Part of
Edited by Angela Condello, Carlo Grassi and Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos
With an introduction by Carlo Grassi
Translated by Cadenza Academic Translations and Angela Condello
What does it mean to judge when there is no general and universal norm to define what is right and what is wrong? Can laws be absent and is law always necessary?
This is the first English translation published of Jean- Luc Nancy’s acclaimed consideration of the law’s most pervasive principles in the context of actual systems and contemporary institutions, power, norms, laws. In a world where it is impossible to imagine the realisation of an ideal of justice that corresponds to every person’s ideal of justice, Nancy probes the limits of legal normativity. Moreover, the question is asked: how can legal normativity be legitimised? A legal order based on performativity and formal validity is questionable and other forces than juridical normativity are at the heart of Dies Irae. Such leads inevitably to the processes of inclusion and exclusion that characterise contemporary juridical systems and those issues of identity, hostility and self-representation central to contemporary political and legal debates
Book DetailsTaste usually occupies the bottom of the sensorial hierarchy, as the quintessentially hedonistic sense, too close to the animal, the elemental and the corporeal, and for this reason disciplined and moralised. At the same time, taste is indissolubly tied to knowledge. To taste is to discriminate, emit judgement, enter an unstable domain of synaesthetic normativity where the certainty of metaphysical categories begins to crumble. This second title in the ‘Law and the Senses’ series explores law using taste as a conceptual and ontological category able to unsettle legal certainties, and a promising tool whereby to investigate the materiality of law’s relation to the world. For what else is law’s reduction of the world into legal categories, if not law’s ingesting the world by tasting it, and emitting moral and legal judgements accordingly? Through various topics including coffee, wine, craft cider and Japanese knotweed, this volume explores the normativities that shape the way taste is felt and categorised, within and beyond subjective, phenomenological and human dimensions. The result is an original interdisciplinary volume – complete with seven speculative ‘recipes’ – dedicated to a rarely explored intersection, with contributions from artists, legal academics, philosophers, anthropologists and sociologists.
Book DetailsUnderstandings of freedom are often discussed in moral, theological, legal and political terms, but they are not often set in a historical perspective, and they are even more rarely considered within their specific language context. From Homeric poems to contemporary works, the author traces the words that express the various notions of freedom in Classical Greek, Latin, and medieval and modern European idioms. Examining writers as varied as Plato, Aristotle, Luther, La Boétie, Hobbes, Rousseau, Kant, Stirner, Nietzsche, and Foucault among others, this theoretical mapping shows old and new boundaries of the horizon of freedom. The book suggests the possibility of transcending these boundaries on the basis of a different theorization of human interactions, which constructs individual and collective subjects as processes rather than entities. This construction shifts and disseminates the very locus of freedom, whose vocabulary would be better recast as a relational middle path between autonomous and heteronomous alternatives.
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