Suchergebnisse

Droit et Cultures, special issue 2004, "Images and Uses of Law among Ordinary People"Edited by Chantal Kourilsky‐Augeven (Paris: Société de Législation Comparée)

This collection of interdisciplinary essays explores how persons and things - the central elements of the social - are fabricated by legal rituals and institutions. The contributors, legal and anthropological theorists alike, focus on a set of specific institutional and ethnographic contexts, and some unexpected and thought-provoking analogies emerge from this intellectual encounter between law and anthropology. For example, contemporary anxieties about the legal status of the biotechnological body seem to resonate with the questions addressed by ancient Roman law in its treatment of dead bodies. The analogy between copyright and the transmission of intangible designs in Melanesia suddenly makes western images of authorship seem quite unfamiliar. A comparison between law and laboratory science presents the production of legal artefacts in new light. These studies are of particular relevance at a time when law, faced with the inventiveness of biotechnology, finds it increasingly difficult to draw the line between persons and things

In this essay we explore a rather spare kind of meeting: a conversation between three people with minimal facilitating equipment. The stakes are high because these are meetings in which the barrister in an asylum or immigration case first meets with a client who is at risk of deportation. We focus on two dimensions of these encounters. First, we identify the aesthetic that configures and animates most asylum cases: the aesthetic of inconsistency. The meetings we observed were all about inconsistency; about working out how to respond to actual and anticipated challenges to the coherence of a refugee or migrant's personal narrative. The logic of inconsistency is so persistent and so corrosive that the exercise of anticipation – 'rehearsal' – is essentially open‐ended. This leads to the second dimension of our meetings. Barristers who work in this area of law develop a particular style or ethos, which allows them to accompany vulnerable clients through the rehearsal and also to make sense of their own involvement in the machinery of deportation. In these two aspects we find the basic choreographic principles of our meetings: the articulations which shape their material and affective ecology, and which inform the barrister's interpretation and performance of his or her professional role.

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Copyright Acknowledgements -- List of Abbreviations -- Foreword - Operations and Artifices: The Art of the Oldest Legal Professionals -- 1. The Contrivances of Legal Institutions: Studies in Roman Law -- 2. Legal History for Historians: A Presentation -- 3. The Language of Roman Law: Problems and Methods -- 4. The Law between Words and Things: Rhetoric and Case Law in Rome -- 5. Artifices of Truth in the Medieval ius commune -- 6. The Subject of Right, the Person, Nature: Remarks on the Current Criticism of the Legal Subject -- 7. Vitae Necisque Potestas: The Father, the State, Death -- 8. On Parricide: Political Interdiction and the Institution of the Subject -- 9. Act, Agent, Society: Fault and Guilt in Roman Legal Thinking -- 10. The Slave's Body and its Work in Rome: On Analysing a Juridical Dissociation -- Afterword - A Knowledge Apart -- Biographies of Contributors

Frontmatter -- CONTENTS -- ACKNOWLEDGMENTS -- INTRODUCTION Staging Encounters -- CHAPTER 1 Will Sovereignty Ever Be Deconstructed? -- CHAPTER 2 Whither Materialism? Althusser/Darwin -- CHAPTER 3 From the Overman to the Posthuman: How Many Ends? -- CHAPTER 4 Autoplasticity -- CHAPTER 5 Plasticity, Capital, and the Dialectic -- CHAPTER 6 Plasticity and the Cerebral Unconscious: New Wounds, New Violences, New Politics -- CHAPTER 7 "Go Wonder": Plasticity, Dissemination, and (the Mirage of) Revolution -- CHAPTER 8 Insects, War, Plastic Life -- CHAPTER 9 Zones of Justice: A Philopoetic Engagement -- CHAPTER 10 Law, Sovereignty, and Recognition -- CHAPTER 11 Something Darkly Th is Way Comes: The Horror of Plasticity in an Age of Control -- CHAPTER 12 The Touring Machine (Flesh Th ought Inside Out) -- CHAPTER 13 Interview with Catherine Malabou -- BIBLIOGRAPHY -- CONTRIBUTORS -- INDEX