Patrick Hanafin

Introduction: Deleuze and law : forensic futures

This volume engages with the impact of a thinking of law with Gilles Deleuze. It is an attempt to engage in another mode of doing jurisprudence, which places the emphasis on the material bodies of citizens and their interests rather than the abstract formless subject of law. It is, as Claire Colebrook observes in her essay in this volume, a reconsideration of law and legal theory as a differential jurisprudence. In such a jurisprudence the emphasis would be placed on how the claims of some bodies might transform the relation between what counts as a speaking subject for law and what is silenced. This shift in the way we view the manner in which individual bodies are formed and subjugated by law provides an opening to another thinking of law, which emerges in the essays in this collection. In this regard the collection attempts to perform what one might term a vitalist jurisprudence or one in which the body obtains primacy over what Deleuze and Guattari termed the terror of the signifier.

Rights of Passage: Law and the Biopolitics of Dying

The figure who refuses is a particularly troubling one for law. Such a figure engages in a refusal to submit to the biopolitical order. One such figure is the terminally ill person who states that they would prefer not to live. This gesture expresses what Gilles Deleuze has termed the mode of being as if already gone (Boutang, 1995). To be as if already gone is to accept death and not allow it to become the limit of thinking. This is a living with, or being with death, which sees it not as an intruder but as that without which we cannot live. Those who have exhausted their end seek the right to die with dignity. This is a choice to die, which allows the body to speak its end rather than have that end dictated by the voice of an expert, legal or medical. The person who seeks to die is, to paraphrase Foucault, ‘the Passenger par excellence: that is, the prisoner of the passage’ (Foucault, 1967, p. 11). This notion of a passenger on the way to death bespeaks our existence, prisoners of our being, passing towards death.

Refusing disembodiment Abortion and the paradox of reproductive rights in contemporary Italy

Employing insights from Italian sexual difference theory on law and rights, this article examines how both the text of the Italian Abortion Law of 1978 and its operation reveal the contradictions within liberal rights discourse on reproductive freedom. The Act itself contains traces of both Roman Catholic and liberal pluralist worldviews and has, since its introduction, been the site of conflict over competing notions of citizenship and legal identity. This article explores the impact of the Acts paradoxical nature on its operation against the background of the complex debates within the different strands of feminist theory in Italy over the question of reproductive freedom.

Voicing Embodiment, Relating Difference: Towards a Relational Legal Subjectivity

The concept of legal rights has brought recognition to several marginalized groups, but that legal recognition has not always improved the material position of such groups. The author suggests a symbolic re-appropriation of law that acknowledges the existence of an imagined control. She refers to the works of Adriana Cavarero and Lia Cigarini, who describe a space of relational politics, based on the embodied self capable of acting, speaking and thinking for herself.

Rewriting Desire: the Construction of Sexual Identity in Literary and Legal Discourse in Postcolonial Ireland

The failure of the legal imaginary to reflect sexual difference in the opening decades of the postcolonial Irish state led to what in psychoanalytical terms may be described as the creation of socially abjected groups. Lesbians and gay men were numbered among such groups. The failure of official discourse to contemplate sexual difference as an integral part of Irish national identity was a residue of the Irish colonial experi ence. The association of Ireland with the female in colonial discourse led the Irish revolutionary elite to propagate a myth of hypermasculinity. This strategy had far- reaching consequences for the manner in which matters of sexual difference were to be treated in the postcolonial era. The exclusion of sexually dissident voices from official discourse did not stifle attempts at the levels of literary discourse and pressure group politics to voice alternative desires which were deemed antithetical to the heterosexual Irish state. The growth of alternative narratives of sexual identity led to a gradual transformation of the legal and cultural construction of homosexuality in Ireland. This demonstrates the power of narrative strategies to counter a dominant discourse of blindness to sexual difference and reflects a link between the cultural and legal constructions of sexual identity.

Rights, bioconstitutionalism and the politics of reproductive citizenship in Italy

The introduction of a restrictive law on assisted reproduction in Italy in 2004 sees the privileging of a conservative model of family relations and a patriarchal conception of society. This law excludes many individuals from full reproductive citizenship. The 2004 Act excludes gay couples, single people and people who are carriers of genetically inherited conditions from access to assisted reproductive technologies. This article examines the manner in which citizen contestation of the law via Court challenges engages what Jasanoff (2011, Reframing rights: bioconstitutionalism in the genetic age, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press) has termed a practice of ‘bioconstitutionalism’. Such a practice has led to a gradual judicial reworking of the Act, and demonstrates the power of individuals acting in concert to contest successfully draconian state action. It undoes the imposition of a biopolitical ordering on individuals and allows them, through their own continuous action, to perform a contestatory form of citizenship.

Building in the Imagin(ed)(n)ation: An Essay Inspired by W.B. Yeats' – ``Meditations in Time of Civil War''

Ireland is a country haunted by a past which refuses to remain buried. This past irrupts and interupts in texts as diverse as the Irish Constitution and the poems of W.B. Yeats. This piece ruminates on the representation of the states violent past in legal texts and in the poetry of W.B. Yeats and Paul Muldoon and attempts to draw links between the personal and the political narration of violence.

Last rites or rights at last: The development of a right to die in Irish constitutional law

Abstract Death has been viewed in cultural terms in Ireland more as rite than right. This view is rooted in deontological ideas about the intrinsic value of life. The sanctity-of-life model has been the dominant model in Irish legal discourse on the topic of the right to life. This model rather than being a flexible one, adapting to the needs of an evolving societal framework, is absolutist. It finds expression in the Irish Constitution of 1937 with its homage to the ideals of classical natural law theory. In recent years, this model has been subject to challenge from another model which appears to offer more in terms of respecting individual autonomy. Following the recent Supreme Court decision in the case of Re A Ward of Court ([1995] 2 ILRM 401), one could argue that Irish constitutional jurisprudence may be commencing to question the traditional sanctity-of-life model in more vehement terms than heretofore. This paper attempts to chart this judicial shift and place it in the context of the more genera...