Daniel Matthews

From jurisdiction to juriswriting: at the expressive limits of the law

Through the work of Jean-Luc Nancy, and following recent publications that champion the theoretical significance of jurisdiction, this article reads jurisdiction as a technique of legal fiction-making and as capable of exposing an originary ontological category of “being-with.” Rather than thought of purely as an expression of the law’s sovereign authority, it is argued that jurisdiction is a privileged point at which we can see the law’s fragility and thus open to critical intervention and interruption. Following Nancy’s understanding of “writing” and “literature” as that which exposes being-with, I suggest that we might name such strategies of creative intervention “juriswriting.” This account of jurisdiction, developed by thinking with Nancy’s account of ontology, is explored with reference to the common law constructions of jurisdiction in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Narrative, Space and Atmosphere A Nomospheric Inquiry into Hong Kong’s Pro-democracy ‘Umbrella Movement’

Since the financial crash of 2008, the strategy of occupation has been widely deployed as a means of expressing and mobilizing political dissent. Within legal studies, responses to this mode of protest have remained wedded to a statist perspective that fails to assess the normative commitments immanent to occupations themselves. Rather than examining the strategy of occupation through a legalistic lens, this article approaches a recent occupation through the theoretical apparatus of the ‘nomosphere’. This term – originally coined by David Delaney but substantially expanded here – allows for an assessment of the spatial, narrative and atmospheric orderings of the Umbrella Movement, a pro-democracy campaign that sustained a 79-day occupation in Hong Kong’s city centre in late 2014. This ‘nomospheric inquiry’ assesses the forms of ordering that animated the movement from within and seeks to foreground the lived and felt reality of the occupation rather than focus on its legalistic or constitutional significance alone.

Plasticity, Jurisdiction, and the Interruption of Sovereignty: A Response to Catherine Malabou via José Saramago's Seeing

Abstract In a series of recent interventions Catherine Malabou, the contemporary French philosophy of “plasticity,” argues that celebrated “deconstructions” of sovereignty have failed to transcend the concepts constitutive division between “symbolic” and “biological” life. Malabous argument conspicuously fails to address the role of the juridical in giving form to sovereignty, an omission that is addressed here through an assessment of “jurisdiction.” This turn to the juridical opens a space for further critical reflection on Malabous thinking. Through a reading of José Saramagos novel Seeing we can displace Malabous insistence on the centrality of cerebral “life” in her effort to deconstruct the symbolic/biological binary and instead gesture towards a collective and affective “life” that remains refractory in relation to the juridical forms that sovereignty seeks to impose. Pointing to important tensions inherent in Saramagos text, the article brings critical pressure to bear on the position, articulated by Michel Foucault and endorsed by Malabou, that we need to transcend sovereignty tout court.

Introduction: legal marginalia

One of the many consequences of the unexpected political events of 2016 has been a renewed focus on communities on the margins of society and of the law. In the era of Brexit and Donald Trump, refugees, economic migrants, the white working class, sexual outcasts and racial minorities, to name but a few, have dominated the headlines as the world appears to be stumbling towards a new political dispensation. While there is no shortage of discussion of particular groups that find themselves at the sharp end of recent debates – often drawing on long-standing traditions of scholarship that engage questions of sexual and racial discrimination – in this volume we seek to offer a more generalized reflection on this very question of marginalization and the critical purchase to be found in reading from the margins of legal discourse. The shifting sands in political life serve to remind us of the contingent nature of the ‘centre ground’ and ought to attune us to the forces that produce distinctions between the periphery and core, the orthodox and marginal. In some political regimes, scholars embed their criticism of government policies in endnotes and footnotes, such that their ‘core’ arguments can be discerned only by looking at the ‘margins’ of the text. Previously ignored or neglected categories of people now receive renewed attention in political and legal discourse, though the ultimate effect of such renewed attention is arguably still to be determined. Finally, the humanities are at times considered ‘marginal’ to legal studies, and the interdisciplinary turn in legal scholarship has underscored the contribution humanistic inquiry can make to the study of law. Taking a step back from the more immediate debates about marginalized communities, and drawing on a range of interdisciplinary approaches, this special issue of Law and Humanities probes more fundamental issues about the definition, formation, perpetuation and appropriation of the margin. It addresses the margin not so much as a fixed demarcation in the law, but as a concept which lies at the intersection of history, genre, identity and the philosophy of law. This collection is animated by two questions: first, by what processes – epistemological, political, cultural – does the law relegate an entity or a group to the margin, and what is at stake in the processes of

Book Review: Competing SovereigntiesCompeting Sovereignties By JoyceRichard. Routledge, 2013. 283 pp. £75/

colonial and early national criminal confessions, DeLombard argues, that the genre of the antebellum slave narrative would develop. By harnessing the culpable black persona created through gallows literature, the slave narrative could assert the black subject’s individual personhood and right to political belonging. In support of her deftly argued study, DeLombard marshals an extraordinary variety of sources, ranging from trial transcripts, press accounts, scaffold orations, gallows broadsides, pamphlet confessions, and slaver narratives to the well-known canonical works of Edgar Allen Poe, Herman Melville, and Frederick Douglass. By reading these sources alongside shifting medical, scientific, legal and political discourses, DeLombard has produced a genuinely impressive work of humanities scholarship. Although the density of the argument and sophistication of the prose will prove too difficult for undergraduate readers and a general audience, this is an important book that ought to be read by scholars of literature, history, law, and African American Studies. Some readers will wish she had carried her astute analysis even further – into a discussion of how black women were affected by the rise of the culpable black criminal persona, or how her findings relate to the post-emancipation rise of the black lynching subject. However, by encouraging us to cease reading the black criminal through the lens of prosecution, and instead see him as an autonomous, “puffed up” protocitizen that laid the groundwork for later authors like Frederick Douglass to turn himself from a slave into a man in print, DeLombard has already contributed a wealth of important ideas that will surely impact future scholarly debates on the linkages between race, crime, and citizenship in the United States.

112 (cloth) ISBN 978-0-415-67814-8

If there is any theme that provides continuity to Hancock’s presentation, it is “transcendence.” The beginning of Chapter 3, “The Rule of Reason and the Paradoxes of Transcendence,” tells us a little about what Hancock means by transcendence. “This very excess of Being with respect to thinking – transcendence – reason necessarily configures along two axes of significance or of free signifying that we may call ‘vertical’ (aristocracy, actuality) and ‘horizontal’ (democracy, possibility)’’ (75). Transcendence is so important that he substitutes assertion for argument: “Human beings have always understood their existence in terms of some qualitatively higher possibilities, some ‘vertical’ understanding of transcendence” (108, see too 239), although he doesn’t try to square this universal human condition with the uniqueness of Christianity and its understanding of transcendence. Hancock detects “almost secret work of transcendence at work [sic] [Rawls’] A Theory of Justice’’ (284). In his discussion of Strauss, we learn that “the philosopher’s transcendence is a prolongation of the gentleman’s lofty contempt for that which he considers beneath him” (192). There is, too, the equivalence of “absolute transcending or detachment of the philosophy” [sic] (209), and of “nobility/transcendence” (223). There isn’t much content that “transcendence” can bear alongside such varied uses. Apart from the lack of an argument, this book does not make for rewarding reading. Sometimes Greek words appear correctly, sometimes misspelled, sometimes as a string of letters without any accents at all, sometimes followed by transliteration, sometimes by translation. I think this inconsistency hides no secret pattern, but is just sloppy editing. Speaking of secret patterns and sloppy editing, Hancock usually refers to Strauss, but occasionally to Leo Strauss or even Mr. Strauss, and to Pangle, Professor Pangle, and Mr. Pangle (these three all on a single page, p. 234). Are these subtle winks to the cognoscenti?