Deleuze and Law: Forensic Futures explores the relation between law and life and the advent of a politics of 'life'. How have recent events focused social, political and cultural attention on the living body and its maintenance and management? The central concept, through which the embodiment of the subject will be examined will be that of 'bio-power'. Articulated by Michel Foucault, but brought to attention more recently in the work of Giorgio Agamben, this concept recognises that the relation between life and law is both historical and necessary: the law must operate on bodies but can only do so by establishing a border between the body of the polity, and the mere life excepted from political concern. The contemporary advent of bio-politics occurs when the polity increasingly and invasively operates on this 'mere' life, and the body or organism – rather than the self – becomes the object of political management. The manner in which the body becomes the focus of contemporary power has led legal theory to explore new questions of the threshold between life and death and has led social theory to question the new extensions of the law and the polity into embodied life. The contributors explore the forensic shift in contemporary social theory and cultural sensibility from a number of perspectives.
Acknowledgements
Notes on Contributors
Introduction: Law and Deleuze: Forensic Futures; R.Braidotti, C.Colebrook& P.Hanafin
Legal Theory After Deleuze; C.Colebrook
The Time of Law: Evolution in Holmes and Bergson; A.Lefebvre
Rights of Passage: Law and the Biopolitics of Dying; P.Hanafin
The Terri Schiavo Case: Biopolitics, Biopower, and Privacy as Singularity; J.Protevi
Vitalistic Feminethics: Materiality, Mediation and the End of Necrophilosophy; P.Maccormack
Locating Deleuze's Eco-Philosophy: Between Bio/Zoe Power and Necro-Politics; R.Braidotti
Is There Life in Cybernetics? Designing a Post-Humanist Bioethics; J.Zylinska
The Silent Scream – Agamben, Deleuze and the Politics of the Unborn; M.Cooper
Points of Departure: The Culture of US Airport Screening; L.Parks
The Spectacle of War: Security, Legitimacy, and Profit Post-9/11; I.Buchanan& L.Guillaume
Index
ROSI BRAIDOTTI is Distinguished Professor of Humanities and founding director of the Centre for the Humanities at Utrecht University, the Netherlands, and Honorary Visiting Professor in the Law School of Birkbeck College, University of London.
PROFESSOR CLAIRE COLEBROOK is the Edwin Earle Sparks Professor of English at Pennsylvania State University, USA. She was Professor of Modern Literary Theory at the University of Edinburgh (2000-2008) and has taught at Murdoch University, Monash University and the University of Stirling.
PROFESSOR PATRICK HANAFIN is Professor of Law at Birkbeck Law School, University of London, UK. He has been a Visiting Professor at the School of Law at the University of Porto, Portugal and at the Law Faculty at the University of Pretoria in South Africa.
Description
Deleuze and Law: Forensic Futures explores the relation between law and life and the advent of a politics of 'life'. How have recent events focused social, political and cultural attention on the living body and its maintenance and management? The central concept, through which the embodiment of the subject will be examined will be that of 'bio-power'. Articulated by Michel Foucault, but brought to attention more recently in the work of Giorgio Agamben, this concept recognises that the relation between life and law is both historical and necessary: the law must operate on bodies but can only do so by establishing a border between the body of the polity, and the mere life excepted from political concern. The contemporary advent of bio-politics occurs when the polity increasingly and invasively operates on this 'mere' life, and the body or organism – rather than the self – becomes the object of political management. The manner in which the body becomes the focus of contemporary power has led legal theory to explore new questions of the threshold between life and death and has led social theory to question the new extensions of the law and the polity into embodied life. The contributors explore the forensic shift in contemporary social theory and cultural sensibility from a number of perspectives.
Contents
Acknowledgements
Notes on Contributors
Introduction: Law and Deleuze: Forensic Futures; R.Braidotti, C.Colebrook& P.Hanafin
Legal Theory After Deleuze; C.Colebrook
The Time of Law: Evolution in Holmes and Bergson; A.Lefebvre
Rights of Passage: Law and the Biopolitics of Dying; P.Hanafin
The Terri Schiavo Case: Biopolitics, Biopower, and Privacy as Singularity; J.Protevi
Vitalistic Feminethics: Materiality, Mediation and the End of Necrophilosophy; P.Maccormack
Locating Deleuze's Eco-Philosophy: Between Bio/Zoe Power and Necro-Politics; R.Braidotti
Is There Life in Cybernetics? Designing a Post-Humanist Bioethics; J.Zylinska
The Silent Scream – Agamben, Deleuze and the Politics of the Unborn; M.Cooper
Points of Departure: The Culture of US Airport Screening; L.Parks
The Spectacle of War: Security, Legitimacy, and Profit Post-9/11; I.Buchanan& L.Guillaume
Index
Authors
ROSI BRAIDOTTI is Distinguished Professor of Humanities and founding director of the Centre for the Humanities at Utrecht University, the Netherlands, and Honorary Visiting Professor in the Law School of Birkbeck College, University of London.
PROFESSOR CLAIRE COLEBROOK is the Edwin Earle Sparks Professor of English at Pennsylvania State University, USA. She was Professor of Modern Literary Theory at the University of Edinburgh (2000-2008) and has taught at Murdoch University, Monash University and the University of Stirling.
PROFESSOR PATRICK HANAFIN is Professor of Law at Birkbeck Law School, University of London, UK. He has been a Visiting Professor at the School of Law at the University of Porto, Portugal and at the Law Faculty at the University of Pretoria in South Africa.
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