Jonathan Goldberg-Hiller

Plastic materialities : politics, legality, and metamorphosis in the work of Catherine Malabou

Catherine Malabous concept of plasticity has influenced and inspired scholars from across disciplines. The contributors to Plastic Materialities-whose disciplines include political philosophy, critical legal studies, social theory, literature, and philosophy-use Malabous innovative combination of post-structuralism and neuroscience to evaluate the political implications of her work. They address, among other things, subjectivity, science, war, the malleability of sexuality, neoliberalism and economic theory, indigenous and racial politics, and the relationship between the human and non-human. Plastic Materialities also includes three essays by Malabou and an interview with her, all of which bring her work into conversation with issues of sovereignty, justice, and social order for the first time.

Reconciliation and Plasticity in a Postcolonial Hawai‘i

This article asks what might hold together the promises of a future open to indigenous organization and self-governance in postcolonial Hawai‘i. In what ways can past violence and lingering structural inequalities be integrated into contemporary politics and law? I argue that the grand projects of recognition and apology fail to resolve historical violence in forms acceptable to many native Hawaiians because of the constraints of the legal form in both alternatives, a legality that has served as a tool of colonization and subordination. Rather than turn away from the legal form, however, I explore a third philosophical alternative, plasticity, that comprehends the ways in which form destabilizes and reintegrates itself, grasping what Catherine Malabou has called “the interplay between form and itself.” I explore plasticity philosophically and in the context of ongoing plastic political experiments designed to privilege indigenous ontology as a means of reengaging with a different postcolonial legality.

Feeble Echoes of the Heart: A Postcolonial Legal Struggle in Hawai`i

This article analyzes the legal discourse of native Hawaiians opposed to proposed federal recognition. We argue that this contemporary contest over the means of self-determination reveals the ways in which law and rights provide inescapable idioms for indigenous sovereignty at the same time that they form the primary obstacles that must be overcome. Strategic maneuvering through this postcolonial legal dilemma is shown to produce new ideas of laws authority, challenging dominant notions of place and time, as well as the performance of legal recognition.

Esthetics and Methods in the Study of Sexual Rights

The study of sexuality has been and remains a seminal project for Social & Legal Studies. This article utilizes the political/esthetic theory of Jacques Rancière in order to explore the dimensions of this project as an intervention in the field of sociolegal studies from the Journal’s inception to contemporary concerns. Early studies of sexuality in the Journal developed three methodological themes: law as deconstructable process, as consequential for the performative aspects of nonessentialized identities, and as potentially destabilized by highly mobile rights claiming. This article seeks to understand whether this unique agenda for the study of gender, sexuality, and law remains viable. It concludes that the nonessentialist fluidity of gender and sexuality which framed early approaches to the study of the consequences of rights and the relationship of sexual and gender identity requires renewed attention to the structures of race, colonialism, and imperialism enabling and enabled by contemporary queer critique.

Deconstructing Law and Society: A Sociolegal Aesthetics

Handlers genealogy of postmodernism recounted in his address recognizes its origin in aesthetic disciplines and its somewhat viral transcription into social jurisprudence: “the postmodern concept of subversion developed first in language and literary theory, art, and architecture and then spread into politics and law” (1992a, p. 698). Although Handlers rejection of deconstruction stems from what he sees to be its political quiescence, its association with aesthetic critiques of modernism haunts his claims as one source of its essential conservatism. Aesthetic values, he implies, remain distant or distinct from pressing issues of political and social inequality.

Book Reviews : AUSTIN SARAT (ED.), Race, Law & Culture: Reflections on Brown v Board of Education. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997, 248 pp., £38.00 hardback, £15.00 paperback

police powers, this optimism is always so bounded by qualification that it is never more than a lukewarm, almost apologetic, endorsement. While he sees the prospects of police officers embracing due process values as ’improbable’, he nevertheless is prepared to offer limited support for the notion of a ’new professionalism’ in policing. He sees such professionalism as little more than a ’grumbling acquiesence’ as police ideology over time accommodates changes to law and to citizens’ rights. ‘ &dquo;New professionalism&dquo; is probably the best that can realistically be expected in present circumstances’, he writes in a typically guarded passage, but he goes no further than saying that ’enough has been said above to signal my limited favour of it’ (p. 304). Although Dixon’s writing is polished, stylish, and occasionally brilliant, there are