CrisisKnowledge History Law

Social Critiques of Law

University of Kent Kent Law School

Social Critiques of Law

29 January 2016

Darwin Conference Suite 3

One-day workshop of the Social Critiques of Law Research Group (SoCriL)

Organizer: Thanos Zartaloudis (Kent Law School & AA School of Architecture)

Assistants: Michalis Zivanaris & Gian Giacomo Fusco

Funded by: Social Critiques of Law Research Group

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Kent Law School, University of Kent, Canterbury, UK

http://www.kent.ac.uk/law/socril/events/2016/crisis.html

Thanks to the very kind support by Sarah Gilkes, Jasper Van Dooren and Ed Fairhead, Michalis Zivanaris and Gian Giacomo Fusco. This workshop would not have materialized if it were not for the collegiality and vision of the co-directors of the

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Social Critiques of Law Group at Kent Law School, Emilie Cloatre and Donatella Alessandrini. Photography (cover) kindly

offered by Kiriakos Sifiltzoglou © 2015.

General Useful Information

Darwin College – Maps and Directionshttps://www.kent.ac.uk/maps/canterbury/canterbury-campus/building/darwin-college Wi-Fi access: Connect to the Cloud (while on Campus)

TaxisCanterbury Taxi phone numbers: 01227 710777 or 01227 458885

Train StationCanterbury West Train Station (for trains from/to London)

Coffee Places (Coffee/Tea on Campus can be found at the Gulbenkian – on your way to Darwin College next to the Templeman Library).

Refectory Kitchen [Opposite Agnes Hotel]16 St. Dunstans Street, Canterbury, CT2 8AFWillows Secret Kitchen (on Stour Street just of the high street)42 Stour Street, Canterbury, CT1 2PHMicro Roastery (just off the high street)4 Saint Margaret's Street, Canterbury CT1 2TPThe Goods Shed [Next to Canterbury West Train Station]Station Rd W, Canterbury, Kent CT2 8AN

BarsAbode Hotel (Hotel Bar)The Goods ShedThe Falstaff (Hotel Bar)

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Programme

Darwin Conference Suite 3

9.15 RegistrationMichalis Zivanaris (University of Kent, Law School) & Gian Giacomo Fusco

(University of Kent, Law School)(Bring your Coffee/Tea; Best to get it from town before you come up to Campus. Coffee/Tea on Campus can be found at the Gulbenkian – on your way to Darwin

College next to the Templeman Library).

9-30-9.35 WelcomeToni Williams (University of Kent, Head of School of Law)

Thanos Zartaloudis (University of Kent, Law School & Architectural Association)

9.35-11.00 Session 1Chair: Maria Drakopoulou (University of Kent, Law School)

Marika Rose (University of Durham, Department of Theology and Religion)Crisis of judgement: on the juridical logics of Christian identity.

&Ilias Papagianopoulos (University of Piraeus, International and European Studies)

Crisis and modern Greek genealogies.

11.00-11.15 Tea/Coffee Break

11.15 – 12.45 Session 2Chair: John Ackerman (University of Kent, Law School)

Bo Isenberg (Lund University, Faculty of Sociology)Permanent crisis, epoch of the provisional – Images and experiences of

classical modernity.&

Esther Leslie (University of London, Birkbeck College, Department of English and Humanities)

To Gamble in the Light of Crisis.

12.45 – 13.45 Lunch

13.45 – 15.15 Session 3Chair: Thanos Zartaloudis (University of Kent, Law School & Architectural

Association)

Emanuele Coccia (Centre d'Histoire et Théorie des Arts (CEHTA - EHESS), Paris and The Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America, Columbia University)From Krisis to Krasis: The Cosmology and Politics of Total Blending.

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&Anton Schütz (University of London, Birkbeck College, School of Law)Crisis, peirasmós, escalation : for an archaeo-theology of the

unsustainable.

15.15 – 15.30 Tea/Coffee Break

15.30 – 17.00 Session 4Chair: Iain MacKenzie (University of Kent, School of Politics and International

Relations)

Marina Lathouri (Architectural Association, London, School of Architecture & University of Cambridge, School of Architecture)

Crisis and economies of living&

Stathis Gourgouris (Columbia University, Classics, English; Institute for Comparative Literature and Society)

Fortress Europe in Critical Condition.

17.00 – 17.15 Tea/Coffee Break

17.15 – 18.45 Session 5Chair: Donatella Alessandrini (University of Kent, Law School, Co-Director SoCriL)

Marinos Diamantides (University of London, Birkbeck College, School of Law)Western political theology, civil religion and the empire of management.

&Janet Roitman (The New School for Social Research, New York)

Anti-Crisis.

19.15 – 21.30 Dinner (Location TBC)

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Abstracts & Bios (in order of presentation)Marika Rose (University of Durham, Department of Theology and Religion)Crisis of judgement: on the juridical logics of Christian identity

The Hebrew scriptures understand judgement as salvation, an active process of righting wrongs in which the powerful are brought down from their thrones and the lowly are lifted up. The narrative of Pilate and Jesus marks the emergence in Christianity of a new logic of judgement not as salvation but as crisis, in which – as Agamben argues – ‘judgement and salvation mutually exclude one another’. What are the implications of this shift for Christian theology and for the logic of capital which emerges from Christianity?

Marika Rose is a Research Fellow at the CODEC Research Centre for Digital Theology, Durham University. She is Reviews Editor of the Journal “Theology and Sexuality”. She recently completed a PhD thesis on the relationship between the Christian apophatic tradition and contemporary continental philosophy, particularly the work of Slavoj Žižek. Her current project focuses on angels, cyborgs, and the theology of work.

Ilias Papagianopoulos (University of Piraeus, International and European Studies)Crisis and Modern Greek Genealogies

During the Greek crisis, political discourse has had very often porous borders with concepts and patterns originated in cultural narratives. Those patterns revive and reproduce a discussion which originated in the nineteenth century and between its ideological camps. On the one hand, in the so-called 'hellenocentric' paradigm and its variations, modern Europe is seen in a negative light and pre-modern Greek traditions in a positive one, whereas for the 'eurocentric' narrative, the view is the exactly opposite one. In the first part of my presentation, I will refer to three modern and contemporary examples of the second case, that had an important effect in the public discourse of the recent years. Although the three paradigmatic thinkers of my focus (K. Axelos, P. Kondylis and S. Ramfos) come from very different philosophical traditions, they nonetheless coincide in their central claim: that modern Greece lacks access to modernity's temporality and, thus, to the political subjectivity which is linked with that specific temporality. Modern Greece would remain fragmentary and deprived of a living heritage, enclosed in an ahistoric crypta.After analyzing aspects of that argument, in the second part of the presentation I will question the very basis for the distinction between the two main narratives, suggesting that the actual structure of their argument reveals a hidden opponent,

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who is surprisingly common to them: while they both claim a pure ontological basis as their departure point, provided before the domain of the historical experience, they both construct closed political ontologies and schemes of historicity. On the other hand, casting an eye on public debates, but also on the literature of the nineteenth century, shows that modern Greece was marked from the very beginning by the historical experience of a lack of foundational continuity and of a hovering in a constant exceptional state of historical bordering. In other words, the common opponent was none other than the traumatic modern Greek historicity itself, which remained unformulated in philosophical terms; and the main opponent of the most prominent figures of modern Greek philosophy, equally 'hellenocentric' and 'eurocentric', are visible only through literary and artistic expressions.In that sense, the so-called crisis can be seen as the constellation of a return to the initial symbolic void of the modern Greek historical experience. The question would thus be whether an affirmative position towards that void and a different relation to the idea of an origin, could lead philosophical thought to a different kind of understanding Greece as a European subject, with the potentiality of a post-foundational political and historical agency.

Ilias Papagiannopoulos studied philosophy and history at Innsbruck where he was also awarded his doctoral degree with a thesis on Herman Melville's Moby-Dick. He held seminars and lectured at the Universities of Innsbruck (1997-2003), Panteion (2004-2007) and Thessaly (2015) and was a research fellow at the Greek Academy for Sciences and Arts (2001-2004). Since 2008 he is Assistant Professor for contemporary political philosophy at the Department of International and European Studies of the University of Piraeus. He has written two books in Greek, on Moby-Dick (Exit stage left, 2000) and King Oedipus (Beyond absence, 2005), and he has edited one more (Present past and present future, 2011). His most recent publication is 'Krise und neugriechische Genealogien', in his co-edited Griechenland im europäischen Kontext. Krise und Krisendiskurse (Wiesbaden: Springer, 2016). In 2016 a collection in Greek of recent essays of his is forthcoming. These essays concern the politics of time in Arendt, Benjamin, Foucault, Derrida and others, as well as inquiries into modern Greek political philosophy and literature.

Bo Isenberg (Lund University, Faculty of Sociology)Permanent crisis, epoch of the provisional – Images and experiences of classical modernity

The presentation offers an outline of classical modern reflection (sociology, cultural theory, literature) on the constitution and transformation of modernity, and its cultural and mental dispositions. It will be argued that classical modernity may be conceived as an archive of influential concepts on culture today. Core references are Siegfried Kracauer, Robert Musil, Joseph Roth, Georg Simmel, Ferdinand Tönnies.

Bo Isenberg is a Reader at the Sociology Faculty of Lund University. He specializes in social theory, cultural sociology and social psychology. He has published in subjects like identity, culture, globalization, modernity, crisis, sociology’s relation to the novel. Presently he is involved in a research project on identity and cosmopolitanism in the Weimar Republic. Some of his recent publications in English include: “Critique and crisis. Reinhart Koselleck's thesis of the genesis of modernity” Eurozine – Network of European Cultural Journals, 2012; and “Mammonist Capitalism – Ubiquity, Immanence, Acceleration and the Social Consequences” in Nordicum-Mediterraneum (E-Journal of Nordic and Mediterranean Studies), vol.8:2, 2013.

Esther Leslie

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(Birkbeck College, Department of English and Humanities)To Gamble in the Light of Crisis

This paper draws on Benjamin’s Arcades Project, exploring it as a text about finance, or casino capitalism. Like its Benjaminian model, this paper explores the intermingling of economy, gesture, pleasure, terror in the locations of burgeoning commodity capitalism, a capitalism that is in crisis from its start. In addition, this paper sets a history of capitalist crisis in relation to the fluctuations of light and darkness.

Esther Leslie is Professor in Political Aesthetics at Birkbeck College, School of English, University of London. Esther Leslie has research interests in Marxist theories of aesthetics and culture, with a particular focus on the work of Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno. Other research interests include the poetics of science, European literary and visual modernism and avant gardes, animation, colour and madness. Her books include: Walter Benjamin: Overpowering Conformism (Pluto 2000), Hollywood Flatlands, Animation, Critical Theory and the Avant Garde (Verso 2002), Synthetic Worlds: Nature, Art and the Chemical Industry (Reaktion, 2005) Walter Benjamin (Reaktion 2007), and Derelicts: Thought Worms from the Wreckage (Unkant, 2014). Her translations include Georg Lukacs, A Defence of 'History and Class Consciousness (Verso 2002) and Walter Benjamin: The Archives (Verso, 2007). Her next book is on the poetics and politics of liquid crystals.

Emanuele Coccia EHESS, Paris – Italian Academy, Columbia University, New York)From Krisis to Krasis : the Cosmology and Politics of Total Blending.

In pre-Socratic cosmology krisis was the name for the power of judgment and the force of the distinction of things: a krisis as a power or a force was opposed to an opposite one, the force which produced blending, mixture, confusion. In the vivid Anaxagorean version, krisis is embodied in a separated cosmic mind, which is facing the universal surrounding mass, wherein all “things are together, infinite both in number and in smallness” and nothing is clear and distinct. Following this cosmological model, the genesis of the world is then the act, through which the mind separates, judges, distinguishes and produces differences out of the mixture of all things: cosmogony is, here, an affair of critique. Against this crude opposition the stoic cosmology tried to describe the world as the place of the total blending (krasis) of all elements, where everything is in everything and the universal mind is at the same time the cause and the form of this total blending. I will claim that the shift from Modernity to Postmodernity is not a pure historical but a cosmological one, and that it could be interpreted as a transition from an Anaxagorean cosmological model to a Stoic one. Rationality is nowadays the name for the process of systematic blending and mixing of the elements of the worlds and of the methodical disengagement of every form of distinction and judgement (and therefore of critique). In front of the contemporary world, critique is not only powerless: it has literally no more place.

Emanuele Coccia is an Associate Professor at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris. He received his PhD in Florence and was formerly an Assistant Professor of History of Philosophy in Freiburg, Germany. He worked on the history of European normativity and on aesthetics. His current research topics focus on the ontological status of images and their normative power, especially in fashion and advertising. Among his publications are: La trasparenza delle immagini. Averroè e l’averroismo (Milan 2005, Spanish translation 2008), La vie sensible (Paris 2010, translated in Italian, Portuguese, Spanish and Romanian; English translation in

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press) and Le bien dans les choses (Paris 2013 translated in Italian and Spanish; English and German translation in press). With Giorgio Agamben as a co-editor, he published an anthology on angels in Christian, Jewish, and Islamic contexts: Angeli. Ebraismo Cristianesimo Islam (Milan 2009).

Anton Schütz (University of London, Birkbeck College, School of Law)Crisis, peirasmós, escalation: for an archaeo-theology of the unsustainable

Well-known maps of the undoable are split in a moral-cum-legalist and a possibilistic half, separating that which ought not, from that which cannot be done. Throughout most of the history of Philosophy they were associated with the domains known as practical inquiry in the first, of theoretical inquiry in the second case. This has changed to the extent that that which ought to be « done » (leaving aside, for the occasion, the most decisive issue: by whom?) is now increasingly seen as a dependent variable of that which can be. What is the relation, if any, between these changes and the appearance of the terrorizingly inflationary supernova of « crisis »? And how should we understand the new galaxy of more re-assuring themes or disciplines such as management, oikonomia, functional differentiation, and the quest for a new science – a quasi-ontology of process and happening, roughly – that they respond to? The theme of a "mystery of sustainability" will serve us as a guide into the long build-up of a very contemporary problematic.

Anton Schütz teaches Legal Theory at Birkbeck Law School. He holds degrees in law from the University of Vienna and in Social Anthropology from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (Paris). He has also been a teacher of European legal and religious history at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes. Anton Schütz publishes in the fields of Continental Philosophy, Jurisprudence, the History of religion and secularisation, and the evolution of scientific methodology. He co-edits (with Thanos Zartaloudis) the book series Encounters in Law and Philosophy (EUP, 2015-). He has recently edited the following books: (with Massimiliano Traversino), “The Theology of ‘Potentia dei’ and the History of European Normativity” special edition of the Journal Divus Thomas, n.115, 2012); (with Peter Goodrich and Lior Barshak) Law, Text, Terror, (Routledge-Cavendish, 2006).

Marina Lathouri (Architectural Association, London, School of Architecture & University of Cambridge, School of Architecture)Crisis and economies of living

Reinhart Koselleck argues in Critique and Crisis that crisis is a philosophical construct, which came to signify “a permanent concept of ‘history’,” “a historically immanent transitional phase.” This reading of the idea of crisis suggests the present as possible moment of rupture and dis-continuity, as well as, a locus within which, new directions of thought may emerge. However, when being in crisis becomes a state of mind, the norm rather than its resolution (the latter thought of as essentially eschatological concept and temporal beginning), the concept of crisis loses its programmatic aspect and projective potential. Jacques Derrida in his Economies de la crise describes this loss (the crisis of the idea of crisis) as “the symptom of,” and at the same time, “the jostling attempt to save a world (kosmos) which we no longer inhabit”, where “there is no longer oiko-nomia, oiko-logia, inhabitable place in which we feel ‘at home’.” In light of a new geography of movement – economic and social, of shifting forms of political authority and jurisdiction, what are the terms in which modes of inhabitation can be re-framed? How would invariants and everyday rituals of living stripped from

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embedded meanings and symbols be reinstated to produce forms of co-living and collective consciousness? At this point, Jean Luc Nancy’s idea of exchange developed in La Communaute affrontee and registered in the preposition ‘with’/’avec’ provides an exact and effective locus. “Neither communion nor atomisation, solely the partaking in a place” the ‘with’ (“L’ ‘avec’ est sec et neutre: ni communion ni atomisation, seulement le partage d’un lieu, tout au plus un contact: un etre ensemble sans assemblage,”) outlines multiple micro-economies of living, within which the intimate, both in the sense of proximity and the absolute interiority, is interwoven with the collective and the global. The boundaries of the personal, the political, the territorial and the constitutional often remain ambiguous, yet the singular is ceaselessly reconfigured within the inside of this indistinct (as for its boundaries) system of planning. This understanding unavoidably expands the signification of the material (and architectural) object. The question thus to be raised is whether and to what extent these material and spatial micro-inventions alone can potentially claim political action, not in the sense of strategic planning and specific propositions, but by demarcating and offering a figure to the locus of exchange.Bo Isenberg is a Reader at the Sociology Department of Lund University and he specializes in social theory, cultural sociology and social psychology. He has published in subjects like identity, culture, globalization, modernity, crisis, sociology’s relation to the novel. Presently he is involved in a research project on identity and cosmopolitanism in the Weimar Republic. Some of his recent publications in English include: “Critique and crisis. Reinhart Koselleck's thesis of the genesis of modernity” Eurozine – Network of European Cultural Journals, 2012; and “Mammonist Capitalism – Ubiquity, Immanence, Acceleration and the Social Consequences” in Nordicum-Mediterraneum (E-Journal of Nordic and Mediterranean Studies), vol.8:2, 2013.

Marina Lathouri studied architecture and philosophy of art and aesthetics. She directs the Graduate Programme in History and Critical Thinking at the AA and lectures at Cambridge University. Lathouri’s current research interests lie in the conjunction of architectural history, the city and political philosophy. She co-authored Intimate Metropolis: Urban Subjects in the Modern City, London: Routledge, 2008; and City Cultures: Contemporary Positions on the City, London: AA Publications, 2010. Lathouri has recently directed the Research project at the AA entitled City Cultures. Intimate Metropolis: Urban Subjects in the Modern City.

Stathis Gourgouris(Columbia University, Classics, English; Institute for Comparative Literature and Society)Fortress Europe in Critical Condition

This argument takes for granted the thesis that crisis is an endemic condition in democracy, which does not mean that this is necessarily good for democratic politics. Therefore, the question of how we determine what crisis is, or what constitutes crisis in what terms and in what form, must always be asked and explored in order to determine the conditions of democratic action. The paper will engage the theoretical problem that opens up with this question by addressing some of the recent events that challenge what has been called "Fortress Europe" -- chiefly the refugee situation and, related to it but not exclusively determined by it, what we can identify as the war conditions in European cities. Addressing those theoretical dimensions that seem impervious to social analysis, I will propose that we use as a prism the theoretical capacities of literature by reading against the grain Michel Houellebecq's new controversial novel Submission.

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Stathis Gourgouris is Professor of Classics, English, and Comparative Literature and Director of the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University. Professor Gourgouris writes and teaches on a variety of subjects that ultimately come together around questions of the poetics and politics of modernity and democracy. He is the author of Dream Nation: Enlightenment, Colonization, and the Institution of Modern Greece (Stanford, 1996); Does Literature Think? Literature as Theory for an Antimythical Era (Stanford, 2003); Lessons in Secular Criticism (Fordham 2013); and editor of Freud and Fundamentalism (Fordham, 2010). Outside these projects he has also published numerous articles on Ancient Greek philosophy, political theory, modern poetics, film, contemporary music, and psychoanalysis. He is currently completing work on two other book projects of secular criticism: The Perils of the One and Nothing Sacred.He writes regularly in internet media (such as The Huffington Post, Los Angeles Review of Books, Al Jazeera, Open Democracy, The Immanent Frame), as well as major Greek newspapers and journals on political and literary matters. A collection of such essays on poetics and politics, written in Greek over a period of 25 years, is forthcoming in 2016 with the title Contingent Disorders. He is also an internationally awarded poet, with four volumes of poetry published in Greek, most recent being Introduction to Physics (Athens, 2005). His work has been translated into French, Italian, Serbo-Croatian, Turkish, and Hebrew. He has also served as Director of the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia (2009-2015); President of the Modern Greek Studies Association (2006-2012); and at the Board of Supervisors of the English Institute, Harvard University (2006-2009). In 2015 he was honored with the Lenfest Distinguished Columbia Faculty Award.An extensive interview covering the whole range of his work can be found in the Los Angeles Review of Books: Part I “Dream Nation and the Phantasm of Europe” http://lareviewofbooks.org/interview/dream-nation-and-the-phantasm-of-europe-part-i; Part II “Poetics and the Political World” http://lareviewofbooks.org/interview/poetics-and-the-political-world-obrad-savic-interviews-stathis-gourgouris-part-ii

Marinos Diamantides (University of London, Birkbeck College, School of Law)Western   political theology, civil religion and the empire of management

Secular modernity constitutes itself as the constant management of interminable crises and the late-modern global Empire of Management (Legendre) is often decried as a dictatorship without a dictator in a disenchanted, post-hierocratic, post-sovereign, ‘flat’ world society. There is, however, reluctance among the Christian/post-Christian subjects to accept that impersonal and fragmentary management without telos is the ultimate global legacy of the Western political and legal imagination.  The human psyche, I argue, can only experience disorder -and management is all about disorder- with a sense of certainty that ultimately only religion provides with the result that parochial politics is the only possible politics. The deposition of the monarch in modern democracies did not dislodge the fantastic image of a sovereign Throne - now reconfigured as the ‘empty place of power’ which competing interests occupy in turns- as if it is indispensable for the constitution of the social. Thus, as I show in the case of the Greek sovereign-debt crisis, when faith in sovereignty and authority was all but lost following the onslaught of neoliberal dictates, the legal positivists (courts, legislators and many liberal academics) effectively joined with rebellious activists (endorsed from the Euro-Atlantic left as ‘revolutionaries’) to re-validate as a social fact the existence of actual/ potential legitimate legal/ rightful political sovereignty (think judicial decisions that the austerity is in conformity with the popular Will; but also, revolutionary fists raised against austerity only to turn into hands signing on to whatever measures are

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dictated from Brussels). Overall, the obsession with holding/restraining ‘sovereign power’ points to an inability to accept that there is no puppeteer-like sovereign and no master-plan behind the countless impersonal operations that constitute the social in functionally differentiated societies – which Christian ‘individualism’ made possible. The Greek situation, akin to an absurdist play, was thus falsely staged as a tragedy or comedy in which imaginary 'protagonists' are vilified or glorified and truly legitimate/rightful legal/political sovereignty is anticipated as deus ex machina.

Marinos Diamantides is a Reader in Law at Birkbeck College, School of Law, University of London. He was born and educated in Athens and he has taught at Lancaster University, the London School of Economics and, since 1995, at, Birkbeck College, while he has been a fellow at Law Schools in the USA, Japan and Israel. He has published books on the potential impact of Emmanuel Levinas's philosophy on jurisprudential and political problems (including The Ethics of Suffering: Modern Law, Philosophy and Medicine, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000). He is currently writing a monograph on the topic of 'comparative legalism' among monotheistic cultures, with A. Schütz, entitled - Immaculate Conceptions: Secularization in Law and Philosophy - Four Chapters on Law and Political Theology in the 21st Century, Edinburgh University Press, ‘Encounters in Law and Philosophy’ Series, (forthcoming, 2016).

Janet Roitman (The New School for Social Research, New York)Anti-Crisis

In the book Anti-Crisis, I step back from the cycle of crisis production to ask not just why we declare so many crises but also what sort of analytical work the concept of crisis enables. What, I ask, are the stakes of crisis? Taking responses to the so-called subprime mortgage crisis of 2007–2008 as the case in point, I engage with the work of thinkers ranging from Reinhart Koselleck to Michael Lewis, and from Thomas Hobbes to Robert Shiller. In the process, I question the bases for claims to crisis and show how crisis functions as a narrative device, or how the invocation of crisis in contemporary accounts of the financial meltdown enables particular narratives, raising certain questions while foreclosing others.

[In this presentation Roitman will present the modality and central arguments of her book briefly to then initiate a wider discussion.]

Janet Roitman received her doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania. Before taking her Chair (Anthropology) at the New School, she served as an instructor at the Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques de Paris (Sciences-Po). Roitman was, further, a research fellow with the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) and a member of the Institut Marcel-Mauss (CNRS-EHESS) in Paris. Professor Roitman has conducted extensive research in Central Africa, focusing specifically on the borders of Cameroon, Nigeria, the Central African Republic and Chad. Her book, Fiscal Disobedience: An Anthropology of Economic Regulation in Central Africa (Princeton University Press, 2005), is an analysis of the unregulated commerce that transpires on those borders. This research enquires into emergent forms of economic regulation in the region of the Chad Basin and considers consequential transformations in the nature of fiscal relations and citizenship. More generally, her research covers topics of political economy, the anthropology of value, economization, and emergent forms of the political. Her most recent book which is, in fact, one of the key works that inspired and informed this workshop is: Anti-Crisis, (Duke University Press, 2014).

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Invitation Brief for the one-day Workshop of the Social Critiques of Law Research Group (SoCriL)

ThemeThis workshop has invited papers by participants on a variety of approaches across disciplines to the notion and experience of crisis. The aim of the workshop is to interrogate the notion of crisis across and against disciplinary approaches, with one eye set, inevitably, on the contemporary situation, but with ever more attention to the intersections between crisis, knowledge, history and law in a wider sense.

Thematic OutlineWe are told that we are “immersed” in crisis: European sovereign debt crisis, the subprime crisis in the United States, ISIS, Syria, the crisis in Afghanistan, the crisis in Darfur, the crisis in the Congo, in Cairo, in the Middle East, ecologic crisis, Ebola, climate change (cf. Roitman), the modern city is crisis, the University in crisis and so forth. A bad infinity of crises amounting, in one view, to a ‘global crisis’ that forms a ‘surface effect’ in the reversal of the relation between humans and the world (cf. Serres). To not just enter a moment of crisis, but to be in crisis raises then at first significant entry-level questions (i.e. Who decides, if anyone, whether there is ‘a crisis’? What are the outcomes of being in a permanent state of ‘crisis’? etc.) Yet at the same time it questions the peculiar nature of crisis as such: its paradoxical elevated status through conditioning normalcy while suspending it; and at the same time its endless encroachment over social processes and beings which, as time goes by, become tomorrow’s normalcy.There are many exemplary moves ‘in crisis’. For instance, capitalism is introduced as a phenomenon through the ‘medium’ of crisis. It is worth noting that Marx and Engels are most careful to establish proximity between crisis and the bourgeoisie:

The conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to comprise the wealth created by them. And how does the bourgeoisie get over these crises? On the one hand, by enforced destruction of a mass of productive forces; on the other, by the conquest of new markets, and by the more thorough exploitation

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of the old ones. That is to say, by paving the way for more extensive and more destructive crises, and by diminishing the means whereby crises are prevented (Marx / Engels 1967: 226).

To refer to some other examples: Freud’s ego constitutes itself, on the other hand, through the working out of crises, while Nietzsche’s account of the predicament of both ‘God and man’ in their encounter with nihilism, is a predicament of crisis. For Husserl’s conception of a ‘krisis of the European sciences’ and of the form of human life as such, positivist sciences were seen as reducing the transcendental ego to a natural object. Classic references to the ‘crisis of Europe’ by Rousseau and Saint-Simon as the result of revolution, whether in an affirmative or negative sense, are also well known. Modernity, it has even been repeatedly said, conceives itself, in each of its forms, as a crisis. In current discourse, too, in the midst of competing crisis-rhythms, crisis appears to be understood as either an error within an otherwise efficient institutional structure (for instance in Kindleberger, Aliber, Roubini, Mihm, among others); or as the critical condition of an ‘alienation’ whereby institutions are parasitic aberrations from the truth of this or that value or principle (for instance in Harvey, Marazzi, Berardi). Others turn on the effect of crisis in its paradoxical production. In Lazzarato, for example, who claims that crises are related to the (re)production of subjectivities, first of all, at an existential level as such. And in Agamben whereby the decision on the exception of “bare life” is a juridico-political decision on a life placed in permanent crisis (in the sense of judgement, as well as in its reduction to the supposedly lowest common denominator). And isn’t a legal trial’s only goal nothing other than the krisis (judgment, the res iudicata) (Satta)? As Satta writes with regard to this paradigm of krisis:

For this moment of arrest is precisely judgment: an act, therefore, contrary to the economy of life, which is all movement, all will, and all action, an antihuman, inhuman act, an act that is truly –if one considers it properly, in its essence- without goal. Humans have intuited the divine nature of this act without goal and they have handed their whole existence over to its power. More than that they have constructed their whole existence on this unique act.

If crisis is the ‘post-ontological’ rule of government par excellence, then it appears that the transposition has taken place from crisis to indecision, from a momentary situation to a ‘post-historical’ permanence (modernus, the now seen as mechanized and unidirectional), so that government by management (administration, oikonomia), signposts not just a ‘legitimation crisis’, but positive feedback loops (cf. Morin) that (re)produce the crisis. In this manner every decision, as a matter of supposed fact (where fact and right become indistinguishable), leads to a new ‘critical distinction’ and it is purported that only in this way can any alternative be observed or adhered to, hence, leading by necessity to a ever new crisis. An inadvertent effect is exposed to be that the supposed solution (or ever new ‘critical distinction’) to a crisis becomes therefore indistinguishable from the very production of crises in the first place. It returns one to question, again, the effect of crises and their production anew, primarily in/by discourses that sit on either side of the borderline distinctions of what could be called an ever-infantile crisis.Agamben has recently offered a revision of this paradigm of crisis (c.f. Pilate and Jesus). It is worth noting, in this regard, that the term is derived from the Greek Krisis from krinein "to separate, decide, judge, a distinctive force"; from PIE root *krei- "to sieve, discriminate, distinguish" (also worth noting the Greek krinesthai "to explain”). In medical vocabulary, as it is known, the term ‘crisis’ is the decisive moment at which a patient’s illness would either turn for the worse or begin to ease towards a

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recovery (Hippocrates and Galen). Still in 1754, under the entry ‘Crise’ by Théophile De Bordeu in Diderot’s and D’Alembert’s Encyclopédie, 'crisis' appears only as a 'medical' word, which draws on the juridical meaning of 'judgment'. But in Agamben’s case (with some proximity as well to Deleuze) the point is to not think of a counter-crisis or a counter-judgment but instead to do away with judgment in this particular sense.In Aristotle’s political sense in turn it is noted that: "The virtue of justice is a characteristic of a state; for justice is the arrangement of the association that takes the form of a state, and the virtue of justice is a judgment [krisis] about what is just". A conception of crisis that, perhaps, can be still traced in the later ‘political’ sense of an irreversible, definitive, change that was transposed analogically in view of the Enlightenment and the so-called Age of Revolutions. Thus, crisis appears moldable according to its applications and to other concepts which in turn may be linked with it; and its, perhaps, original meaning becomes, according to some, even the ‘art of government' (managerial oikonomia; cf. Agamben) par excellence. It is worth noting also that there does not seem to exist a verb that would relate to the noun ‘crisis’ in a way in which one might have expected (underscoring what is perhaps the most decisive feature of a crisis – that it comes about; that it stages an encounter with the scarcity and the finiteness of reserves or possibilities, “without anyone in particular being ‘responsible’ for this outcome”). This is why the noun itself today arguably takes the stance of a performative, epitomizing its own indefinite condition (a ‘non-locus’ as Roitman puts it) and reapplication. This, needless to say, is in sharp contrast to what can be said about the earlier medical term, a merely descriptive term, which appears to relate a somehow silent, natural, taken-for-granted, approach to finitude.

It seems then that, among else, crisis as a form of life and government draws first a distinction between knowledge and experience. Koselleck’s, for instance, viewing of crisis as “the signature of the modern era” can be read to suggest that the historical concept of ‘crisis’ (and critique) is an “indicator of a new awareness”, from which one reconceptualises modern time as such; and where time becomes the permanence of the provisional (or contemporary). How can new forms of knowledge be engendered?’ becomes, perhaps, a key question. ‘How can the bipolarity of normality and crisis be suspended?’ In ‘critical’ terms critique itself appears equally bipolar between a perpetuation and a political denunciation of a situation. In this manner, a supposedly permanent post-historicism loops within an equally permanent transgression loop in what has proven to be a sustainable and ultimately successful functional depoliticized relation between crisis and experience amidst nihilist vertigo. This, ultimately, brings to mind, further, a crisis as a dream-image and a wish-image (Benjamin) whereby mythical thought turns crisis as both natural history and utopia. A ‘Kingdom of Crisis’, perhaps, as the telos of the historical dynamic, to paraphrase Benjamin’s Theologisch-politisches Fragment: a mythical incarnation of crisis as fate.

This workshop invites you, among else, to reopen this conundrum and to think what it may mean to liberate the future from its ‘deformations in the present by an act of cognition’ as Benjamin writes in his early text Das Leben der Studenten (1977: 75; Gesammelte Schriften, Band II-1). And yet to, further, ask: ‘Has an act of cognition ever saved anyone?’ Have we ever cognized finitude against our saviours? Indeed, this is only one provisional way of putting the question and the participants will elaborate their own along different and perhaps intersecting pathways.

Indicative Reading [not required for attendance]Agamben, G. (2015) Pilate and Jesus. Trans. Adam Kotsko, Stanford: SUP.

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Agamben, G. (2011) The Kingdom and the Glory: For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government, trans. Lorenzo Chiesa. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.Béjin, A. and E. Morin (eds.) (1976) “La notion de crise,” Centre d’études transdisciplinaires, Communication 25.Dodd, J. (2004) Crisis and Reflection: An Essay on Husserl’s Crisis of the European Sciences. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.Edwards, J. (2006)  “Critique and Crisis Today: Koselleck, Enlightenment and the Concept of Politics,” Contemporary Political Theory 5: 428-446.Husserl, E. (1970) [1954] The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (transl. D. Carr). Evanston: Northwestern University Press.Janet Roitmanhttp://www.politicalconcepts.org/issue1/crisis/https://www.dukeupress.edu/anti-crisisKoselleck, R. 1988 [1959] Critique and Crisis. Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society. Cambridge MA: Berg Publishers.Koselleck, R.  2002 The Practice of Conceptual History. Timing History, Spacing Concepts.  Stanford University Press.Koselleck, R. 2004 [1979] Futures Past. On the Semantics of Historical Time. New York: Columbia University Press.Koselleck, R. and M. Richter. (2006) “Crisis,” Journal of the History of Ideas 67(2): 357-400. http://www.jstor.org/stable/30141882?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contentsLazarrato, M. “Governmentality in the current crisis”http://www.generation-online.org/p/fp_lazzarato7.htmLazzarato, M. (2012) The Making of the Indebted Man: An Essay on the Neoliberal Condition, Semiotext(e), Los Angeles.Masur, G. (1973) “Crisis in History,” in P. Wiener, ed., Dictionary of the History of Ideas, New York: Scribners1: 589Mbembe, A. and J. Roitman. (1995) “Figures of the Subject in Times of Crisis,” Public Culture 7: 323-352.Roubini, N., and S. Mihm, (2010), Crisis economics: A Crash Course in the Future of Finance, Harmondsworth: Penguin.Satta, S. (1994/2014) Il mistero del processo, Adelphi Edizioni. Starn, R. (1971) “Historians and ‘Crisis’,” Past and Present, 52: 3-22.

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