Volume 16, Issue 1 - Focus: Secularization as a Paradigm of ‘Cross-Thought’

Political theology is often the subject of debate. In this contribution we will trace an alternative declination of this concept in modern political thought. Starting from James I’s thought, the article will show the most arcane and heterodox sides of sovereignty and the multiple configurations of the political body.

In the history of Western literary tradition, early modern theatres constituted an important passage for the construction of a different perception of community as well as a different appraisal of legal institutions. In modern playhouses, traditional values were staged, debated, and critiqued. In this paper, I will focus on three Shakespearean tragedies ( Hamlet , Macbeth , Romeo and Juliet ) that provide relevant insights about the way in which power and legal themes were challenged and questioned. In these plays Shakespeare provided a critical view of what we might call the “mystical foundation of authority.” Shakespeare’s theater is the triumph of rule and exception, of order and disorder, of sacred and profane. As I will show, in Hamlet , Macbeth and Romeo and Juliet , law is always living on the danger of its eclipse and its suspension: the threshold which separates the legal and the illegal, the legitimate and the illegitimate, is then the result of a narrative process of which Shakespeare’s theater provides perhaps the highest example in Western literary culture.

This essay argues that efforts to accommodate religion within the contemporary liberal-democratic and secular state give rise to difficulties that liberals struggle to understand. It also argues that practical impulses that exhibit intensity of the sort present in religion threaten to destabilize the operations of the contemporary liberal-democratic state. This essay develops these arguments by reference to Hilary Mantel’s novel A Place of Greater Safety (a fictionalized account of the French Revolution). In this novel, Mantel explores Maximilien Robespierre’s ambiguous relationship with the Christian faith. As well as drawing on Mantel, this essay also makes use of Milan Kundera’s novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being . Kundera’s account of the ‘Grand March’ of the political left provides a basis on which to explore practical impulses that are reminiscent of religion in their intensity and that threaten to destabilize the liberal-democratic state. The two literary reference points that feature in this essay also provide resources with which to probe the contributions to contemporary liberal political philosophy made by Richard Rorty, John Rawls, and Ronald Dworkin. The result is an analysis that supports the conclusion that contemporary liberal-democratic states may be destabilized by practical impulses that, in their intensity, have affinities with religion. This essay also finds support for this conclusion in the writings of Stanley Fish and Carl Schmitt. Fish and Schmitt each argue in terms that give expression to a pessimistic political anthropology. This pessimistic political anthropology throws light on the difficulties that those who wield power within the liberal-democratic state face when they seek justly to accommodate religion. These difficulties lend plausibility to an observation made by John Adams (one of the founders of the USA): ‘[t]here is a germ of religion in human nature’ and it is ‘strong’.

The area of reproductive politics in Italy demonstrates both a process of secularisation and desecularisation. On the one hand the highly conservative Assisted Reproduction Act of 2004 has been challenged in the courts leading to a resecularisation of this area of law. On the other hand the Abortion Act of 1978 has been descularised by the high usage by doctors of the conscientious objection clause of the Act. This article looks at this parallel movement of both secularisation and desecularisation.

Understanding vulnerability as a process emerging unevenly through a reading of jurisprudence as literature challenges the carceral conceptualisation of immigration detention as a form of spatial control, when hegemonic narratives insist upon vulnerability as a corporeal concept born on the bodies of those subject to border violence rather than of the space itself. Through a critical reading of the text theorised through spatial vulnerability, I aim to encounter the material emergence of the gesture towards enclosure, that which must constantly deny its uneven and material originary narrative, revealing its inherent vulnerability at the site of the spectral threshold.

Stories shape our thinking about legal relationships and the challenges of law. This paper is interested in the ways, in which spatial constellations are imagined in connection with the law. It analyzes selected stories by Franz Kafka and Rachel Shihor alongside each other. Legal themes permeate these stories. Their fictive dialogue brings forth contrasting imaginations of community, universalism, and human limitations. Starting with their variations on the Tower of Babel story, the paper then discusses Kafka’s “The Great Wall of China”, “Before the Law”, and “The Burrow”, as well as Shihor’s “The Bridge”, “The Bus”, “The Door”, and “Questions”. These stories illuminate Kafka’s and Shihor’s rich, narrative vocabulary of spatial imaginations of the law, and the fruitful contrast of their perspectives.

In this essay I intend to examine and discuss three theses that recurrently appear in the works of Friedrich Dürrenmatt. I shall first identify the three theses in order to clarify the focus of my research. Dürrenmatt puts forward at least three theses to relating to 1. the paradoxical nature of human justice; 2. the demystification of apparent atheistic nihilism; 3. the neutralising effect of the contradiction inherent in divine justice. The conclusion I will try to reach is that if one accepts the three above-stated theses, justice is broken, but not irreparably.

Laws punish delinquents after having made them such, and yet this is not inevitable. At work in this phenomenon is a melding of ‘ought’ and ‘is’ in which the law renders criminal behavior perpetually determinative by recognizing only a duty to abide by statutes while simultaneously losing site of the magma of meanings and behaviors that constitute human lives. Using the core of Hugo’s epic Les Misérables as a kind of mirroring illustration, this paper will explore how categorical rigidity and blindness to the changing contours of identity and subjectivity constitute one dark side of the law. Hugo’s work demonstrates the importance of literature as a parallel narrative that can illuminate law’s limitations, specifically, its tendency to conceal through certainty, ignoring the actual possibilities of becoming for the subjects it is charged to rule and protect. I will argue that in Les Misérables we can see an inversion in the order of priority between narrative commitment and social criticism, specifically a meta-legal criticism that has specific insights regarding how law obfuscates the ought/is divide and, in so doing, loses legitimacy and collapses in on itself. Issues of human dignity, social responsibility and the very purpose and legitimacy of law can be constructively addressed through parallel analysis of Hugo’s world of ‘the wretched’ and those the law renders wretched even today.