations, Technologies, and Critique
Two striking elements of the Bush administration's 'war on terror' were its use of torture, and t... more Two striking elements of the Bush administration's 'war on terror' were its use of torture, and the publication of related images. This chapter considers two of these images together (one from Camp X-Ray, Guantánamo Bay, in January 2002, and the other from the 'Abu Ghraib archive' made shortly after), in order to argue that the 'spectacle of the scaffold' famously identified by Michel Foucault did not disappear completely as he claimed, but was transformed. Foucault could not countenance this possibility due to a methodological aversion to representational-juridical power. But his account can nonetheless help us, I argue, to think through the fraught relationship between images of torture emanating from a liberal democratic state that disavows torture, and such a state's strategies for maintaining its governmental power.
Political torture has an intrinsic tendency to publicise itself, but 'governmental rationality' must mediate that tendency historically, which is to say, in relation to contemporary norms about the display of force and violence, as well as the material conditions through which things are made visible. As such, in this chapter I recast the spectacle of the scaffold as an ongoing politico-legal 'dynamic of display and concealment'. This dynamic, I suggest, must be negotiated and configured wherever a state acts to maintain its monopoly on violence. Turning to the two images in question, I argue that in the early 21st Century, when the state 'no longer takes responsibility for the violence bound up in its practice', Foucault's spectacle is 'exceptionalised' and split into two images. Considering their material conditions, I further argue that when read together these images manifest the two inverted halves of a necessarily unstable spectacle. One maintains the sovereign's triumphant public self-image, the other immanently produces the all-important guilty body of the criminal-enemy. Together, such images can be understood as 'exceptional' in that they rupture norms around the display of state violence, yet do so in order to maintain a 'normal' sovereign social and political order that is raced and heteronormatively sexualised. In addition to Foucault's 'micro-physics of power', then, I argue that we must also pay attention to the dimension of representation--and its materiality--in the maintenance of sovereign power, via what I call a 'micro-theatrics of power'.
Recent decisions have given legal identity to rivers such as Te Awa Tupua in New Zealand, and the... more Recent decisions have given legal identity to rivers such as Te Awa Tupua in New Zealand, and the Ganges and Yamuna in India, effectively treating them as having all the rights, duties and liabilities of a legal person. Looking at such cases, in which the enduring fiction of the legal person is extended over an increasingly wide range of referents, we are reminded that this fiction is anything but marginal – especially in the law of any jurisdiction influenced, however indirectly, by Roman jurisprudence. This paper begins from the point of view that the anthropological embedding of the juridical person ought not to be anachronistically attributed to the Roman ‘law of persons’ in which its craft originated. Rather, we suggest, the well-known Christian metaphysicalization of the juridical person as a moral entity not only adds to but also transforms and displaces that law as a juristic enterprise. What is marginalized in this sense is in fact Roman law’s discrete and self-conscious techniques of shaping the legal person. This article aims not just to highlight the familiar fate of the person under the influence of church doctrine, but also to draw a contemporary inspiration – and, more cautiously, a critical potential – from a return to a casuistic, concrete and immanent conception of the jurisprudential art of crafting the person. Rather than argue for the inclusion of excluded identities within law’s categories (thus extending such categories but doing nothing to challenge the often heteronormative construction of the identities it encompasses), this chapter asks what would it mean to return to an ‘experimental’ law of persons (or a ‘profaned’ art of fashioning the person, in Giorgio Agamben’s sense)? Might this eventually be a path by which to liberate juristic technique to new uses?
Giorgio Agamben: Legal, political and philosophical perspectives (Ed. Tom Frost)
Law and the Question of the Animal: A Critical Jurisprudence (eds Yoriko Otomo and Edward Mussawir), Feb 15, 2013
New Critical Legal Thinking (eds Matthew Stone, Illan Rua Wall and Costas Douzinas), 2012
This chapter addresses the paradoxical possibility for dissent against the legal and political or... more This chapter addresses the paradoxical possibility for dissent against the legal and political order through a particular form of political action: parody. Languages of protest and political action always risk complicity with the structures of power they aim to critique, and every subject and identity is constituted in relation to existing political power. But parodic gestures, such as those of the Tranny Cops in Australia - whose badged, uniformed, dildo-ed transgender mimicry of riot police has attracted the chagrin of the state governments – dwell differently within this complex aporia. Offering a critique whose only content is a re-performance, re-presentation, and re-inhabitation of policing’s gestural universe, the Tranny Cops’ parody at the same time takes an unmistakeable distance from the police’s methods of power, and the entailed order’s constitution and capture of life. This chapter uses the work of Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben to read the Tranny Cops’ gesture and to elaborate on what is specific about parody as a mode of political “protest”. Comparing Hannah Arendt’s conception of politics and her account of civil disobedience to Agamben’s notions of politics and parodic gesture, this chapter draws out some specifically Agambenian parameters for contemporary dissent at the limits of subject-sovereign relations. Can an entirely different relation to political power, which is almost unrecognizeable as such considering that it makes no claim to institution, be augured through parodic protest?
Austl. Feminist LJ, Jan 1, 2003
Continuum: Journal of Media &# 38; …, Jan 1, 2005
Events by Connal Parsley
Kent Summer School in Critical Theory, 2019
Join one of two intensive seminars, in small-group format, with:
Professor Alain Pottage: "An An... more Join one of two intensive seminars, in small-group format, with:
Professor Alain Pottage: "An Anthropogeology of Law"
How does the "anthropocene hypothesis" engage and challenge basic premises of legal thinking?
Professor Sigrid Weigel: "Towards a Political Theology of Images: Imaging the A-Visible in Science, Religion, and Politics"
‘New images’ share many aspects with pre-modern and ancient image practices that present super-natural figures or a-visible, transcendental ideas. This seminar investigates correspondences between images before and after 'art': traces and data, contemporary iconic images, the mediation of resentment, the translation of ideas, values and concepts into the visual register.
More information on the KSSCT, the seminar leaders, and full seminar descriptions and indicative reading lists can be found at https://research.kent.ac.uk/kssct
-
The Kent Summer School in Critical Theory was created to offer a unique intellectual experience to early career academics and research students – as well as to the scholars invited to lead seminars in a particular year.
For two weeks in Paris in July, a small group of junior scholars will work intensively with thinkers carefully selected from year to year, for the contemporary significance of their work and their ability to enrich the ethos of the school. The school has been arranged to create the conditions for an intimate and intensive collaboration between students and teachers, outside the formal institutional frame, so as to bring together participants who may not otherwise encounter each other.
We believe it is increasingly important to proliferate and defend spaces for critical thinking in the contemporary academy. Equally important is the maintenance of spaces within the PhD and early career calendar to pursue the kind of academic practice that engenders genuine and sustained intellectual activity.
In 2019 the KSSCT will be accompanied by a Graduate Research Day (29 June).
See website for further details, including a FAQ section.
We hope to see you in Paris this summer!
Abstract:
Paris, 26 June -7 July 2017
kssct.org
Two-week intensive seminars led by
- Timothy C... more Abstract:
Paris, 26 June -7 July 2017
kssct.org
Two-week intensive seminars led by
- Timothy Campbell: "Attention, Ethos, Life: Practices of the Self in the Contemporary Milieu"
- Patricia J. Williams: "Seeing and Surveillance: Law, culture and notions of justice"
-
The Kent Summer School in Critical Theory was created to offer a unique intellectual experience to early career academics and research students – as well as to the scholars invited to lead seminars in a particular year.
For two weeks in Paris in June, a small group of junior scholars will work intensively with thinkers carefully selected from year to year, for the contemporary significance of their work and their ability to enrich the ethos of the school. The school has been arranged to create the conditions for an intimate and intensive collaboration between students and teachers, outside the formal institutional frame, so as to bring together participants who may not otherwise encounter each other.
We believe it is increasingly important to proliferate and defend spaces for critical thinking in the contemporary academy. Equally important is the maintenance of spaces within the PhD and early career calendar to pursue the kind of academic practice that engenders genuine and sustained intellectual activity.
See website for further details, including a FAQ section
We hope to see you in Paris this summer!
CRITICAL LEGAL CONFERENCE 2016
Kent Law School
1st – 3rd September
Turning Points
The Call ... more CRITICAL LEGAL CONFERENCE 2016
Kent Law School
1st – 3rd September
Turning Points
The Call for Stream Proposals is OPEN NOW – please send proposals of no more than 500 words along with short bios of the stream organisers to [email protected]. The Call for Stream Proposals closes 7 March 2016.
“…there are no witnesses to changes of epoch. The epochal turning is an imperceptible frontier,
bound to no crucial date or event.”
The present is notoriously difficult to diagnose. Are we living at a decisive turning point for global and European history, politics and law? Are we witnesses to a new epoch? Or perhaps we just have a bad case of “presentism”? The Critical Legal Conference 2016 will open a forum for critical reflection on precarious political situations, particularly that of Europe in a global context - an apposite theme for a critical conference at the University of Kent, ‘the UK’s European University’ and a point of origin for the CLC.
Taking a global and historicised view of contemporary Europe and its intellectual and political traditions (as well as an interrogative stance on their centrality), we anticipate that this year’s CLC will enable a creative response to some of the many problems of our collective present. The difficulty in thinking the present lies partly in its immediacy, and partly in the way in which spaces for that thinking are themselves precarious, colonised, dis-placed, degraded, recast or simply made untenable. From individuals’ housing, employment and migration experiences to the broader question about the intensification or disintegration of the European political project, are life’s very objects and experiences now peculiarly shaped by precarity?
Law forms part of the architecture of precarity, shaping both its production and governance, whether through specific rules and regulations relating to welfare provision, housing law or the structuring and regulation of financial markets; or through changing images and enactments of justice, (fragmented) genealogies, and shifting understandings of modernity. One approach within the critical legal tradition has been to expose these architectures: to show how it produces inequity, to demonstrate its contingencies, to trace its genealogies, to question law’s production of a normative order of life. In this sense it might be said that the role of critique is to render law itself precarious. What is the contemporary nature, role and position of academic work generally, in relation to political life and cultural and intellectual history? Are we post-human? Post-Europe? Post-law? Post-critique? And what about the core critical legal concerns: law, justice and ethics?
True to the tradition of the CLC, we hope participants will approach these general provocations through a rich plurality of critical and radical thematics and interdisciplinary approaches.
Confirmed Plenary Speakers:
Donatella Alessandrini, Kent Law School
Kathleen Davis, University of Rhode Island
Isabell Lorey, European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies
Davide Tarizzo, University of Salerno
The Call for Stream Proposals is OPEN NOW – please send proposals of no more than 500 words along with short bios of the stream organisers to [email protected]. The Call for Stream Proposals closes 7 March 2016. The Call for Papers and Panels will be opened in March when streams are announced – and as ever there will be a general stream. *Conference registation will open via the webpage shortly: http://www.kent.ac.uk/law/research/clc-2016/*
We also invite participants to curate screenings, performances, happenings and other creative formats at the conference. Please contact us at [email protected] with your plans – we will do our best to facilitate them (within the bounds of possibility).
- Connal Parsley, Nick Piška and the KLS CLC Committee
Paris, 13-24 June 2016
kssct.org
Two-week intensive seminars led by
- Samantha Frost: "Matters ... more Paris, 13-24 June 2016
kssct.org
Two-week intensive seminars led by
- Samantha Frost: "Matters of perception: objects and materialities of affect"
- James Martel: "How to be a bad subject: misinterpellation and the anarchisation of the soul"
- Bernard Stiegler: "From German ideology to the Dialectic of nature:
Reading Marx and Engels in the age of the Anthropocene"
-
The Kent Summer School in Critical Theory was created to offer a unique intellectual experience to early career academics and research students – as well as to the scholars invited to lead seminars in a particular year.
For two weeks in Paris in June, a small group of junior scholars will work intensively with thinkers carefully selected from year to year, for the contemporary significance of their work and their ability to enrich the ethos of the school. The school has been arranged to create the conditions for an intimate and intensive collaboration between students and teachers, outside the formal institutional frame, so as to bring together participants who may not otherwise encounter each other.
We believe it is increasingly important to proliferate and defend spaces for critical thinking in the contemporary academy. Equally important is the maintenance of spaces within the PhD and early career calendar to pursue the kind of academic practice that engenders genuine and sustained intellectual activity.
See website for further details.
We hope to see you in Paris in June!
-
Translations by Connal Parsley
This is the English translation of Giorgio Agamben's 1968 essay 'L'albero del linguaggio'. Origin... more This is the English translation of Giorgio Agamben's 1968 essay 'L'albero del linguaggio'. Originally published in the journal I Problemi di Ulisse, in an issue on 'Language and Languages', the article has now been republished in Italian together with the first English translation in the first issue of the Journal of Italian Philosophy. The full contents of the issue are available online, featuring new work by Lorenzo Chiesa, Stephen Howard, Lars Cornelissen, and Andrea Bellocci, and reviews by Lucio Privitello, Sevgi Doğan and Michael Lewis:
https://research.ncl.ac.uk/italianphilosophy/current%20issue/
Uploads
Papers by Connal Parsley
Political torture has an intrinsic tendency to publicise itself, but 'governmental rationality' must mediate that tendency historically, which is to say, in relation to contemporary norms about the display of force and violence, as well as the material conditions through which things are made visible. As such, in this chapter I recast the spectacle of the scaffold as an ongoing politico-legal 'dynamic of display and concealment'. This dynamic, I suggest, must be negotiated and configured wherever a state acts to maintain its monopoly on violence. Turning to the two images in question, I argue that in the early 21st Century, when the state 'no longer takes responsibility for the violence bound up in its practice', Foucault's spectacle is 'exceptionalised' and split into two images. Considering their material conditions, I further argue that when read together these images manifest the two inverted halves of a necessarily unstable spectacle. One maintains the sovereign's triumphant public self-image, the other immanently produces the all-important guilty body of the criminal-enemy. Together, such images can be understood as 'exceptional' in that they rupture norms around the display of state violence, yet do so in order to maintain a 'normal' sovereign social and political order that is raced and heteronormatively sexualised. In addition to Foucault's 'micro-physics of power', then, I argue that we must also pay attention to the dimension of representation--and its materiality--in the maintenance of sovereign power, via what I call a 'micro-theatrics of power'.
Events by Connal Parsley
Professor Alain Pottage: "An Anthropogeology of Law"
How does the "anthropocene hypothesis" engage and challenge basic premises of legal thinking?
Professor Sigrid Weigel: "Towards a Political Theology of Images: Imaging the A-Visible in Science, Religion, and Politics"
‘New images’ share many aspects with pre-modern and ancient image practices that present super-natural figures or a-visible, transcendental ideas. This seminar investigates correspondences between images before and after 'art': traces and data, contemporary iconic images, the mediation of resentment, the translation of ideas, values and concepts into the visual register.
More information on the KSSCT, the seminar leaders, and full seminar descriptions and indicative reading lists can be found at https://research.kent.ac.uk/kssct
-
The Kent Summer School in Critical Theory was created to offer a unique intellectual experience to early career academics and research students – as well as to the scholars invited to lead seminars in a particular year.
For two weeks in Paris in July, a small group of junior scholars will work intensively with thinkers carefully selected from year to year, for the contemporary significance of their work and their ability to enrich the ethos of the school. The school has been arranged to create the conditions for an intimate and intensive collaboration between students and teachers, outside the formal institutional frame, so as to bring together participants who may not otherwise encounter each other.
We believe it is increasingly important to proliferate and defend spaces for critical thinking in the contemporary academy. Equally important is the maintenance of spaces within the PhD and early career calendar to pursue the kind of academic practice that engenders genuine and sustained intellectual activity.
In 2019 the KSSCT will be accompanied by a Graduate Research Day (29 June).
See website for further details, including a FAQ section.
We hope to see you in Paris this summer!
Paris, 26 June -7 July 2017
kssct.org
Two-week intensive seminars led by
- Timothy Campbell: "Attention, Ethos, Life: Practices of the Self in the Contemporary Milieu"
- Patricia J. Williams: "Seeing and Surveillance: Law, culture and notions of justice"
-
The Kent Summer School in Critical Theory was created to offer a unique intellectual experience to early career academics and research students – as well as to the scholars invited to lead seminars in a particular year.
For two weeks in Paris in June, a small group of junior scholars will work intensively with thinkers carefully selected from year to year, for the contemporary significance of their work and their ability to enrich the ethos of the school. The school has been arranged to create the conditions for an intimate and intensive collaboration between students and teachers, outside the formal institutional frame, so as to bring together participants who may not otherwise encounter each other.
We believe it is increasingly important to proliferate and defend spaces for critical thinking in the contemporary academy. Equally important is the maintenance of spaces within the PhD and early career calendar to pursue the kind of academic practice that engenders genuine and sustained intellectual activity.
See website for further details, including a FAQ section
We hope to see you in Paris this summer!
Kent Law School
1st – 3rd September
Turning Points
The Call for Stream Proposals is OPEN NOW – please send proposals of no more than 500 words along with short bios of the stream organisers to [email protected]. The Call for Stream Proposals closes 7 March 2016.
“…there are no witnesses to changes of epoch. The epochal turning is an imperceptible frontier,
bound to no crucial date or event.”
The present is notoriously difficult to diagnose. Are we living at a decisive turning point for global and European history, politics and law? Are we witnesses to a new epoch? Or perhaps we just have a bad case of “presentism”? The Critical Legal Conference 2016 will open a forum for critical reflection on precarious political situations, particularly that of Europe in a global context - an apposite theme for a critical conference at the University of Kent, ‘the UK’s European University’ and a point of origin for the CLC.
Taking a global and historicised view of contemporary Europe and its intellectual and political traditions (as well as an interrogative stance on their centrality), we anticipate that this year’s CLC will enable a creative response to some of the many problems of our collective present. The difficulty in thinking the present lies partly in its immediacy, and partly in the way in which spaces for that thinking are themselves precarious, colonised, dis-placed, degraded, recast or simply made untenable. From individuals’ housing, employment and migration experiences to the broader question about the intensification or disintegration of the European political project, are life’s very objects and experiences now peculiarly shaped by precarity?
Law forms part of the architecture of precarity, shaping both its production and governance, whether through specific rules and regulations relating to welfare provision, housing law or the structuring and regulation of financial markets; or through changing images and enactments of justice, (fragmented) genealogies, and shifting understandings of modernity. One approach within the critical legal tradition has been to expose these architectures: to show how it produces inequity, to demonstrate its contingencies, to trace its genealogies, to question law’s production of a normative order of life. In this sense it might be said that the role of critique is to render law itself precarious. What is the contemporary nature, role and position of academic work generally, in relation to political life and cultural and intellectual history? Are we post-human? Post-Europe? Post-law? Post-critique? And what about the core critical legal concerns: law, justice and ethics?
True to the tradition of the CLC, we hope participants will approach these general provocations through a rich plurality of critical and radical thematics and interdisciplinary approaches.
Confirmed Plenary Speakers:
Donatella Alessandrini, Kent Law School
Kathleen Davis, University of Rhode Island
Isabell Lorey, European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies
Davide Tarizzo, University of Salerno
The Call for Stream Proposals is OPEN NOW – please send proposals of no more than 500 words along with short bios of the stream organisers to [email protected]. The Call for Stream Proposals closes 7 March 2016. The Call for Papers and Panels will be opened in March when streams are announced – and as ever there will be a general stream. *Conference registation will open via the webpage shortly: http://www.kent.ac.uk/law/research/clc-2016/*
We also invite participants to curate screenings, performances, happenings and other creative formats at the conference. Please contact us at [email protected] with your plans – we will do our best to facilitate them (within the bounds of possibility).
- Connal Parsley, Nick Piška and the KLS CLC Committee
kssct.org
Two-week intensive seminars led by
- Samantha Frost: "Matters of perception: objects and materialities of affect"
- James Martel: "How to be a bad subject: misinterpellation and the anarchisation of the soul"
- Bernard Stiegler: "From German ideology to the Dialectic of nature: Reading Marx and Engels in the age of the Anthropocene"
-
The Kent Summer School in Critical Theory was created to offer a unique intellectual experience to early career academics and research students – as well as to the scholars invited to lead seminars in a particular year.
For two weeks in Paris in June, a small group of junior scholars will work intensively with thinkers carefully selected from year to year, for the contemporary significance of their work and their ability to enrich the ethos of the school. The school has been arranged to create the conditions for an intimate and intensive collaboration between students and teachers, outside the formal institutional frame, so as to bring together participants who may not otherwise encounter each other.
We believe it is increasingly important to proliferate and defend spaces for critical thinking in the contemporary academy. Equally important is the maintenance of spaces within the PhD and early career calendar to pursue the kind of academic practice that engenders genuine and sustained intellectual activity.
See website for further details.
We hope to see you in Paris in June!
-
Translations by Connal Parsley
https://research.ncl.ac.uk/italianphilosophy/current%20issue/
Political torture has an intrinsic tendency to publicise itself, but 'governmental rationality' must mediate that tendency historically, which is to say, in relation to contemporary norms about the display of force and violence, as well as the material conditions through which things are made visible. As such, in this chapter I recast the spectacle of the scaffold as an ongoing politico-legal 'dynamic of display and concealment'. This dynamic, I suggest, must be negotiated and configured wherever a state acts to maintain its monopoly on violence. Turning to the two images in question, I argue that in the early 21st Century, when the state 'no longer takes responsibility for the violence bound up in its practice', Foucault's spectacle is 'exceptionalised' and split into two images. Considering their material conditions, I further argue that when read together these images manifest the two inverted halves of a necessarily unstable spectacle. One maintains the sovereign's triumphant public self-image, the other immanently produces the all-important guilty body of the criminal-enemy. Together, such images can be understood as 'exceptional' in that they rupture norms around the display of state violence, yet do so in order to maintain a 'normal' sovereign social and political order that is raced and heteronormatively sexualised. In addition to Foucault's 'micro-physics of power', then, I argue that we must also pay attention to the dimension of representation--and its materiality--in the maintenance of sovereign power, via what I call a 'micro-theatrics of power'.
Professor Alain Pottage: "An Anthropogeology of Law"
How does the "anthropocene hypothesis" engage and challenge basic premises of legal thinking?
Professor Sigrid Weigel: "Towards a Political Theology of Images: Imaging the A-Visible in Science, Religion, and Politics"
‘New images’ share many aspects with pre-modern and ancient image practices that present super-natural figures or a-visible, transcendental ideas. This seminar investigates correspondences between images before and after 'art': traces and data, contemporary iconic images, the mediation of resentment, the translation of ideas, values and concepts into the visual register.
More information on the KSSCT, the seminar leaders, and full seminar descriptions and indicative reading lists can be found at https://research.kent.ac.uk/kssct
-
The Kent Summer School in Critical Theory was created to offer a unique intellectual experience to early career academics and research students – as well as to the scholars invited to lead seminars in a particular year.
For two weeks in Paris in July, a small group of junior scholars will work intensively with thinkers carefully selected from year to year, for the contemporary significance of their work and their ability to enrich the ethos of the school. The school has been arranged to create the conditions for an intimate and intensive collaboration between students and teachers, outside the formal institutional frame, so as to bring together participants who may not otherwise encounter each other.
We believe it is increasingly important to proliferate and defend spaces for critical thinking in the contemporary academy. Equally important is the maintenance of spaces within the PhD and early career calendar to pursue the kind of academic practice that engenders genuine and sustained intellectual activity.
In 2019 the KSSCT will be accompanied by a Graduate Research Day (29 June).
See website for further details, including a FAQ section.
We hope to see you in Paris this summer!
Paris, 26 June -7 July 2017
kssct.org
Two-week intensive seminars led by
- Timothy Campbell: "Attention, Ethos, Life: Practices of the Self in the Contemporary Milieu"
- Patricia J. Williams: "Seeing and Surveillance: Law, culture and notions of justice"
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The Kent Summer School in Critical Theory was created to offer a unique intellectual experience to early career academics and research students – as well as to the scholars invited to lead seminars in a particular year.
For two weeks in Paris in June, a small group of junior scholars will work intensively with thinkers carefully selected from year to year, for the contemporary significance of their work and their ability to enrich the ethos of the school. The school has been arranged to create the conditions for an intimate and intensive collaboration between students and teachers, outside the formal institutional frame, so as to bring together participants who may not otherwise encounter each other.
We believe it is increasingly important to proliferate and defend spaces for critical thinking in the contemporary academy. Equally important is the maintenance of spaces within the PhD and early career calendar to pursue the kind of academic practice that engenders genuine and sustained intellectual activity.
See website for further details, including a FAQ section
We hope to see you in Paris this summer!
Kent Law School
1st – 3rd September
Turning Points
The Call for Stream Proposals is OPEN NOW – please send proposals of no more than 500 words along with short bios of the stream organisers to [email protected]. The Call for Stream Proposals closes 7 March 2016.
“…there are no witnesses to changes of epoch. The epochal turning is an imperceptible frontier,
bound to no crucial date or event.”
The present is notoriously difficult to diagnose. Are we living at a decisive turning point for global and European history, politics and law? Are we witnesses to a new epoch? Or perhaps we just have a bad case of “presentism”? The Critical Legal Conference 2016 will open a forum for critical reflection on precarious political situations, particularly that of Europe in a global context - an apposite theme for a critical conference at the University of Kent, ‘the UK’s European University’ and a point of origin for the CLC.
Taking a global and historicised view of contemporary Europe and its intellectual and political traditions (as well as an interrogative stance on their centrality), we anticipate that this year’s CLC will enable a creative response to some of the many problems of our collective present. The difficulty in thinking the present lies partly in its immediacy, and partly in the way in which spaces for that thinking are themselves precarious, colonised, dis-placed, degraded, recast or simply made untenable. From individuals’ housing, employment and migration experiences to the broader question about the intensification or disintegration of the European political project, are life’s very objects and experiences now peculiarly shaped by precarity?
Law forms part of the architecture of precarity, shaping both its production and governance, whether through specific rules and regulations relating to welfare provision, housing law or the structuring and regulation of financial markets; or through changing images and enactments of justice, (fragmented) genealogies, and shifting understandings of modernity. One approach within the critical legal tradition has been to expose these architectures: to show how it produces inequity, to demonstrate its contingencies, to trace its genealogies, to question law’s production of a normative order of life. In this sense it might be said that the role of critique is to render law itself precarious. What is the contemporary nature, role and position of academic work generally, in relation to political life and cultural and intellectual history? Are we post-human? Post-Europe? Post-law? Post-critique? And what about the core critical legal concerns: law, justice and ethics?
True to the tradition of the CLC, we hope participants will approach these general provocations through a rich plurality of critical and radical thematics and interdisciplinary approaches.
Confirmed Plenary Speakers:
Donatella Alessandrini, Kent Law School
Kathleen Davis, University of Rhode Island
Isabell Lorey, European Institute for Progressive Cultural Policies
Davide Tarizzo, University of Salerno
The Call for Stream Proposals is OPEN NOW – please send proposals of no more than 500 words along with short bios of the stream organisers to [email protected]. The Call for Stream Proposals closes 7 March 2016. The Call for Papers and Panels will be opened in March when streams are announced – and as ever there will be a general stream. *Conference registation will open via the webpage shortly: http://www.kent.ac.uk/law/research/clc-2016/*
We also invite participants to curate screenings, performances, happenings and other creative formats at the conference. Please contact us at [email protected] with your plans – we will do our best to facilitate them (within the bounds of possibility).
- Connal Parsley, Nick Piška and the KLS CLC Committee
kssct.org
Two-week intensive seminars led by
- Samantha Frost: "Matters of perception: objects and materialities of affect"
- James Martel: "How to be a bad subject: misinterpellation and the anarchisation of the soul"
- Bernard Stiegler: "From German ideology to the Dialectic of nature: Reading Marx and Engels in the age of the Anthropocene"
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The Kent Summer School in Critical Theory was created to offer a unique intellectual experience to early career academics and research students – as well as to the scholars invited to lead seminars in a particular year.
For two weeks in Paris in June, a small group of junior scholars will work intensively with thinkers carefully selected from year to year, for the contemporary significance of their work and their ability to enrich the ethos of the school. The school has been arranged to create the conditions for an intimate and intensive collaboration between students and teachers, outside the formal institutional frame, so as to bring together participants who may not otherwise encounter each other.
We believe it is increasingly important to proliferate and defend spaces for critical thinking in the contemporary academy. Equally important is the maintenance of spaces within the PhD and early career calendar to pursue the kind of academic practice that engenders genuine and sustained intellectual activity.
See website for further details.
We hope to see you in Paris in June!
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https://research.ncl.ac.uk/italianphilosophy/current%20issue/
The book’s reconstruction of the impolitical lineage—which is anything but uniform—begins with the extreme conclusions reached by Carl Schmitt and Romano Guardini in their reflections on the political and then moves through a series of encounters between several great twentieth-century texts: from Hannah Arendt’s On Revolution to Hermann Broch’s The Death of Virgil, to Elias Canetti’s Crowds and Power; from Simone Weil’s The Need for Roots to Georges Bataille’s Sovereignty to Ernst Junger’s An der Zeitmauer.
The trail forged by this analysis offers a defiant counterpoint to the modern political lexicon, but at the same time a contribution to our understanding of its categories.