Introduction: Law in End Times: A North/South Collaboration

Though our personal life-worlds continue to contract under the jarring stop-go of pandemic-necessitated lockdowns, shut-ins and social distancing, global scholarly networks continue to survive and, in some notable instances, thrive. This issue of Polemos is one such instance of global thriving, being the result of an academic partnership that spans the Northern and Southern hemispheres. Previously, a largely European affair – published in Berlin, edited from Verona – Polemos, forthwith, joins the select ranks of genuinely international academic journals, having entered into partnership with the Australian-based Law Discipline of the Faculty of Business, Law and Arts, Southern Cross University (SCU), Lismore, NSW & Coolangatta, Qld.

I am delighted to have assumed the reins as Co-Managing Editor of Polemos and, first and foremost, I want to thank my fellow Co-Managing Editor, Professor Daniela Carpi of the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures University of Verona, for her generosity, collegiality, insight, flair and sheer genius. Working with Prof. Carpi – the doyenne of European law and literature – was (and is), for me – and my SCU colleague, Professor John Page, now on the journal’s Advisory Board – one of the principal attractions in our decision to partner with Polemos. In addition to Professor Carpi – and Professor Page – I would like to thank this issue’s Assistant Editor, Ms Britt Dietrich, and Reviews Editor, Emerita Professor Bee Chen Goh (SCU), for their considerable efforts and unflagging support here. To the two of you, my dear friends, I dedicate this issue of the journal.

This issue of Polemos shifts the journal’s customary implied mise-en-scene from the historic purlieus of Verona – the intellectual home of AIDEL – to those of Queensland’s (in)famous Gold Coast, often thought to be only about sun, surf, and living in-the-moment, with nary a thought for the future. Except that, in December 2019, it was at its salubrious Gold Coast campus that SCU’s then School of Law and Justice hosted the presciently monikered conference ‘Law in End Times’, a joint initiative of the Law, Literature and Humanities Association of Australasia (‘Law, Lit, Hum’) and the Law and Society Association of Australia and New Zealand (LSAANZ).

The Focus section of this issue of Polemos reflects the rich variety of papers submitted to that spectacular – and prophetic – joint conference, itself divided into two parts: ‘JurisApocalypse Now!’ (‘Law, Lit, Hum’, 2–4 December) and ‘Survive.Thrive.Die’ (LSAANZ, 5–7 December). Our opening article, ‘The Judgment of Revelation’, by The Hon. Justice Francois Kunc, was, in fact, the joint conference’s closing address and, in its superbly hortatory way – retained, stylistically, here to give a sense of occasion – it provides the perfect introduction the theme of ‘end times’, expertly parsing apocalyptic ‘revelation’ and connecting it with the praxis (and theoria) of judging, now revealed as sacred in its pursuit of the ‘truth’. Dr. Edwin Bikundo takes up this sense of the sacred in his excellent and erudite ‘“Behold, I tell you a mystery”: Tracing Faust’s influences on Giorgio Agamben to and from International Law’, which tracks the mystical foundations of international law to two textual sources, Giorgio Agamben’s homo sacer and Goethe’s Faust, each of which, in turn, invoke, cross-reference and estrange the Logos of St John, ‘In the beginning was the word…’

A word that was, as it turns out, made flesh; that is, embodied in the most corporeal of terms. It is this theme of embodiment that is taken up in the next two articles: Dr. Heather Humann’s ‘The Embodiment of Law: Altered Carbon and Six Wakes; and Professor Marco Wan’s ‘Hail the Spectator: Embodiment, Injustice, and Film’. The former – by the appropriately surnamed Humann – carefully and convincingly unpacks contemporary science fiction’s shifting cadastres between the binarised human/post-human, the radical indeterminacy of which is played out upon, and mediated through the body, be it manufactured, cloned or discarded; while the latter – Wan – ably explores, closely analyses and, indeed, powerfully cross-examines the ‘haptic’ filmic image in Hong Kong cinema, the sense and sensibility of which reaches out to its audience, calling them to account and transforming their space of viewing into a site of judgment. This notion of the sensate – or the absence thereof – is continued in Ms. Kathariina Kauro-aho’s trenchant and haunting ‘Politics of Silence: On Autonomous, Communicative and Aesthetic Silences’ where silence, itself, is characterised not so much by absence as presence: of meaning, of change, of hope.

Three other sections follow: Research, Reviews and an editorial innovation, Interventions. Starting with the last first: Interventions feature a short thought-piece from prominent Australian lawyer and lay Catholic, Brisbane’s Mr. Patrick Mullins, on the crucial role that Catholicism’s ‘silent majority’ – its laity – may play in shaping a new direction for the Church, precisely by – contra Kauro-aho – speaking up and calling out abuse. Reviews include book reviews by Professor Daniela Carpi (Verona) and Professor Ian Ward (Newcastle, UK). Finally, under Research, Polemos is pleased to publish a piece by one of Finland’s – in fact, Europe’s and the world’s – leading legal philosophers and cultural legal scholars, Professor Panu Minkkinen whose ‘“The Nude Man’s City”: Flávio de Carvalho’s anthropophagic architecture as cultural criticism’ returns our gaze to where this Introduction started; namely, the global South and its rich possibilities of rethinking art anew – one that balances European modernism with Indigenous tradition, tracing both but coming to rest over neither, and exemplified in Brazil’s politically empowering ‘Anthropophagic’ architecture.

Enjoy this first Australian-edited issue of Polemos and I look forward to our future collaboration!