Volume 15, Issue 1 - Focus: Law in End Times

The judge’s judgment is intended to be the definitive means of quelling controversy – the last word. While judgments have always been open to question by various means, the current social and political environment is especially prone to challenging the judgments of courts. This paper will consider the judgment through the lens of ideas about text, truth and legitimacy to explore the pressure such challenges can place on the capacity of law to hold the line in times of uncertainty.

It is a mystery as to why more is not made of the influence of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust on Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s body of work. After all, as a great philosophical poet, and tremendously concerned with language, Goethe’s work could not have failed to capture Agamben’s attention, especially given his early and sustained interest in poetry. Indeed, Agamben cites Goethe in at least 12 of his works including: The Use of Bodies, Creation and Anarchy, Pilate and Jesus, The Kingdom and the Glory, Homo Sacer , The Signature of All Things, Stanzas, The End of the Poem, Potentialities, Karman, Adventure and Infancy and History. Crucially, the last five reference Goethe’s Faust directly. Thus, this paper seeks to remedy the relative lack of explicit engagement and demonstrate the strong, clear and persistent influence of Goethe’s Faust that underpins Agamben’s signature philological and philosophical approach to literarily explicating law’s foundational riddles. Agamben’s Homo Sacer, project – it must be recalled – quite accidentally began in part as a direct response to the legalistic justifications for the 1990–91 Gulf War. The present discussion seeks to demonstrate that Goethean influence ironically enough through a close examination of both Faust’s and Agamben’s attempts at partially translating a biblical phrase: ‘in the beginning was the word’.

Mur Lafferty’s novel Six Wakes (2017) and the Netflix television series Altered Carbon (2018–present), created by Laeta Kalogridis and based on a novel written by Richard K. Morgan, both portray futuristic societies wherein death as we conceive of it has been rendered nearly obsolete because of technological advancements. In the case of Altered Carbon , the series imagines a twenty-fourth century dystopian society which relies on alien technology to transfer individuals’ consciousness into new bodies (referred to in the series as “sleeves”). In Six Wakes , a novel set in the twenty-fifth century, cloning and “mind-mapping” work together to bring about a similar process. Through these processes, both Six Wakes and Altered Carbon call specific attention to the unstable boundaries between human and posthuman. While in Six Wakes and Altered Carbon alike, beings have not achieved true immortality, they have gained something akin to it. Death remains a possibility for these post-human beings, but they have the potential to download their consciousness into other bodies on a (theoretically) limitless basis. These science fiction narratives thus raise new questions related to embodiment and post-humanism. Indeed, throughout Six Wakes , Lafferty devotes a significant amount of care to mapping out the legal considerations and consequences that human cloning invariably bring about. This facet of her novel works to raise questions about the ethics of cloning as well as about the legal and ontological status of clones. In Altered Carbon , a new legal frontier is likewise explored since the ultra-rich try on and discard bodies (“sleeves”) in a manner which prompts a re-definition of the concept of personhood while they simultaneously manipulate law enforcement and the legal system to suit their whims. Alongside the legal questions they raise, the science fiction scenarios depicted in these narratives serve as cases-in-point to demonstrate a post-human view of embodiment.

How does film move us into caring about injustice, and what role do the qualities specific to the medium play in the process? In this article, I provide an answer to these questions by building on ideas about embodied spectatorship from film studies. I argue that the haptic nature of certain cinematic images can trigger a sensuous, corporeal response to unjust acts and processes in their viewers, and thereby cultivate in them a commitment to justice. I will anchor my argument through a close reading of Wong Jing’s Hail the Judge , a Hong Kong comedy about a woman who is framed for the murder of her family.

The article analyses the political meaning of silence by reflecting on the communicative, autonomous and aesthetic function of silence in context of prevailing political speech systems. In the article, silence is interpreted as an active communication form, as an activist protest tactic and as an aesthetic practice. The article argues that silence can have a politically subversive function toward prevailing aesthetically organised speech systems.Conventionally, silence is devalued in Western societies that primarily celebrate the expressive and communicative capacity of verbal speech. In theorising about radically egalitarian politics, it is however crucial to note the various ways in which silence can be an important source of power. Silence holds the potential for certain active political change in current legal-political frameworks. On the one hand, silence can enable new communication forms and actualise alternative political solidarities and attachments. Also, the logic of oppressive speech systems can be resisted through silent political action. On the other hand, it is in an individual’s own practices of silence, ones that silent protests can bring about in their aftermath, where the sensibility of prevailing political speech orders can be rearranged. The article analyses these many meanings of political silence.

Cannibalism is one of the most recognisable taboos of the West and a benchmark with which a supposedly civilised world has traditionally sought to differentiate itself from the radically “other” of the hinterlands. As such, cannibalism has made its way both into the vocabulary of the West’s pseudo-ethnographic self-reflection (e.g. Freud) and the imaginary of its literary culture (e.g. Grimm). A less-well-known strain in this narrative uses cannibalism as a critical postcolonial metaphor. In 1928, the Brazilian poet and agitator Oswald de Andrade published a short text entitled “Anthropophagic Manifesto.” The aim of the manifesto was to distance an emerging Brazilian modernism from the European ideals that the São Paulo bourgeoisie uncritically embraced, and to synthesise more avant-garde ideas with aspects from the cultures of the indigenous Amazonian peoples into a truly national cultural movement. This essay draws on various aspects of the anthropophagic movement and seeks to understand, whether (and how) it influenced Brazilian urban planning and architecture, and especially if it is detectable in the ways in which architects Lúcio Costa and Oscar Niemeyer designed and executed the legal and political institutions in Brasília, the country’s iconic federal capital. The ana-lysis, however, identifies a colonialist inclination in Costa and Niemeyer’s ideological debt to Le Corbusier. Instead, the radical potential of anthropophagic architecture is developed with reference to the less-known São Paulo architect and polymath Flávio de Carvalho whose aesthetic politics provide parallels with contemporary radical politics, as well. The essay suggests that such a notion of politics would be akin to a radical anti-instrumentalism that I have elsewhere, following Georges Bataille and Maurice Blanchot, called a “politics of the impossible.”

In both a canon law student’s essay and in oral remarks to the 2017 Onclin Chair conference at KU Leuven, the author critiques his own country’s closed border consensus excluding admission of boat people. He argues this political consensus in Australia is at odds with the celebrated national identity of Australians. Moreover, the author identifies that the closed border consensus is contrary to the Gospel, because it does not welcome the stranger and because it betrays the universality of the love of neighbour which the Gospel demands. The author argues that the voice of the Catholic lay person is not to remain silent, but is to speak out against the injustice of the policy because the Gospel, the magisterium of the Second Vatican Council in its decree on the Apostolate of the laity, the Canon law, Catholic moral theology and the dictates of conscience all demand the articulation of a contrary view.