Crisis
Knowledge History Law
Social Critiques of Law
University of Kent
Kent Law School
Social Critiques of Law
29 January 2016
Darwin Conference Suite 3
One-day workshop of the Social Critiques of Law Research Group (SoCriL)
Organizer: Thanos Zartaloudis (Kent Law School & AA School of Architecture)
Assistants: Michalis Zivanaris & Gian Giacomo Fusco
Funded by: Social Critiques of Law Research Group
&
Kent Law School, University of Kent, Canterbury, UK
http://www.kent.ac.uk/law/socril/events/2016/crisis.html
Thanks to the very kind support by Sarah Gilkes, Jasper Van Dooren and Ed
Fairhead, Michalis Zivanaris and Gian Giacomo Fusco. This workshop would not
have materialized if it were not for the collegiality and vision of the co-directors of
the Social Critiques of Law Group at Kent Law School, Emilie Cloatre and Donatella
Alessandrini. Photography (cover) kindly offered by Kiriakos Sifiltzoglou © 2015.
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General Useful Information
Darwin College – Maps and Directions
https://www.kent.ac.uk/maps/canterbury/canterbury-campus/building/darwin-college
Wi-Fi access: Connect to the Cloud (while on Campus)
Taxis
Canterbury Taxi phone numbers: 01227 710777 or 01227 458885
Train Station
Canterbury West Train Station (for trains from/to London)
Coffee Places
(Coffee/Tea on Campus can be found at the Gulbenkian – on your way to Darwin
College next to the Templeman Library).
Refectory Kitchen [Opposite Agnes Hotel]
16 St. Dunstans Street, Canterbury, CT2 8AF
Willows Secret Kitchen (on Stour Street just of the high street)
42 Stour Street, Canterbury, CT1 2PH
Micro Roastery (just off the high street)
4 Saint Margaret's Street, Canterbury CT1 2TP
The Goods Shed [Next to Canterbury West Train Station]
Station Rd W, Canterbury, Kent CT2 8AN
Bars
Abode Hotel (Hotel Bar)
The Goods Shed
The Falstaff (Hotel Bar)
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Programme
Darwin Conference Suite 3
9.15 Registration
Michalis Zivanaris (University of Kent, Law School) & Gian Giacomo Fusco (University of Kent,
Law School)
(Bring your Coffee/Tea; Best to get it from town before you come up to Campus. Coffee/Tea on
Campus can be found at the Gulbenkian – on your way to Darwin College next to the Templeman
Library).
9-30-9.35 Welcome
Toni Williams (University of Kent, Head of School of Law)
Thanos Zartaloudis (University of Kent, Law School & Architectural Association)
9.35-11.00 Session 1
Chair: Maria Drakopoulou (University of Kent, Law School)
Marika Rose (University of Durham, Department of Theology and Religion)
Crisis of judgement: on the juridical logics of Christian identity.
&
Ilias Papagianopoulos (University of Piraeus, International and European Studies)
Crisis and modern Greek genealogies.
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11.00-11.15 Tea/Coffee Break
11.15 – 12.45 Session 2
Chair: John Ackerman (University of Kent, Law School)
Bo Isenberg (Lund University, Faculty of Sociology)
Permanent crisis, epoch of the provisional – Images and experiences of classical modernity.
&
Esther Leslie (University of London, Birkbeck College, Department of English and Humanities)
To Gamble in the Light of Crisis.
12.45 – 13.45 Lunch
13.45 – 15.15 Session 3
Chair: Thanos Zartaloudis (University of Kent, Law School & Architectural Association)
Emanuele Coccia (Centre d'Histoire et Théorie des Arts (CEHTA - EHESS), Paris and The Italian
Academy for Advanced Studies in America, Columbia University)
From Krisis to Krasis: The Cosmology and Politics of Total Blending.
&
Anton Schütz (University of London, Birkbeck College, School of Law)
Crisis, peirasmós, escalation : for an archaeo-theology of the unsustainable.
15.15 – 15.30 Tea/Coffee Break
15.30 – 17.00 Session 4
Chair: Iain MacKenzie (University of Kent, School of Politics and International Relations)
Marina Lathouri (Architectural Association, London, School of Architecture & University of
Cambridge, School of Architecture)
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Crisis and economies of living
&
Stathis Gourgouris (Columbia University, Classics, English; Institute for Comparative Literature
and Society)
Fortress Europe in Critical Condition.
17.00 – 17.15 Tea/Coffee Break
17.15 – 18.45 Session 5
Chair: Donatella Alessandrini (University of Kent, Law School, Co-Director SoCriL)
Marinos Diamantides (University of London, Birkbeck College, School of Law)
Western political theology, civil religion and the empire of management.
&
Janet Roitman (The New School for Social Research, New York)
Anti-Crisis.
19.15 – 21.30 Dinner (Location TBC)
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Abstracts & Bios (in order of presentation)
Marika Rose
(University of Durham, Department of Theology and Religion)
Crisis of judgement: on the juridical logics of Christian identity
The Hebrew scriptures understand judgement as salvation, an active process of righting wrongs in
which the powerful are brought down from their thrones and the lowly are lifted up. The narrative
of Pilate and Jesus marks the emergence in Christianity of a new logic of judgement not as
salvation but as crisis, in which – as Agamben argues – ‘judgement and salvation mutually exclude
one another’. What are the implications of this shift for Christian theology and for the logic of
capital which emerges from Christianity?
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Marika Rose is a Research Fellow at the CODEC Research Centre for Digital Theology, Durham
University. She is Reviews Editor of the Journal “Theology and Sexuality”. She recently completed
a PhD thesis on the relationship between the Christian apophatic tradition and contemporary
continental philosophy, particularly the work of Slavoj Žižek. Her current project focuses on
angels, cyborgs, and the theology of work.
Ilias Papagianopoulos
(University of Piraeus, International and European Studies)
Crisis and Modern Greek Genealogies
During the Greek crisis, political discourse has had very often porous borders with concepts and
patterns originated in cultural narratives. Those patterns revive and reproduce a discussion which
originated in the nineteenth century and between its ideological camps. On the one hand, in the
so-called 'hellenocentric' paradigm and its variations, modern Europe is seen in a negative light
and pre-modern Greek traditions in a positive one, whereas for the 'eurocentric' narrative, the
view is the exactly opposite one. In the first part of my presentation, I will refer to three modern
and contemporary examples of the second case, that had an important effect in the public
discourse of the recent years. Although the three paradigmatic thinkers of my focus (K. Axelos, P.
Kondylis and S. Ramfos) come from very different philosophical traditions, they nonetheless
coincide in their central claim: that modern Greece lacks access to modernity's temporality and,
thus, to the political subjectivity which is linked with that specific temporality. Modern Greece
would remain fragmentary and deprived of a living heritage, enclosed in an ahistoric crypta.
After analyzing aspects of that argument, in the second part of the presentation I will question the
very basis for the distinction between the two main narratives, suggesting that the actual
structure of their argument reveals a hidden opponent, who is surprisingly common to them:
while they both claim a pure ontological basis as their departure point, provided before the
domain of the historical experience, they both construct closed political ontologies and schemes
of historicity. On the other hand, casting an eye on public debates, but also on the literature of
the nineteenth century, shows that modern Greece was marked from the very beginning by the
historical experience of a lack of foundational continuity and of a hovering in a constant
exceptional state of historical bordering. In other words, the common opponent was none other
than the traumatic modern Greek historicity itself, which remained unformulated in philosophical
terms; and the main opponent of the most prominent figures of modern Greek philosophy,
equally 'hellenocentric' and 'eurocentric', are visible only through literary and artistic expressions.
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In that sense, the so-called crisis can be seen as the constellation of a return to the initial symbolic
void of the modern Greek historical experience. The question would thus be whether an
affirmative position towards that void and a different relation to the idea of an origin, could lead
philosophical thought to a different kind of understanding Greece as a European subject, with the
potentiality of a post-foundational political and historical agency.
Ilias Papagiannopoulos studied philosophy and history at Innsbruck where he was also awarded
his doctoral degree with a thesis on Herman Melville's Moby-Dick. He held seminars and lectured
at the Universities of Innsbruck (1997-2003), Panteion (2004-2007) and Thessaly (2015) and was a
research fellow at the Greek Academy for Sciences and Arts (2001-2004). Since 2008 he is
Assistant Professor for contemporary political philosophy at the Department of International and
European Studies of the University of Piraeus. He has written two books in Greek, on Moby-Dick
(Exit stage left, 2000) and King Oedipus (Beyond absence, 2005), and he has edited one more
(Present past and present future, 2011). His most recent publication is 'Krise und neugriechische
Genealogien', in his co-edited Griechenland im europäischen Kontext. Krise und Krisendiskurse
(Wiesbaden: Springer, 2016). In 2016 a collection in Greek of recent essays of his is forthcoming.
These essays concern the politics of time in Arendt, Benjamin, Foucault, Derrida and others, as
well as inquiries into modern Greek political philosophy and literature.
Bo Isenberg
(Lund University, Faculty of Sociology)
Permanent crisis, epoch of the provisional – Images and experiences of classical modernity
The presentation offers an outline of classical modern reflection (sociology, cultural theory,
literature) on the constitution and transformation of modernity, and its cultural and mental
dispositions. It will be argued that classical modernity may be conceived as an archive of
influential concepts on culture today. Core references are Siegfried Kracauer, Robert Musil, Joseph
Roth, Georg Simmel, Ferdinand Tönnies.
Bo Isenberg is a Reader at the Sociology Faculty of Lund University. He specializes in social theory,
cultural sociology and social psychology. He has published in subjects like identity, culture,
globalization, modernity, crisis, sociology’s relation to the novel. Presently he is involved in a
research project on identity and cosmopolitanism in the Weimar Republic. Some of his recent
publications in English include: “Critique and crisis. Reinhart Koselleck's thesis of the genesis of
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modernity” Eurozine – Network of European Cultural Journals, 2012; and “Mammonist Capitalism
– Ubiquity, Immanence, Acceleration and the Social Consequences” in Nordicum-Mediterraneum
(E-Journal of Nordic and Mediterranean Studies), vol.8:2, 2013.
Esther Leslie
(Birkbeck College, Department of English and Humanities)
To Gamble in the Light of Crisis
This paper draws on Benjamin’s Arcades Project, exploring it as a text about finance, or casino
capitalism. Like its Benjaminian model, this paper explores the intermingling of economy, gesture,
pleasure, terror in the locations of burgeoning commodity capitalism, a capitalism that is in crisis
from its start. In addition, this paper sets a history of capitalist crisis in relation to the fluctuations
of light and darkness.
Esther Leslie is Professor in Political Aesthetics at Birkbeck College, School of English, University of
London. Esther Leslie has research interests in Marxist theories of aesthetics and culture, with a
particular focus on the work of Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno. Other research interests
include the poetics of science, European literary and visual modernism and avant gardes,
animation, colour and madness. Her books include: Walter Benjamin: Overpowering Conformism
(Pluto 2000), Hollywood Flatlands, Animation, Critical Theory and the Avant Garde (Verso 2002),
Synthetic Worlds: Nature, Art and the Chemical Industry (Reaktion, 2005) Walter Benjamin
(Reaktion 2007), and Derelicts: Thought Worms from the Wreckage (Unkant, 2014). Her
translations include Georg Lukacs, A Defence of 'History and Class Consciousness (Verso 2002)
and Walter Benjamin: The Archives (Verso, 2007). Her next book is on the poetics and politics of
liquid crystals.
Emanuele Coccia
EHESS, Paris – Italian Academy, Columbia University, New York)
From Krisis to Krasis: the Cosmology and Politics of Total Blending.
In pre-Socratic cosmology krisis was the name for the power of judgment and the force of the
distinction of things: a krisis as a power or a force was opposed to an opposite one, the force
which produced blending, mixture, confusion. In the vivid Anaxagorean version, krisis is embodied
in a separated cosmic mind, which is facing the universal surrounding mass, wherein all “things
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are together, infinite both in number and in smallness” and nothing is clear and distinct. Following
this cosmological model, the genesis of the world is then the act, through which the mind
separates, judges, distinguishes and produces differences out of the mixture of all things:
cosmogony is, here, an affair of critique. Against this crude opposition the stoic cosmology tried
to describe the world as the place of the total blending (krasis) of all elements, where everything
is in everything and the universal mind is at the same time the cause and the form of this total
blending. I will claim that the shift from Modernity to Postmodernity is not a pure historical but a
cosmological one, and that it could be interpreted as a transition from an Anaxagorean
cosmological model to a Stoic one. Rationality is nowadays the name for the process of
systematic blending and mixing of the elements of the worlds and of the methodical
disengagement of every form of distinction and judgement (and therefore of critique). In front of
the contemporary world, critique is not only powerless: it has literally no more place.
Emanuele Coccia is an Associate Professor at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales
(EHESS) in Paris. He received his PhD in Florence and was formerly an Assistant Professor of
History of Philosophy in Freiburg, Germany. He worked on the history of European normativity
and on aesthetics. His current research topics focus on the ontological status of images and their
normative power, especially in fashion and advertising. Among his publications are: La
trasparenza delle immagini. Averroè e l’averroismo (Milan 2005, Spanish translation 2008), La vie
sensible (Paris 2010, translated in Italian, Portuguese, Spanish and Romanian; English translation
in press) and Le bien dans les choses (Paris 2013 translated in Italian and Spanish; English and
German translation in press). With Giorgio Agamben as a co-editor, he published an anthology on
angels in Christian, Jewish, and Islamic contexts: Angeli. Ebraismo Cristianesimo Islam (Milan
2009).
Anton Schütz
(University of London, Birkbeck College, School of Law)
Crisis, peirasmós, escalation: for an archaeo-theology of the unsustainable
Well-known maps of the undoable are split in a moral-cum-legalist and a possibilistic half,
separating that which ought not, from that which cannot be done. Throughout most of the
history of Philosophy they were associated with the domains known as practical inquiry in the
first, of theoretical inquiry in the second case. This has changed to the extent that that which
ought to be « done » (leaving aside, for the occasion, the most decisive issue: by whom?) is now
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increasingly seen as a dependent variable of that which can be. What is the relation, if any,
between these changes and the appearance of the terrorizingly inflationary supernova of
« crisis »? And how should we understand the new galaxy of more re-assuring themes or
disciplines such as management, oikonomia, functional differentiation, and the quest for a new
science – a quasi-ontology of process and happening, roughly – that they respond to? The theme
of a "mystery of sustainability" will serve us as a guide into the long build-up of a very
contemporary problematic.
Anton Schütz teaches Legal Theory at Birkbeck Law School. He holds degrees in law from the
University of Vienna and in Social Anthropology from the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences
Sociales (Paris). He has also been a teacher of European legal and religious history at the Ecole
Pratique des Hautes Etudes. Anton Schütz publishes in the fields of Continental Philosophy,
Jurisprudence, the History of religion and secularisation, and the evolution of scientific
methodology. He co-edits (with Thanos Zartaloudis) the book series Encounters in Law and
Philosophy (EUP, 2015-). He has recently edited the following books: (with Massimiliano
Traversino), “The Theology of ‘Potentia dei’ and the History of European Normativity” special
edition of the Journal Divus Thomas, n.115, 2012); (with Peter Goodrich and Lior Barshak) Law,
Text, Terror, (Routledge-Cavendish, 2006).
Marina Lathouri
(Architectural Association, London, School of Architecture & University of Cambridge,
School of Architecture)
Crisis and economies of living
Reinhart Koselleck argues in Critique and Crisis that crisis is a philosophical construct, which came
to signify “a permanent concept of ‘history’,” “a historically immanent transitional phase.” This
reading of the idea of crisis suggests the present as possible moment of rupture and discontinuity, as well as, a locus within which, new directions of thought may emerge. However,
when being in crisis becomes a state of mind, the norm rather than its resolution (the latter
thought of as essentially eschatological concept and temporal beginning), the concept of crisis
loses its programmatic aspect and projective potential. Jacques Derrida in his Economies de la
crise describes this loss (the crisis of the idea of crisis) as “the symptom of,” and at the same time,
“the jostling attempt to save a world (kosmos) which we no longer inhabit”, where “there is no
longer oiko-nomia, oiko-logia, inhabitable place in which we feel ‘at home’.”
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In light of a new geography of movement – economic and social, of shifting forms of political
authority and jurisdiction, what are the terms in which modes of inhabitation can be re-framed?
How would invariants and everyday rituals of living stripped from embedded meanings and
symbols be reinstated to produce forms of co-living and collective consciousness? At this point,
Jean Luc Nancy’s idea of exchange developed in La Communaute affrontee and registered in the
preposition ‘with’/’avec’ provides an exact and effective locus. “Neither communion nor
atomisation, solely the partaking in a place” the ‘with’ ( “L’ ‘avec’ est sec et neutre: ni communion
ni atomisation, seulement le partage d’un lieu, tout au plus un contact: un etre ensemble sans
assemblage,”) outlines multiple micro-economies of living, within which the intimate, both in the
sense of proximity and the absolute interiority, is interwoven with the collective and the global.
The boundaries of the personal, the political, the territorial and the constitutional often remain
ambiguous, yet the singular is ceaselessly reconfigured within the inside of this indistinct (as for
its boundaries) system of planning. This understanding unavoidably expands the signification of
the material (and architectural) object.
The question thus to be raised is whether and to what extent these material and spatial microinventions alone can potentially claim political action, not in the sense of strategic planning and
specific propositions, but by demarcating and offering a figure to the locus of exchange.
Bo Isenberg is a Reader at the Sociology Department of Lund University and he specializes in
social theory, cultural sociology and social psychology. He has published in subjects like identity,
culture, globalization, modernity, crisis, sociology’s relation to the novel. Presently he is involved
in a research project on identity and cosmopolitanism in the Weimar Republic. Some of his recent
publications in English include: “Critique and crisis. Reinhart Koselleck's thesis of the genesis of
modernity” Eurozine – Network of European Cultural Journals, 2012; and “Mammonist Capitalism
– Ubiquity, Immanence, Acceleration and the Social Consequences” in Nordicum-Mediterraneum
(E-Journal of Nordic and Mediterranean Studies), vol.8:2, 2013.
Marina Lathouri studied architecture and philosophy of art and aesthetics. She directs the
Graduate Programme in History and Critical Thinking at the AA and lectures at Cambridge
University. Lathouri’s current research interests lie in the conjunction of architectural history, the
city and political philosophy. She co-authored Intimate Metropolis: Urban Subjects in the Modern
City, London: Routledge, 2008; and City Cultures: Contemporary Positions on the City, London: AA
Publications, 2010. Lathouri has recently directed the Research project at the AA entitled City
Cultures. Intimate Metropolis: Urban Subjects in the Modern City.
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Stathis Gourgouris
(Columbia University, Classics, English; Institute for Comparative Literature and Society)
Fortress Europe in Critical Condition
This argument takes for granted the thesis that crisis is an endemic condition in democracy, which
does not mean that this is necessarily good for democratic politics. Therefore, the question of
how we determine what crisis is, or what constitutes crisis in what terms and in what form, must
always be asked and explored in order to determine the conditions of democratic action. The
paper will engage the theoretical problem that opens up with this question by addressing some
of the recent events that challenge what has been called "Fortress Europe" -- chiefly the refugee
situation and, related to it but not exclusively determined by it, what we can identify as the war
conditions in European cities. Addressing those theoretical dimensions that seem impervious to
social analysis, I will propose that we use as a prism the theoretical capacities of literature by
reading against the grain Michel Houellebecq's new controversial novel Submission.
Stathis Gourgouris is Professor of Classics, English, and Comparative Literature and Director of the
Institute for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University. Professor Gourgouris
writes and teaches on a variety of subjects that ultimately come together around questions of the
poetics and politics of modernity and democracy. He is the author of Dream Nation:
Enlightenment, Colonization, and the Institution of Modern Greece (Stanford, 1996); Does
Literature Think? Literature as Theory for an Antimythical Era (Stanford, 2003); Lessons in Secular
Criticism (Fordham 2013); and editor of Freud and Fundamentalism (Fordham, 2010). Outside
these projects he has also published numerous articles on Ancient Greek philosophy, political
theory, modern poetics, film, contemporary music, and psychoanalysis. He is currently completing
work on two other book projects of secular criticism: The Perils of the One and Nothing Sacred.
He writes regularly in internet media (such as The Huffington Post, Los Angeles Review of
Books, Al Jazeera, Open Democracy, The Immanent Frame), as well as major Greek newspapers
and journals on political and literary matters. A collection of such essays on poetics and politics,
written in Greek over a period of 25 years, is forthcoming in 2016 with the title Contingent
Disorders. He is also an internationally awarded poet, with four volumes of poetry published in
Greek, most recent being Introduction to Physics (Athens, 2005). His work has been translated
into French, Italian, Serbo-Croatian, Turkish, and Hebrew. He has also served as Director of the
Institute for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia (2009-2015); President of the
Modern Greek Studies Association (2006-2012); and at the Board of Supervisors of the English
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Institute, Harvard University (2006-2009). In 2015 he was honored with the Lenfest Distinguished
Columbia Faculty Award.
An extensive interview covering the whole range of his work can be found in the Los Angeles
Review
of
Books:
Part
I
“Dream
Nation
and
the
Phantasm
of
Europe”
http://lareviewofbooks.org/interview/dream-nation-and-the-phantasm-of-europe-part-i; Part II
“Poetics and the Political World” http://lareviewofbooks.org/interview/poetics-and-the-politicalworld-obrad-savic-interviews-stathis-gourgouris-part-ii
Marinos Diamantides
(University of London, Birkbeck College, School of Law)
Western political theology, civil religion and the empire of management
Secular modernity constitutes itself as the constant management of interminable crises and the
late-modern global Empire of Management (Legendre) is often decried as a dictatorship without a
dictator in a disenchanted, post-hierocratic, post-sovereign, ‘flat’ world society. There is, however,
reluctance among the Christian/post-Christian subjects to accept that impersonal and
fragmentary management without telos is the ultimate global legacy of the Western political and
legal imagination. The human psyche, I argue, can only experience disorder -and management is
all about disorder- with a sense of certainty that ultimately only religion provides with the result
that parochial politics is the only possible politics. The deposition of the monarch in modern
democracies did not dislodge the fantastic image of a sovereign Throne - now reconfigured as
the ‘empty place of power’ which competing interests occupy in turns- as if it is indispensable for
the constitution of the social. Thus, as I show in the case of the Greek sovereign-debt crisis, when
faith in sovereignty and authority was all but lost following the onslaught of neoliberal dictates,
the legal positivists (courts, legislators and many liberal academics) effectively joined with
rebellious activists (endorsed from the Euro-Atlantic left as ‘revolutionaries’) to re-validate as a
social fact the existence of actual/ potential legitimate legal/ rightful political sovereignty (think
judicial decisions that the austerity is in conformity with the popular Will; but also, revolutionary
fists raised against austerity only to turn into hands signing on to whatever measures are dictated
from Brussels). Overall, the obsession with holding/restraining ‘sovereign power’ points to an
inability to accept that there is no puppeteer-like sovereign and no master-plan behind the
countless impersonal operations that constitute the social in functionally differentiated societies –
which Christian ‘individualism’ made possible. The Greek situation, akin to an absurdist play, was
15
thus falsely staged as a tragedy or comedy in which imaginary 'protagonists' are vilified or
glorified and truly legitimate/rightful legal/political sovereignty is anticipated as deus ex machina.
Marinos Diamantides is a Reader in Law at Birkbeck College, School of Law, University of London.
He was born and educated in Athens and he has taught at Lancaster University, the London
School of Economics and, since 1995, at, Birkbeck College, while he has been a fellow at Law
Schools in the USA, Japan and Israel. He has published books on the potential impact of
Emmanuel Levinas's philosophy on jurisprudential and political problems (including The Ethics of
Suffering: Modern Law, Philosophy and Medicine, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000). He is currently
writing a monograph on the topic of 'comparative legalism' among monotheistic cultures, with A.
Schütz, entitled - Immaculate Conceptions: Secularization in Law and Philosophy - Four Chapters
on Law and Political Theology in the 21st Century, Edinburgh University Press, ‘Encounters in Law
and Philosophy’ Series, (forthcoming, 2016).
Janet Roitman
(The New School for Social Research, New York)
Anti-Crisis
In the book Anti-Crisis, I step back from the cycle of crisis production to ask not just why we
declare so many crises but also what sort of analytical work the concept of crisis enables. What, I
ask, are the stakes of crisis? Taking responses to the so-called subprime mortgage crisis of 2007–
2008 as the case in point, I engage with the work of thinkers ranging from Reinhart Koselleck to
Michael Lewis, and from Thomas Hobbes to Robert Shiller. In the process, I question the bases for
claims to crisis and show how crisis functions as a narrative device, or how the invocation of crisis
in contemporary accounts of the financial meltdown enables particular narratives, raising certain
questions while foreclosing others.
[In this presentation Roitman will present the modality and central arguments of her book briefly
to then initiate a wider discussion.]
Janet Roitman received her doctorate from the University of Pennsylvania. Before taking her
Chair (Anthropology) at the New School, she served as an instructor at the Fondation Nationale
des Sciences Politiques de Paris (Sciences-Po). Roitman was, further, a research fellow with the
Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) and a member of the Institut Marcel-Mauss
(CNRS-EHESS) in Paris. Professor Roitman has conducted extensive research in Central Africa,
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focusing specifically on the borders of Cameroon, Nigeria, the Central African Republic and Chad.
Her book, Fiscal Disobedience: An Anthropology of Economic Regulation in Central Africa
(Princeton University Press, 2005), is an analysis of the unregulated commerce that transpires on
those borders. This research enquires into emergent forms of economic regulation in the region
of the Chad Basin and considers consequential transformations in the nature of fiscal relations
and citizenship.
More generally, her research covers topics of political economy, the
anthropology of value, economization, and emergent forms of the political. Her most recent book
which is, in fact, one of the key works that inspired and informed this workshop is: Anti-Crisis,
(Duke University Press, 2014).
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Invitation Brief for the one-day Workshop of the Social Critiques of Law
Research Group (SoCriL)
Theme
This workshop has invited papers by participants on a variety of approaches across disciplines to
the notion and experience of crisis. The aim of the workshop is to interrogate the notion of crisis
across and against disciplinary approaches, with one eye set, inevitably, on the contemporary
situation, but with ever more attention to the intersections between crisis, knowledge, history and
law in a wider sense.
Thematic Outline
We are told that we are “immersed” in crisis: European sovereign debt crisis, the subprime crisis in
the United States, ISIS, Syria, the crisis in Afghanistan, the crisis in Darfur, the crisis in the Congo,
in Cairo, in the Middle East, ecologic crisis, Ebola, climate change (cf. Roitman), the modern city is
crisis, the University in crisis and so forth. A bad infinity of crises amounting, in one view, to a
‘global crisis’ that forms a ‘surface effect’ in the reversal of the relation between humans and the
world (cf. Serres). To not just enter a moment of crisis, but to be in crisis raises then at first
significant entry-level questions (i.e. Who decides, if anyone, whether there is ‘a crisis’? What are
the outcomes of being in a permanent state of ‘crisis’? etc.)
Yet at the same time it questions the peculiar nature of crisis as such: its paradoxical elevated
status through conditioning normalcy while suspending it; and at the same time its endless
encroachment over social processes and beings which, as time goes by, become tomorrow’s
normalcy.
There are many exemplary moves ‘in crisis’. For instance, capitalism is introduced as a
phenomenon through the ‘medium’ of crisis. It is worth noting that Marx and Engels are most
careful to establish proximity between crisis and the bourgeoisie:
The conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to comprise the wealth created by
them. And how does the bourgeoisie get over these crises? On the one hand, by enforced
destruction of a mass of productive forces; on the other, by the conquest of new markets,
and by the more thorough exploitation of the old ones. That is to say, by paving the way
for more extensive and more destructive crises, and by diminishing the means whereby
crises are prevented (Marx / Engels 1967: 226).
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To refer to some other examples: Freud’s ego constitutes itself, on the other hand, through the
working out of crises, while Nietzsche’s account of the predicament of both ‘God and man’ in
their encounter with nihilism, is a predicament of crisis. For Husserl’s conception of a ‘ krisis of the
European sciences’ and of the form of human life as such, positivist sciences were seen as
reducing the transcendental ego to a natural object. Classic references to the ‘crisis of Europe’ by
Rousseau and Saint-Simon as the result of revolution, whether in an affirmative or negative sense,
are also well known. Modernity, it has even been repeatedly said, conceives itself, in each of its
forms, as a crisis.
In current discourse, too, in the midst of competing crisis-rhythms, crisis appears to be
understood as either an error within an otherwise efficient institutional structure (for instance in
Kindleberger, Aliber, Roubini, Mihm, among others); or as the critical condition of an ‘alienation’
whereby institutions are parasitic aberrations from the truth of this or that value or principle (for
instance in Harvey, Marazzi, Berardi). Others turn on the effect of crisis in its paradoxical
production. In Lazzarato, for example, who claims that crises are related to the (re)production of
subjectivities, first of all, at an existential level as such. And in Agamben whereby the decision on
the exception of “bare life” is a juridico-political decision on a life placed in permanent crisis (in
the sense of judgement, as well as in its reduction to the supposedly lowest common
denominator). And isn’t a legal trial’s only goal nothing other than the krisis (judgment, the res
iudicata) (Satta)? As Satta writes with regard to this paradigm of krisis:
For this moment of arrest is precisely judgment: an act, therefore, contrary to the
economy of life, which is all movement, all will, and all action, an antihuman, inhuman act,
an act that is truly –if one considers it properly, in its essence- without goal. Humans have
intuited the divine nature of this act without goal and they have handed their whole
existence over to its power. More than that they have constructed their whole existence
on this unique act.
If crisis is the ‘post-ontological’ rule of government par excellence, then it appears that the
transposition has taken place from crisis to indecision, from a momentary situation to a ‘posthistorical’ permanence (modernus, the now seen as mechanized and unidirectional), so that
government by management (administration, oikonomia), signposts not just a ‘legitimation crisis’,
but positive feedback loops (cf. Morin) that (re)produce the crisis. In this manner every decision,
as a matter of supposed fact (where fact and right become indistinguishable), leads to a new
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‘critical distinction’ and it is purported that only in this way can any alternative be observed or
adhered to, hence, leading by necessity to a ever new crisis. An inadvertent effect is exposed to be
that the supposed solution (or ever new ‘critical distinction’) to a crisis becomes therefore
indistinguishable from the very production of crises in the first place. It returns one to question,
again, the effect of crises and their production anew, primarily in/by discourses that sit on either
side of the borderline distinctions of what could be called an ever-infantile crisis.
Agamben has recently offered a revision of this paradigm of crisis (c.f. Pilate and Jesus). It is worth
noting, in this regard, that the term is derived from the Greek Krisis from krinein "to separate,
decide, judge, a distinctive force"; from PIE root *krei- "to sieve, discriminate, distinguish" (also
worth noting the Greek krinesthai "to explain”). In medical vocabulary, as it is known, the term
‘crisis’ is the decisive moment at which a patient’s illness would either turn for the worse or begin
to ease towards a recovery (Hippocrates and Galen). Still in 1754, under the entry ‘Crise’ by
Théophile De Bordeu in Diderot’s and D’Alembert’s Encyclopédie, 'crisis' appears only as a
'medical' word, which draws on the juridical meaning of 'judgment'. But in Agamben’s case (with
some proximity as well to Deleuze) the point is to not think of a counter-crisis or a counterjudgment but instead to do away with judgment in this particular sense.
In Aristotle’s political sense in turn it is noted that: "The virtue of justice is a characteristic of a
state; for justice is the arrangement of the association that takes the form of a state, and the
virtue of justice is a judgment [krisis] about what is just". A conception of crisis that, perhaps, can
be still traced in the later ‘political’ sense of an irreversible, definitive, change that was transposed
analogically in view of the Enlightenment and the so-called Age of Revolutions. Thus, crisis
appears moldable according to its applications and to other concepts which in turn may be linked
with it; and its, perhaps, original meaning becomes, according to some, even the ‘art of
government' (managerial oikonomia; cf. Agamben) par excellence.
It is worth noting also that there does not seem to exist a verb that would relate to the noun
‘crisis’ in a way in which one might have expected (underscoring what is perhaps the most
decisive feature of a crisis – that it comes about; that it stages an encounter with the scarcity and
the finiteness of reserves or possibilities, “without anyone in particular being ‘responsible’ for this
outcome”). This is why the noun itself today arguably takes the stance of a performative,
epitomizing its own indefinite condition (a ‘non-locus’ as Roitman puts it) and reapplication. This,
needless to say, is in sharp contrast to what can be said about the earlier medical term, a merely
descriptive term, which appears to relate a somehow silent, natural, taken-for-granted, approach
to finitude.
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It seems then that, among else, crisis as a form of life and government draws first a distinction
between knowledge and experience. Koselleck’s, for instance, viewing of crisis as “the signature of
the modern era” can be read to suggest that the historical concept of ‘crisis’ (and critique) is an
“indicator of a new awareness”, from which one reconceptualises modern time as such; and where
time becomes the permanence of the provisional (or contemporary). How can new forms of
knowledge be engendered?’ becomes, perhaps, a key question. ‘How can the bipolarity of
normality and crisis be suspended?’ In ‘critical’ terms critique itself appears equally bipolar
between a perpetuation and a political denunciation of a situation. In this manner, a supposedly
permanent post-historicism loops within an equally permanent transgression loop in what has
proven to be a sustainable and ultimately successful functional depoliticized relation between
crisis and experience amidst nihilist vertigo. This, ultimately, brings to mind, further, a crisis as a
dream-image and a wish-image (Benjamin) whereby mythical thought turns crisis as both natural
history and utopia. A ‘Kingdom of Crisis’, perhaps, as the telos of the historical dynamic, to
paraphrase Benjamin’s Theologisch-politisches Fragment: a mythical incarnation of crisis as fate.
This workshop invites you, among else, to reopen this conundrum and to think what it may mean
to liberate the future from its ‘deformations in the present by an act of cognition’ as Benjamin
writes in his early text Das Leben der Studenten (1977: 75; Gesammelte Schriften, Band II-1). And
yet to, further, ask: ‘Has an act of cognition ever saved anyone?’ Have we ever cognized finitude
against our saviours? Indeed, this is only one provisional way of putting the question and the
participants will elaborate their own along different and perhaps intersecting pathways.
Indicative Reading [not required for attendance]
Agamben, G. (2015) Pilate and Jesus. Trans. Adam Kotsko, Stanford: SUP.
Agamben, G. (2011) The Kingdom and the Glory: For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government,
trans. Lorenzo Chiesa. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Béjin, A. and E. Morin (eds.) (1976) “La notion de crise,” Centre d’études transdisciplinaires, Communication
25.
Dodd, J. (2004) Crisis and Reflection: An Essay on Husserl’s Crisis of the European Sciences. Dordrecht: Kluwer
Academic Publishers.
Edwards, J. (2006) “Critique and Crisis Today: Koselleck, Enlightenment and the Concept of Politics,”
Contemporary Political Theory 5: 428-446.
Husserl, E. (1970) [1954] The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (transl. D.
Carr). Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
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Janet Roitman
http://www.politicalconcepts.org/issue1/crisis/
https://www.dukeupress.edu/anti-crisis
Koselleck, R. 1988 [1959] Critique and Crisis. Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society.
Cambridge MA: Berg Publishers.
Koselleck, R. 2002 The Practice of Conceptual History. Timing History, Spacing Concepts. Stanford University
Press.
Koselleck, R. 2004 [1979] Futures Past. On the Semantics of Historical Time. New York: Columbia University
Press.
Koselleck, R. and M. Richter. (2006) “Crisis,” Journal of the History of Ideas 67(2): 357-400.
http://www.jstor.org/stable/30141882?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents
Lazarrato, M. “Governmentality in the current crisis”
http://www.generation-online.org/p/fp_lazzarato7.htm
Lazzarato, M. (2012) The Making of the Indebted Man: An Essay on the Neoliberal Condition, Semiotext(e),
Los Angeles.
Masur, G. (1973) “Crisis in History,” in P. Wiener, ed., Dictionary of the History of Ideas, New York: Scribners1:
589
Mbembe, A. and J. Roitman. (1995) “Figures of the Subject in Times of Crisis,” Public Culture 7: 323-352.
Roubini, N., and S. Mihm, (2010), Crisis economics: A Crash Course in the Future of Finance, Harmondsworth:
Penguin.
Satta, S. (1994/2014) Il mistero del processo, Adelphi Edizioni.
Starn, R. (1971) “Historians and ‘Crisis’,” Past and Present, 52: 3-22.
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