Just Ideas – serie

The front pages of our newspapers and the chatter on the blogs bear witness to the divorce of law from justice. Highly paid lawyers mine the law for loopholes to help Fortune 500 corporations legally evade their taxes and spoil the environment. In a world governed by the rule of law, justice, it seems, is a chimera, an abstraction, and thus a distraction from the real world struggle over political interest. Ought we, then, to abandon talk about abstract ideals of justice in favor of strategic and political arguments? In The Gift of Science, a bold, revisionist account of 300 years of jurisprudence, Roger Berkowitz argues that the idea of justice is endangered and needs to be saved. Moving from the scientific revolution to the rise of law and economics, Berkowitz tells the story of how lawyers invented a science of law to preserve law's claim to moral authority. The "gift" of science to law, however, proved bittersweet. Instead of strengthening the bond between law and justice, the subordination of law to science transformed law from an ethical order into a tool for social and economic ends. The Gift of Science is a mesmerizing and original intellectual history of law. As a genealogy of the modern divorce of law from justice, Berkowitz shows that positive law has its formative impulse not in the English works of Thomas Hobbes and John Austin, but in the German tradition of legal science stretching from Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz to Friedrich Carl von Savigny and Rudolf von Jhering. As a contribution to jurisprudence, Berkowitz argues that positive law is best understood as a product of science and not, as usually thought, as the will of a sovereign. As a work of political theory, Berkowitz explores how the subordination of law to social science has hollowed out the ethical center of law as the institutional embodiment of justice. Finally, the book makes manifest the danger that the transformation of law itself into a product of science poses for the possibility of law, justice, and freedom in the modern age.

The initial provocation for The Truth of Democracy was the fortieth anniversary of May '68 and the recent criticism (some by French President Nicolas Sarkozy himself) leveled against the ideals and actors at the center of this important but still misunderstood moment in French history. Nancy here defends what he calls simply "68" without apology or equivocation, calling it an essential stage in the search for the "truth of democracy." Less a period within time than a critical moment or interruption of time, 68 needs to be understood, Nancy argues, as an "event" that provided a glimpse into the very "spirit of democracy," a spirit that is linked not to some common vision, idea, or desire (such as the nation, the republic, the people, or humanity) but to an incommensurability (the infinity of man or man's exceeding of himself ) at the origin of democracy.Written in a direct and accessible, almost manifesto-like style, The Truth of Democracy presents a forceful plea that we rethink democracy not as one political regime or form among others but as that which opens up the very experience of being in common.By rearticulating many of the themes and terms he has developed elsewhere (from community and being in common to the singular plural) in relationship to an original analysis of what was and still is at stake in May '68, The Truth of Democracy is at once an eloquent summary of much of Nancy's work and a significant development of it.It is as if, forty years after being first scrawled across university walls and storefronts in France, one of the most famous slogans of May '68 has received in The Truth of Democracy its most eloquent and poignant theoretical elaboration: "Be realistic, demand the impossible!"

The initial provocation for The Truth of Democracy was the fortieth anniversary of May '68 and the recent criticism (some by French President Nicolas Sarkozy himself) leveled against the ideals and actors at the center of this important but still misunderstood moment in French history. Nancy here defends what he calls simply "68" without apology or equivocation, calling it an essential stage in the search for the "truth of democracy." Less a period within time than a critical moment or interruption of time, 68 needs to be understood, Nancy argues, as an "event" that provided a glimpse into the very "spirit of democracy," a spirit that is linked not to some common vision, idea, or desire (such as the nation, the republic, the people, or humanity) but to an incommensurability (the infinity of man or man's exceeding of himself ) at the origin of democracy.Written in a direct and accessible, almost manifesto-like style, The Truth of Democracy presents a forceful plea that we rethink democracy not as one political regime or form among others but as that which opens up the very experience of being in common.By rearticulating many of the themes and terms he has developed elsewhere (from community and being in common to the singular plural) in relationship to an original analysis of what was and still is at stake in May '68, The Truth of Democracy is at once an eloquent summary of much of Nancy's work and a significant development of it.It is as if, forty years after being first scrawled across university walls and storefronts in France, one of the most famous slogans of May '68 has received in The Truth of Democracy its most eloquent and poignant theoretical elaboration: "Be realistic, demand the impossible!"

In dialogue with afro-caribbean philosophy, this book seeks in Cassirer's philosophy of symbolic forms a new vocabulary for approaching central intellectual and political issues of our time. For Cassirer, what makes humans unique is that we are symbolizing creatures destined to come into a world through varied symbolicforms; we pluralistically work with and develop these forms as we struggle to come to terms with who we are and our place in the universe.This approach can be used as a powerful challenge to hegemonic modes of study that mistakenly place the Western world at the center of intellectual and political life. Indeed, the authors argue that the symbolic dimension of Cassirer's thinking of possibility can be linked to a symbolic dimension in revolution via the ideas of Frantz Fanon, who argued that revolution must be a thoroughgoing cultural process, in which what is at stake is nothing less than how we symbolize a new humanity and bring into being a new set of social institutions worthy of that new humanity.

Sanctuary and Crime rethinks the history of sanctuary protections in the Western legal tradition. Until the sixteenth century, every major medieval legal tradition afforded protections to fugitive criminals who took sanctuary in churches. Sanctuary-seeking criminals might have been required to perform penance or go into exile, but they were guaranteed, at least in principle, immunity from corporal and capital punishment. In the sixteenth century, sanctuary protections were abolished throughout Europe, uprooting an ancient tradition and raising a new set of juridical arguments about law, crime and the power to punish.Sanctuary law has not received very much scholarly attention. According to the prevailing explanation among earlier generations of legal historians, sanctuary was an impediment to effective criminal law and social control, but was made necessary by rampant violence and weak political order in the medieval world. Contrary to the conclusions of the relatively scant literature on the topic, Sanctuary and Crime argues that the practice of sanctuary was not simply an instrumental device intended as a response to weak and splintered medieval political authority. Nor can sanctuary laws be explained as simple ameliorative responses to harsh medieval punishments and the specter of uncontrolled blood-feuds. This book seeks to integrate the history of sanctuary law with the history of criminal law in medieval Europe. It does so by first situating sanctuary law within the early Christian traditions of intercession and penance as well as late-imperial Roman law. The book then traces the transmission of Romano-Christian sanctuary legislation into the feuding traditions of early medieval Europe, showing how sanctuary law was an important emblem of Christian kingship and was integrated into a broad range of social, legal, ecclesiastical and political practices. By the late twelfth-century, sanctuary had been domesticated within the procedures of royal law in England. Unmoored from its taproots in penitential and intercessory practices, sanctuary became a central feature of the emergent law of felony in the early English common law. While sanctuary was widely recognized throughout late medieval Europe, medieval English records provide rich accounts of sanctuary in everyday medieval life and the book reflects the prominence of the English sources. The book concludes by examining the legal arguments in both English and Roman-canonical legal traditions that led to the restriction and abolition of sanctuary privileges in the sixteenth-century and which ushered in a new age of criminal law grounded in deterrence and a state-centered view of punishment and social control.

How does our understanding of the reality (or lack thereof ) of race as a category of being affect our understanding of racism as a social phenomenon, and vice versa? How should we envision the aims and methods of our struggles against racism? Traditionally, the Western political and philosophical tradition held that true social justice points toward a raceless future—that racial categories are themselves inherently racist, and a sincere advocacy for social justice requires a commitment to the elimination or abolition of race altogether. This book focuses on the underlying assumptions that inform this view of race and racism, arguing that it is ultimately bound up in a "politics of purity"—an understanding of human agency, and reality itself, as requiring all-or-nothing categories with clear and unambiguous boundaries. Racism, being organized around a conception of whiteness as the purest manifestation of the human, thus demands a constant policing of the boundaries among racial categories.Drawing upon a close engagement with historical treatments of the development of racial categories and identities, the book argues that races should be understood not as clear and distinct categories of being but rather as ambiguous and indeterminate (yet importantly real) processes of social negotiation. As one of its central examples, it lays out the case of the Irish in seventeenth-century Barbados, who occasionally united with black slaves to fight white supremacy—and did so as white people, not as nonwhites who later became white when they capitulated to white supremacy.Against the politics of purity, Monahan calls for the emergence of a "creolizing subjectivity" that would place such ambiguity at the center of our understanding of race. The Creolizing Subject takes seriously the way in which racial categories, in all of their variety and ambiguity, situate and condition our identity, while emphasizing our capacity, as agents, to engage in the ongoing contestation and negotiation of the meaningand significance of those very categories.

How does our understanding of the reality (or lack thereof ) of race as a category of being affect our understanding of racism as a social phenomenon, and vice versa? How should we envision the aims and methods of our struggles against racism? Traditionally, the Western political and philosophical tradition held that true social justice points toward a raceless future—that racial categories are themselves inherently racist, and a sincere advocacy for social justice requires a commitment to the elimination or abolition of race altogether. This book focuses on the underlying assumptions that inform this view of race and racism, arguing that it is ultimately bound up in a "politics of purity"—an understanding of human agency, and reality itself, as requiring all-or-nothing categories with clear and unambiguous boundaries. Racism, being organized around a conception of whiteness as the purest manifestation of the human, thus demands a constant policing of the boundaries among racial categories.Drawing upon a close engagement with historical treatments of the development of racial categories and identities, the book argues that races should be understood not as clear and distinct categories of being but rather as ambiguous and indeterminate (yet importantly real) processes of social negotiation. As one of its central examples, it lays out the case of the Irish in seventeenth-century Barbados, who occasionally united with black slaves to fight white supremacy—and did so as white people, not as nonwhites who later became white when they capitulated to white supremacy.Against the politics of purity, Monahan calls for the emergence of a "creolizing subjectivity" that would place such ambiguity at the center of our understanding of race. The Creolizing Subject takes seriously the way in which racial categories, in all of their variety and ambiguity, situate and condition our identity, while emphasizing our capacity, as agents, to engage in the ongoing contestation and negotiation of the meaningand significance of those very categories.

How may progressive political theorists advance the Enlightenment after Darwin shifted the conversation about human nature in the 19th century, the Holocaust displayed barbarity at the historical center of the Enlightenment, and 9/11 showed the need to modify the ideals and strategies of the Enlightenment? Kantian Courage considers how several figures in contemporary political theory—including John Rawls, Gilles Deleuze, and Tariq Ramadan—do just this as they continue Immanuel Kant's legacy.Rather than advocate specific Kantian ideas, the book contends that political progressives should embody Kantian courage—a critical and creative disposition to invent new political theories to address the problems of the age. It illuminates Kant's legacy in contemporary intellectual debates; constructs a dialogue among Anglo-American, Continental, and Islamic political theorists; and shows how progressives may forge alliances across political and religious differences by inventing concepts such as the overlapping consensus, the rhizome, and the space of testimony. The book will interest students of the Enlightenment, contemporary political theorists and philosophers, and a general audience concerned about the future of the relationship between Islam and the West.

How may progressive political theorists advance the Enlightenment after Darwin shifted the conversation about human nature in the 19th century, the Holocaust displayed barbarity at the historical center of the Enlightenment, and 9/11 showed the need to modify the ideals and strategies of the Enlightenment? Kantian Courage considers how several figures in contemporary political theory—including John Rawls, Gilles Deleuze, and Tariq Ramadan—do just this as they continue Immanuel Kant's legacy.Rather than advocate specific Kantian ideas, the book contends that political progressives should embody Kantian courage—a critical and creative disposition to invent new political theories to address the problems of the age. It illuminates Kant's legacy in contemporary intellectual debates; constructs a dialogue among Anglo-American, Continental, and Islamic political theorists; and shows how progressives may forge alliances across political and religious differences by inventing concepts such as the overlapping consensus, the rhizome, and the space of testimony. The book will interest students of the Enlightenment, contemporary political theorists and philosophers, and a general audience concerned about the future of the relationship between Islam and the West.

Since the Second World War, dignity has increasingly been recognized as an important moral and legal value. Although important examples of dignity-based arguments can be found in western European and North American case law and legal theory, the dignity jurisprudence of the Constitutional Court of South African is widely considered to be the most sweeping in the world. In part, this is related to the unique provisions of the South African Constitution in areas such as socioeconomic rights and allowing dignity to be taken into the sphere of economic justice as well as that of human rights. This book brings together the first sixteen years of constitutional jurisprudence addressing the meaning, role, and reach of dignity in the law of South Africa as a multiracial democracy. The case law is coupled with analysis from a range of selected contributors. The book will therefore be a crucial source for anyone seeking to evaluate dignity, whether in law or in human life more broadly.

Drawing the Line examines the ways in which cultural, political, and legal lines are imagined, drawn, crossed, erased, and redrawn in post-apartheid South Africa—through literary texts, artworks, and other forms of cultural production. Under the rubric of a philosophy of the limit, and with reference to a range of signifying acts and events, this book asks what it takes to recalibrate a sociopolitical scene, shifting perceptions of what counts and what matters, of what can be seen and heard, of what can be valued or regarded as meaningful.The book thus argues for an aesthetics of transitional justice and makes an appeal for a postapartheid aesthetic inquiry, as opposed to simply a political or a legal one. Each chapter brings a South African artwork, text, speech, building, or social encounter into conversation with debates in critical theory and continental philosophy, asking: What challenge do these South African acts of signification and resignification pose to current literary-philosophical debates?

Drawing the Line examines the ways in which cultural, political, and legal lines are imagined, drawn, crossed, erased, and redrawn in post-apartheid South Africa—through literary texts, artworks, and other forms of cultural production. Under the rubric of a philosophy of the limit, and with reference to a range of signifying acts and events, this book asks what it takes to recalibrate a sociopolitical scene, shifting perceptions of what counts and what matters, of what can be seen and heard, of what can be valued or regarded as meaningful.The book thus argues for an aesthetics of transitional justice and makes an appeal for a postapartheid aesthetic inquiry, as opposed to simply a political or a legal one. Each chapter brings a South African artwork, text, speech, building, or social encounter into conversation with debates in critical theory and continental philosophy, asking: What challenge do these South African acts of signification and resignification pose to current literary-philosophical debates?

Might creolization offer political theory an approach that would better reflect the heterogeneity of political life? After all, it describes mixtures that were not supposed to have emerged in the plantation societies of the Caribbean but did so through their capacity to exemplify living culture, thought, and political practice. Similar processes continue today, when people who once were strangers find themselves unequal co-occupants of new political locations they both seek to call "home."Unlike multiculturalism, in which different cultures are thought to co-exist relatively separately, creolization describes how people reinterpret themselves through interaction with one another. While indebted to comparative political theory, Gordon offers a critique of comparison by demonstrating the generative capacity of creolizing methodologies. She does so by bringing together the eighteenth-century revolutionary Swiss thinker Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the twentieth-century Martinican-born Algerian liberationist Frantz Fanon. While both provocatively challenged whether we can study the world in ways that do not duplicate the prejudices that sustain its inequalities, Fanon, she argues, outlined a vision of how to bring into being the democratically legitimate alternatives that Rousseau mainly imagined.

Might creolization offer political theory an approach that would better reflect the heterogeneity of political life? After all, it describes mixtures that were not supposed to have emerged in the plantation societies of the Caribbean but did so through their capacity to exemplify living culture, thought, and political practice. Similar processes continue today, when people who once were strangers find themselves unequal co-occupants of new political locations they both seek to call "home."Unlike multiculturalism, in which different cultures are thought to co-exist relatively separately, creolization describes how people reinterpret themselves through interaction with one another. While indebted to comparative political theory, Gordon offers a critique of comparison by demonstrating the generative capacity of creolizing methodologies. She does so by bringing together the eighteenth-century revolutionary Swiss thinker Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the twentieth-century Martinican-born Algerian liberationist Frantz Fanon. While both provocatively challenged whether we can study the world in ways that do not duplicate the prejudices that sustain its inequalities, Fanon, she argues, outlined a vision of how to bring into being the democratically legitimate alternatives that Rousseau mainly imagined.

Thresholds of Illiteracy reevaluates Latin American theories and narratives of cultural resistance by advancing the concept of "illiteracy" as a new critical approach to understanding scenes or moments of social antagonism. "Illiteracy," Acosta claims, can offer us a way of talking about what cannot be subsumed within prevailing modes of reading, such as the opposition between writing and orality, that have frequently been deployed to distinguish between modern and archaic peoples and societies.This book is organized as a series of literary and cultural analyses of internationally recognized postcolonial narratives. It tackles a series of the most important political/aesthetic issues in Latin America that have arisen over the past thirty years or so, including indigenism, testimonio, the Zapatista movement in Chiapas, and migration to the United States via the U.S.–Mexican border.Through a critical examination of the "illiterate" effects and contradictions at work in these resistant narratives, the book goes beyond current theories of culture and politics to reveal radically unpredictable forms of antagonism that advance the possibility for an ever more democratic model of cultural analysis.

Thresholds of Illiteracy reevaluates Latin American theories and narratives of cultural resistance by advancing the concept of "illiteracy" as a new critical approach to understanding scenes or moments of social antagonism. "Illiteracy," Acosta claims, can offer us a way of talking about what cannot be subsumed within prevailing modes of reading, such as the opposition between writing and orality, that have frequently been deployed to distinguish between modern and archaic peoples and societies.This book is organized as a series of literary and cultural analyses of internationally recognized postcolonial narratives. It tackles a series of the most important political/aesthetic issues in Latin America that have arisen over the past thirty years or so, including indigenism, testimonio, the Zapatista movement in Chiapas, and migration to the United States via the U.S.–Mexican border.Through a critical examination of the "illiterate" effects and contradictions at work in these resistant narratives, the book goes beyond current theories of culture and politics to reveal radically unpredictable forms of antagonism that advance the possibility for an ever more democratic model of cultural analysis.

Critics have claimed that Jean-Jacques Rousseau was a primitivist uncritically preoccupied with "noble savages" and that he remained oblivious to the African slave trade. Fugitive Rousseau presents the emancipatory possibilities of Rousseau's thought and argues that a fresh, "fugitive" perspective on political freedom is bound up with Rousseau's treatments of primitivism and slavery.Rather than trace Rousseau's arguments primarily to the social contract tradition of Hobbes and Locke, Fugitive Rousseau places Rousseau squarely in two imperial contexts: European empire in his contemporary Atlantic world and Roman imperial philosophy. Anyone who aims to understand the implications of Rousseau's famous sentence "Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains" or wants to know how Rousseauian arguments can support a radical democratic politics of diversity, discontinuity, and exodus will find Fugitive Rousseau indispensable.

The relation between law and revolution is one of the most pressing questions of our time. As one country after another has faced the challenge that comes with the revolutionary overthrow of past dictatorships, how one reconstructs a new government is a burning issue.South Africa, after a long and bloody armed struggle and a series of militant uprisings, negotiated a settlement for a new government and remains an important example of what a substantive revolution might look like. The essays collected in this book address both the broader question of law and revolution and some of the specific issues of transformation in South Africa.

The relation between law and revolution is one of the most pressing questions of our time. As one country after another has faced the challenge that comes with the revolutionary overthrow of past dictatorships, how one reconstructs a new government is a burning issue.South Africa, after a long and bloody armed struggle and a series of militant uprisings, negotiated a settlement for a new government and remains an important example of what a substantive revolution might look like. The essays collected in this book address both the broader question of law and revolution and some of the specific issues of transformation in South Africa.

At the start of the twenty-first century, 1 percent of the U.S. population is behind bars. An additional 3 percent is on parole or probation. In all but two states, incarcerated felons cannot vote, and in three states felon disenfranchisement is for life. More than 5 million adult Americans cannot vote because of a felony-class criminal conviction, meaning that more than 2 percent of otherwise eligible voters are stripped of their political rights. Nationally, fully a third of the disenfranchised are African American, effectively disenfranchising 8 percent of all African Americans in the United States. In Alabama, Kentucky, and Florida, one in every five adult African Americans cannot vote.Punishment and Inclusion gives a theoretical and historical account of this pernicious practice of felon disenfranchisement, drawing widely on early modern political philosophy, continental and postcolonial political thought, critical race theory, feminist philosophy, disability theory, critical legal studies, and archival research into state constitutional conventions. It demonstrates that the history of felon disenfranchisement, rooted in postslavery restrictions on suffrage and the contemporaneous emergence of the modern "American" penal system, reveals the deep connections between two political institutions often thought to be separate, showing the work of membership done by the criminal punishment system and the work of punishment done by the electoral franchise.Felon disenfranchisement is a symptom of the tension that persists in democratic politics between membership and punishment. This book shows how this tension is managed via the persistence of white supremacy in contemporary regimes of punishment and governance.

At the start of the twenty-first century, 1 percent of the U.S. population is behind bars. An additional 3 percent is on parole or probation. In all but two states, incarcerated felons cannot vote, and in three states felon disenfranchisement is for life. More than 5 million adult Americans cannot vote because of a felony-class criminal conviction, meaning that more than 2 percent of otherwise eligible voters are stripped of their political rights. Nationally, fully a third of the disenfranchised are African American, effectively disenfranchising 8 percent of all African Americans in the United States. In Alabama, Kentucky, and Florida, one in every five adult African Americans cannot vote.Punishment and Inclusion gives a theoretical and historical account of this pernicious practice of felon disenfranchisement, drawing widely on early modern political philosophy, continental and postcolonial political thought, critical race theory, feminist philosophy, disability theory, critical legal studies, and archival research into state constitutional conventions. It demonstrates that the history of felon disenfranchisement, rooted in postslavery restrictions on suffrage and the contemporaneous emergence of the modern "American" penal system, reveals the deep connections between two political institutions often thought to be separate, showing the work of membership done by the criminal punishment system and the work of punishment done by the electoral franchise.Felon disenfranchisement is a symptom of the tension that persists in democratic politics between membership and punishment. This book shows how this tension is managed via the persistence of white supremacy in contemporary regimes of punishment and governance.

Antiblack racism avows reason is white while emotion, and thus supposedly unreason, is black. Challenging academic adherence to this notion, Lewis R. Gordon offers a portrait of Martinican-turned-Algerian revolutionary psychiatrist and philosopher Frantz Fanon as an exemplar of "living thought" against forms of reason marked by colonialism and racism. Working from his own translations of the original French texts, Gordon critically engages everything in Fanon from dialectics, ethics, existentialism, and humanism to philosophical anthropology, phenomenology, and political theory as well as psychiatry and psychoanalysis.Gordon takes into account scholars from across the Global South to address controversies around Fanon's writings on gender and sexuality as well as political violence and the social underclass. In doing so, he confronts the replication of a colonial and racist geography of reason, allowing theorists from the Global South to emerge as interlocutors alongside northern ones in a move that exemplifies what, Gordon argues, Fanon represented in his plea to establish newer and healthier human relationships beyond colonial paradigms.

Antiblack racism avows reason is white while emotion, and thus supposedly unreason, is black. Challenging academic adherence to this notion, Lewis R. Gordon offers a portrait of Martinican-turned-Algerian revolutionary psychiatrist and philosopher Frantz Fanon as an exemplar of "living thought" against forms of reason marked by colonialism and racism. Working from his own translations of the original French texts, Gordon critically engages everything in Fanon from dialectics, ethics, existentialism, and humanism to philosophical anthropology, phenomenology, and political theory as well as psychiatry and psychoanalysis.Gordon takes into account scholars from across the Global South to address controversies around Fanon's writings on gender and sexuality as well as political violence and the social underclass. In doing so, he confronts the replication of a colonial and racist geography of reason, allowing theorists from the Global South to emerge as interlocutors alongside northern ones in a move that exemplifies what, Gordon argues, Fanon represented in his plea to establish newer and healthier human relationships beyond colonial paradigms.

Critics have claimed that Jean-Jacques Rousseau was a primitivist uncritically preoccupied with "noble savages" and that he remained oblivious to the African slave trade. Fugitive Rousseau presents the emancipatory possibilities of Rousseau's thought and argues that a fresh, "fugitive" perspective on political freedom is bound up with Rousseau's treatments of primitivism and slavery.Rather than trace Rousseau's arguments primarily to the social contract tradition of Hobbes and Locke, Fugitive Rousseau places Rousseau squarely in two imperial contexts: European empire in his contemporary Atlantic world and Roman imperial philosophy. Anyone who aims to understand the implications of Rousseau's famous sentence "Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains" or wants to know how Rousseauian arguments can support a radical democratic politics of diversity, discontinuity, and exodus will find Fugitive Rousseau indispensable.

A major American legal thinker, the late Ronald Dworkin also helped shape new dispensations in the Global South. In South Africa, in particular, his work has been fiercely debated in the context of one of the world's most progressive constitutions. Despite Dworkin's discomfort with that document's enshrinement of "socioeconomic rights," his work enables an important defense of a jurisprudence premised on justice, rather than on legitimacy.Beginning with a critical overview of Dworkin's work culminating in his two principles of dignity, Cornell and Friedman turn to Kant and Hegel for an approach better able to ground the principles of dignity Dworkin advocates. Framed thus, Dworkin's challenge to legal positivism enables a theory of constitutional revolution in which existing legal structures are transformatively revalued according to ethical mandates. By founding law on dignity, Dworkin begins to articulate an ethical jurisprudence responsive to the lived experience of injustice. This book, then, articulates a revolutionary constitutionalism crucial to the struggle for decolonization.

A major American legal thinker, the late Ronald Dworkin also helped shape new dispensations in the Global South. In South Africa, in particular, his work has been fiercely debated in the context of one of the world's most progressive constitutions. Despite Dworkin's discomfort with that document's enshrinement of "socioeconomic rights," his work enables an important defense of a jurisprudence premised on justice, rather than on legitimacy.Beginning with a critical overview of Dworkin's work culminating in his two principles of dignity, Cornell and Friedman turn to Kant and Hegel for an approach better able to ground the principles of dignity Dworkin advocates. Framed thus, Dworkin's challenge to legal positivism enables a theory of constitutional revolution in which existing legal structures are transformatively revalued according to ethical mandates. By founding law on dignity, Dworkin begins to articulate an ethical jurisprudence responsive to the lived experience of injustice. This book, then, articulates a revolutionary constitutionalism crucial to the struggle for decolonization.

The central thesis of Foucault's Critical Ethics is that Foucault's account of power does not foreclose the possibility of ethics; on the contrary, it provides a framework within which ethics becomes possible. Tracing the evolution of Foucault's analysis of power from his early articulations of disciplinary power to his theorizations of biopower and governmentality, Richard A. Lynch shows how Foucault's ethical project emerged through two interwoven trajectories: analysis of classical practices of the care of the self, and engaged practice in and reflection upon the limits of sexuality and the development of friendship in gay communities. These strands of experience and inquiry allowed Foucault to develop contrasting yet interwoven aspects of his ethics; they also underscored how ethical practice emerges within and from contexts of power relations. The gay community's response to AIDS and its parallels with the feminist ethics of care serve to illustrate the resources of a Foucauldian ethic—a fundamentally critical attitude, with substantive (but revisable) values and norms grounded in a practice of freedom.

This book is concerned with the aporias, or impasses, of forgiveness, especially in relation to the legacy of the crimes against humanity perpetrated by the Nazis and their collaborators during World War II. Banki argues that, while forgiveness of the Holocaust is and will remain impossible, we cannot rest upon that impossibility. Rather, the impossibility of forgiveness must be thought in another way. In an epoch of "worldwidization," we may not be able simply to escape the violence of scenes and rhetoric that repeatedly portray apology, reconciliation, and forgiveness as accomplishable acts. Accompanied by Jacques Derrida's thought of forgiveness of the unforgivable, and its elaboration in relation to crimes against humanity, the book undertakes close readings of literary, philosophical, and cinematic texts by Simon Wiesenthal, Jean Améry, Vladimir Jankélévitch, Robert Antelme and Eva Mozes Kor. These texts contend with the idea that the crimes of the Nazis are inexpiable, that they lie beyond any possible atonement or repair. Banki argues that the juridical concept of crimes against humanity calls for a thought of forgiveness—one that would not imply closure of the infinite wounds of the past. How could such a forgiveness be thought or dreamed? Banki shows that if today we cannot simply escape the "worldwidization" of forgiveness, then it is necessary to rethink what forgiveness is, the conditions under which it supposedly takes place, and especially its relation to justice.

Populism in politics and policy orientations in law have thrown the jurisdiction of the academy and the disciplines of interpretation into disarray. Critique flounders in abstraction and negativity, law loses itself in particularity. Administering Interpretation brings together philosophers, humanists, and jurists from both continental and Anglophone jurisdictions to reassess the status and trajectory of interpretative theory as applied in the art of law. Tracking the thread of philosophical influences upon the community of legal interpretation, the essays move from the translation and wake of Derrida to the work of Agamben, from deconstruction to oikononmia. Sharing roots in the philological excavation of the political theology of modern law, contributors assess the failure of secularism and the continuing theological borrowings of juridical interpretation. The book brings contemporary critique to bear upon the interpretative apparatuses of exclusion, the law of spectacular sovereignty, and the bodies that lie in its wake. Contributors: Giovanna Borradori, Marinos Diamantides, Allen Feldman, Stanley Fish, Pierre Legrand, Bernadette Meyler, Michel Rosenfeld, Bernhard Schlink, Jeanne Schroeder, Laurent de Sutter, Katrin Trüstedt, Marco Wan