Heathen Earth: Trumpism and Political Ecology looks beyond the rising fortunes of authoritarian nationalism in a fossil-fueled late capitalist world to encounter its conditions. Trumpism represents ...an alternative to the forces undermining the very cosmology of the modern West from two opposing directions. The global economy, the pinnacle of modernization, has brought along a dark side of massive inequality, corrupt institutions, colonial violence, and environmental destruction, while global warming, the nadir of modernity, threatens to undo the foundations of all states and all markets. To the vertigo of placelessness, symptomatic of globalization, is added the ecological vertigo of landlessness. With reality slowly fragmenting, it is only too obvious in this light that Trumpism and other nationalist movements would attract massive hordes of supporters. Promising to expel foreigners and to restore unity and equality by taking power back from the global elites, while utterly denying the climate science that calls ordinary means of subsistence and consumption radically into question, Trumpism can be seen as an antidote to the toxic combination of global markets and global warming. The irony, of course, is that Trumpism only responds to these dangers by doubling down on the reckless expansionist logic that gave rise to them in the first place. This book, composed entirely between November 8, 2016 and January 20, 2017, examines Trumpism according to its regime of political representation (despotism), its political ontology (nativism), and its political ecology (geocide), while laying the groundwork for an alternative politics and a resistant, responsive ecology of the incompossible.
This exciting new vision for legal theory combines analytical tools drawn from Latour's actor-network theory with the philosophical anthropology of the Moderns in An Inquiry into Modes of Existence ...to blaze a new trail in legal epistemology.
This paper argues that law and humanities scholarship as well as socio-legal studies can benefit tremendously by rethinking systematically the modes of expression of law. The force of law passes ...through a wide variety of media – to name only a few: spoken or written words, gestures, visual images, technical objects, human bodies. Intuitively, we may sense that each of these different sorts of mediators has some effect on the nature of the legality or normative force that it conducts and makes pass. The jurisprudential temptation is to reduce these media out of existence and to theorize, for instance, the essence of legal form apart from the substances that give it reality and materiality. The paper sketches the outlines of an anti-jurisprudence that shifts the focus to those forgotten but undeniable substances, asking how they inflect the force of law differently in each case. The paper’s most important resources are the concept of mediation in Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory and the theory of stratification worked out in the mid-20th century by Danish linguist Louis Hjelmslev, which offers a diagram of expression that can be converted for legal-theoretical application. The upshot of this reflection on the force of law, legal stratification, and the vincula juris through which law passes is that we are obliged to take seriously the media of law’s expression: it is there that law makes society and is itself made.
This paper is the first part of an enquiry taking an initial, provisional step toward the construction of a theoretical matrix called speculative jurisprudence. Toward that end, it recruits the ...thought of Louis Althusser, whose work has taken on new significance thanks in part to the availability (in French and English) of many formerly unpublished texts, the contemporary critical scrutiny of numerous commentators, and the independent emergence of several philosophical currents sharing some of his work’s key concerns. The paper offers a unique characterization of Althusser’s aleatory materialism as at once a novel expression of Althusser’s ‘jurisprudential problematic’, a problematic that I argue shapes his thought as a whole, and as a means of posing the core problem of dialectical materialism. The engagement with Althusser that I propose thus intervenes in current debates about aleatory materialism, but this is subsidiary with respect to the elaboration of speculative jurisprudence as a distinct approach in philosophy and law. That mode of thought begins to acquire a degree of reality by taking Althusser’s theoretical anti-humanism as a point of departure for the articulation of a non-humanist conception of legality, in a broad sense that conjoins the territories of both traditional philosophy and legal theory. The paper concludes with a reference to the open questions that Part Two, which will appear in Althusser and Law (
2012
), will take up.
Deleuze and law De Sutter, Laurent; McGee, Kyle
2012., 20120620, 2012, 2012-06-30, 2012-06-20, 20120101
eBook
'A wild and savage creation of principle' is how Deleuze defined the practice of law as perpetual experimentation, or what he called, Universal Jurisprudence. Rather than a guarantee against ...political, economic, or social odds, this collection of thirteen essays gives insights into Gilles Deleuze's philosophy of law which experiments with new forms of politics, economics and society. This book shows that law has never been a conservative force but in fact is the most progressive and experimental force of the Modern Age. It explores the basic features of this universal jurisprudence, the mutual becoming of law and philosophy, for the first time.
The critical ethos that stands behind much of the most impressive and important work on modern forms of power seems to have constructed its own prison. A free and open concept of power -- the concept ...that has guided so many enlightening histories of the present -- has revealed itself as yet another technology of foreclosure. Two apparently opposed approaches to power in political philosophy -- political theology and biopower -- are the contemporary heirs to this critical tradition. Each can be described loosely as a post-Marxist discourse on power advancing something like a theory of radical democracy on its normative edge. Despite the shortcomings I set forth throughout my discussion, and those I omit, these remain the farthest reaching, the most provocative and the most sophisticated theories of power and democracy in circulation today. Together, however, they compose an antinomy. Its resolution would carry us swiftly out of democratic theory and, therefore, beyond the principle of modern power. Adapted from the source document.
The production of legal statements is a peripheral concern among socio-legal scholars, philosophers, anthropologists, critical theorists and others engaging law from what, according to a conventional ...doctrinal perspective organised around the artifact of the legal rule, is itself a peripheral vantage point. Perhaps this is as it should be. This chapter suggests otherwise.
Perhaps, by moving beyond the matrix in which legal statements are assembled in order to access such complex but relatively common phenomena as variances in legal effect and enforcement, or the work of legal rules and modes of reasoning in the construction of social attributes (such as
Two apparently opposed approaches to power in political philosophy, i.e. political theology and biopower, are the contemporary heirs to the critical ethos that stands behind much of the most ...impressive and important work on modern forms of power. The antinomy, as McGee treats it, finds resolution by way of the non-democratic thought of G. W. Leibniz. Pursuing this thought confronts us with the need to reformulate the nature of power, its delimitations and its connections in political space. The outline of a new vision of Leibniz's political philosophy accompanies this exploration of power.
Philosophy has long been fascinated by miracles, and with good reason. Where, however, the problem of the miracle once offered unparalleled insight into the inner workings of natural laws and of ...human knowledge, today, the attention commanded by it is essentially political. The sovereign’s miraculous suspension is the most well studied of these political dimensions, but this formulation is, in fact, ill-suited to the complexities inherent in the concept of the miracle. Political theology understands the miracle poorly, for it captures only the inaugural movement of exception; it knows nothing of the social and political conditions it inspires. A key claim defended in this article is that the miracle possesses continuing interest for philosophy precisely because it lies in the heart of contemporary political formations, instituting a bond that tethers a collective to its present. It is thus more interesting as a figure of inception than of exception. The miraculous is uniformly distinguished as the unengendered, the neutral point of equilibrium against which any distribution of beings is measured. This is the meaning given the miraculous in the thought of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, and this article frames the political aspect of that theme by developing their concept of miraculation, which foregrounds the movement of inception. The article works out a conceptual genealogy, tracing the descent of the miracle back from Deleuze and Guattari to Baruch Spinoza and David Hume. Each contributes an element essential for the constitution of miraculation. It is argued that the miracle has always bound ‘desire and the social’, though in diverse ways.
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