Stewart Motha

Veiled Women and the Affect of Religion in Democracy

The veiled woman troubles feminism and secularism in much the same way. Both feminism and secularism face a problem of finding a position that respects individual autonomy, and simultaneously sustains a conception of politics freed from heteronomous determination. This article gives an account of what is being resisted and by whom in modes of politics which seek to produce an autonomous subject emancipated from ‘other laws’(heteronomy). It also draws on Jean-Luc Nancy in order to consider what has been termed the problem of Islam in Europe as a wider juridical and political problem centred on the significance of affect as heteronomy. It thus explores the tension between piety and polity.

'Begging to be Black': Liminality and Critique in Post Apartheid South Africa

This article explores the distinction between anti-colonial longing and postcolonial becoming through a commentary on Antjie Krog’s Begging to Be Black. The epistemology and ontology of postcolonial becoming is the central concern. Begging to Be Black is a mytho-poetic narrative in which a world is imagined where King Moshoeshoe, missionaries from the 19th century, Antjie Krog and her friends and colleagues, ANC cadres, the Deleuzian philosopher Paul Patton, Nelson Mandela, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and the ANC Youth League are placed in the same narrative space where they can intermingle. And this is done to respond to a crisis of the present — the difficulties South Africans face in grappling with the legacies of colonialism and Apartheid, and the fact that there is a process of un-homing and re-homing that Krog feels white South Africans in particular need to think about more deeply. The article compares Krog’s approach to decolonization with that of the leading South African philosopher of ubuntu, Mogobe Ramose. Both Krog and Ramose offer the epistemological and ontological resources for grappling with the relationship between past, present and future in a decolonizing setting. The article examines how postcolonial critique may take place through liminal figures. Liminality is characterized as central to postcolonial becoming.

The Failure of ‘Postcolonial’ Sovereignty in Australia

[I]t is not possible to say, as was said by Marshall CJ of the Cherokee Nation, that the aboriginal people of Australia are organised as a ‘distinct political society separated from others’, or that they have been uniformly treated as a state.... The aboriginal people are subject to the laws of the Commonwealth and of the States or Territories in which they respectively reside. They have no legislative, executive or judicial organs by which sovereignty might be exercised. Mason CJ, Coe v The Commonwealth (1993), 115 Fanatics have their dreams, wherewith they weave A paradise for a sect; the savage too From forth the loftiest fashion of his sleep Guesses at Heaven; ... John Keats, The Fall of Hyperion: A Dream (1819)

The Sovereign Event in a Nation's Law

This article interrogates the relationship between the sovereign event and a legal decision that purports to place sovereignty beyond law. It argues that sovereignty cannot be regarded as unitary, and elaborates the process of iterability by which the sovereign event is split from the outset. This dynamic is examined through an interrogation of the non-justiciability of sovereignty in Mabo v. Queensland (No. 2)(1992). Along with the unitary conception of sovereignty, Mabo (No. 2) deployed an absolute measure for community in the form of the ‘skeletal principle’ of the doctrine of tenure. The paper argues that a conception of the political that affirms the One sovereign source of community and law instead of the original dis-position of law, nation and community repeats the original violence, and will, at best, run aground on the righteous (mis)recognition of the ‘appropriate savage’. It concludes with an indicative rethinking of community through the thought of Jean-Luc Nancy.

Law, Ethics and the Utopian End of Human Rights

THE ‘END OF IDEOLOGY’ apparently ushered in by the demise of the cold war is accompanied by a new certainty about the ‘measure’ for all time. This measure or ground for law, justice and the resolution of conflict is human rights – a paradoxical universal that is at once accomplishment and aspiration, a means of defining ‘good’ through the negation of ‘evil’ and the justification for ‘humanitarian bombing’, destructive embargoes and ‘wars without end’. In this article we engage with perhaps the most sustained jurisprudential engagement with the philosophical grounds of human rights, Costas Douzinas’ The End of Human Rights, which attempts to reintroduce a transcendent justification for the humanity of rights through a genealogical critique of its erstwhile liberal manifestations. Douzinas’ principal aim is to set out the philosophical underpinnings of (another) human rights through the genealogy of radical natural right. Radical natural right is proposed as a transcendent ground for human rights, but with the acknowledgement that it is an impossible utopian ideal of a justice ‘to come’. In this article we interrogate Douzinas’ reliance on Emmanuel Levinas and Ernst Bloch in his attempt to derive a transcendent ground for human rights in an allegedly disenchanted postmodern world. Does his project of establishing a transcendent ground for human rights escape the

A new Nomos offshore and bodies as their own signs

Abstract This paper begins with the paradoxes that accrue around the appearance of Robinson Crusoe and his “Man Friday” within recent judgments relating to the Chagos Archipelago. These references are understood as revealing the complex of anxieties and limits that are the final legacy of these rulings. In particular, we trace the ways in which – through Daniel Defoes iconic characters – these judgments enact a troubling retreat from review of executive action, and a fuller withdrawal of sensibility from situations of “otherness” that both bear and cannot bear analogy to that of Friday. The paper then more briefly considers a similar complex of anxieties and limits, retreats and withdrawals enacted by recent judgments relating to Australian territory in the Indian Ocean. This allows us to suggest that between these two series of highest court rulings, the Anglophone common law is currently constructing the Indian Ocean as an offshore: a site excised from judicial review, and a site in which certain figures – peoples, individuals – are not considerable in both senses of the word. But in fathoming this, we turn to Derridas insights on sovereignty to argue that, far from being new, this construction of a common law of the Indian Ocean tells us about the affront of an archaic sovereignty that always already determines and is determined by law. Across the arguments of this paper, these perceptions of judgment, geography and sovereignty are enabled by literature, and specifically by reading the return of Crusoe and Friday in a recent novel form (by J. M. Coetzee) that also broaches the limits of judgment and recognition, but through a kind of vigilant silence – an abstinence – that craves an alternative commonality: and in this very longing, resists the silencing complicities of the UK and Australian judgments with the disembodiment of a littoral nomos, offshore.

The Debt Crisis as Crisis of Democracy

This is a commentary on the debt crisis and its impact on the relationship between politics and the state in the US and Europe. Democratic institutions of the state face a crisis of legitimacy. They are not trusted to deliver radical transformations in the orientation of liberal capitalism. Technocrats administer austerity and ‘‘bailouts’’ while the Occupy movement generates a political momentum without consensus on what is to be demanded of law and the state. Urging engagement with the state and the necessity of hegemonic demands, this essay sketches the distinct political landscapes and trajectories in the US and Europe. It suggests that the left must engage with the European project as a significant post-national formation.