How Strange the Change from Major to Minor

Law Text Culture, 2017

Is minor jurisprudence tallow or is it tar? Taking its cue from Elvis Costello and the Brodsky Quartet's 'Damnation's Cellar (1993), this introduction presents the idea of 'minor jurisprudence' as it was first proposed in the mid-1990s, and explores its current potential as discussed, developed, and applied in the essays in this issue of Law Text Culture. The introduction also presents the enterprise known as 'Law As …'-a biennial symposium under the umbrella of which this exploration of minor jurisprudence took place. One important question for the symposium was, 'can "Law As …" be a form of minor jurisprudence'? Should it be? The authors answer by example, or explicitly, as they develop their own encounters with minor jurisprudence in this issue.

In the foreword to “‘Law As . . .’ Glossolalia,” Chris Tomlins frames the central topic of the symposium in terms of jurisprudence and the practice of history writing. History writing, he argues, enables scholars to rearticulate different aspects of the ideas, practices, and institutions of law. Considering glossolalia speaking in tongues and the expression of divine spirit—suggests Tomlins, might allow us to say something about contemporary forms of jurisprudence and history writing or, at least about those genres that remain in touch with the common law tradition.This Afterword follows up the projects presented in the “Law As . . .” symposium as if they articulate a series of jurisprudences that offer a training in the conduct of office or persona of the (minor) jurisprudent.

Journal for Religion and Transformation in Contemporary Society, 2018

One of the key issues addressed by political theories on the Left is the question of how those who are excludedfrom the realm of political representation may speakout and make themselvesheard. Referring to Kafka's In the Penal Colony – a text that illustrates particularly well the workings of representation – and to Deleuze and Guattari's concept of “minor literatures” –a term coined by Kafka – the article demonstrates that one way of coping with the difficulties of representation is to make a minor use of language. Contrary to the claim that politics is fundamentally about becoming major, I argue that the task of becoming minor is not only an essential element of emancipatory politics but also provides us witha criterion for differentiating between progressive, emancipatory forms of speaking out and their reactionary counterparts.

Law and Critique, 1999

This article, which should not in any sense be taken to reflect the views of the Editorial Board of Law and Critique, argues that the political project of critical legal studies in England remains overwhelmingly in the future. Lacking academic identity, political purpose and ethical conviction, critical legal scholarship in England has been too insecure in its institutional place and too unconscious of its individual and collective desires to resist absorption into the institution. Critical legal studies – as distinct from feminist legal studies, gay and lesbian studies or critical race theory –has tended to teach and so reproduce the core curriculum in a passive and negative mode. Resistant, ostensibly for historical and political reasons, to self-criticism and indeed to self-reflection upon their institutional practices, critical scholars have ended up repeating the law that they came to critique and overcome.

2015

Law & Literature, 2016

Affect, this essay argues, has replaced literature as the other of law in law and literature. It begins with a survey of the influence of affect theory in posthumanism, queer theory, history, sociology, the new materialism, and narratology, arguing that "affect"an umbrella term that describes assemblages of nodes, waves, materials, and intensitieshas replaced Foucauldian "discourse" as the leading term in current critical commentary. The consequences of this affective turn for law and literature scholarship and conceptions of legal personhood are then explored. Whereas a more traditional view proposes that law's task is to mediate humans' worst passions and sublate affectively particular conflicts, newer work contends that law is a source of pain rather than its antidote. This entails an end to law and literature as we have known it. Examples of alternative justice offered through literary narratives are now deemed less productive in querying legalist prescription than non-linguistic and non-narratively constructed phenomena. Literature's function of providing "a narrative supplement" to the law has been displaced by anti-narrative explorations of the visual, the haptic, and the experiential that demonstrate law's hidden emotionality and its use of emotional tropes towards ideological ends. This brings text-and linguistic-based law-andliterature work into radical question.

Postmodernism is a term born of disputes or polemics between the 'moderns' and the 'postmoderns'. These disputes passed through the humanities and public discourse between the nineteen sixties and the late nineteen nineties. At its peak the dispute emerged as a distinct 'culture war'. For some postmodernism offered a way of revitalising and moving beyond the modern; for critics, it has been little more than a late flourish of romanticism and irrationalism. Like an earlier series of disputes waged in France and England between the 'ancients' and 'moderns' at the end of the seventeenth and beginning of the eighteenth century, the debates between the moderns and postmoderns concerned the character of our civilization and the conduct of our civility compared with those our past and of our neighbours. The range of the debates between the 'ancients' and 'moderns' is, somewhat surprisingly, comparable to those of our near present. On one reading battle lines were drawn between classical scholarship and modern science, between a past dominated by abstract contemplation and scholastic argument, and a

International Journal for the Semiotics of Law - Revue internationale de Sémiotique juridique, 2008

ociety, every society, understood structurally, namely as an agency of civilisation, cannot help wielding power, the power of instituting the human life that takes place in it. And in order to do so, it cannot but establish itself theatrically, as the stage or scaffold that carries the social edifice. It is on this stage that society ceaselessly releases the fictions which enable its subjects to think the normative order theatrically, which is to say, structurally. Pierre Legendre: 148

Journal of Legal Philosophy