Julen Etxabe – författare

Adjudication between conflicting normative universes that do not share the same vocabulary, standards of rationality, and moral commitments cannot be resolved by recourse to traditional principles. Such cases are always in a sense tragic. And what is called for, in our pluralistic and conflictual world is not to be found, as many would suppose, in an impersonal set of procedures with which all participants could be treated as having rationally agreed. The very idea of such a neutral system is an illusion. Rather, what is needed, Julen Etxabe argues in this book, is a heightened awareness of the difficulty of judgment. The Experience of Tragic Judgments draws upon Sophocles’ play Antigone in order to consider this difficulty and the virtues that attend its acknowledgment. Based on the transformative experience that the audience undergoes in engaging with this play what is proposed is a reconceptualization of judgment: not as it is generally thought to occur in a single isolated moment, like the falling of an axe, but rather as an experience that develops in and through space and time.

Adjudication between conflicting normative universes that do not share the same vocabulary, standards of rationality, and moral commitments cannot be resolved by recourse to traditional principles. Such cases are always in a sense tragic. And what is called for, in our pluralistic and conflictual world is not to be found, as many would suppose, in an impersonal set of procedures with which all participants could be treated as having rationally agreed. The very idea of such a neutral system is an illusion. Rather, what is needed, Julen Etxabe argues in this book, is a heightened awareness of the difficulty of judgment. The Experience of Tragic Judgments draws upon Sophocles’ play Antigone in order to consider this difficulty and the virtues that attend its acknowledgment. Based on the transformative experience that the audience undergoes in engaging with this play what is proposed is a reconceptualization of judgment: not as it is generally thought to occur in a single isolated moment, like the falling of an axe, but rather as an experience that develops in and through space and time.

This book is the first to approach Jacques Rancière’s work from a legal perspective. A former student of Louis Althusser, Rancière is one of the most important contemporary French philosophers of recent decades: offering an original and path-breaking way to think politics, democracy and aesthetics. Rancière’s work has received wide and increasing critical attention, but no study exists so far that reflects on the wider implications of Rancière for law and for socio-legal studies. Although Rancière does not pay much specific attention to law—and there is a strong temptation to identify law with what he terms the "police order"—much of Rancière’s historical work highlights the creative potential of law and legal language, with important legal implications and ramifications. So, rather than excavate the Rancièrean corpus for isolated statements about the law, this volume reverses such a method and asks: what would a Rancière-inspired legal theory look like? Bringing together specialists and scholars in different areas of law, critical theory and philosophy, this rethinking of law and socio-legal studies through Rancière provides an original and important engagement with a range of contemporary legal topics, including constituent power and democracy, legal subjectivity, human rights, practices of adjudication, refugees, the nomos of modernity, and the sensory configurations of law. It will, then, be of considerable interest to those working in these areas.