Patrick Hanafin

• Birkbeck, University of London

Book synopsis: Being Social brings together leading and emerging scholars on the question of sociality in poststructuralist thought. The essays collected in this volume examine a sense of the social which resists final determination and closure, embracing an anxiety and undecidability of sociality, rather than effacing it. Through issues including...

Focusing on the writings of Adriana Cavarero and Lia Cigarini, this piece examines the possible counterpractices and counterspaces of a politics of relational subjectivity outside the time of the masculine legal order which are to be found in Italian sexual difference theory. Both Cavarero and Cigarini share a desire to create a practice of sexual...

This article examines the potential of Roberto Esposito’s work for a rethinking of the relationship between norm and life: in particular, the possibility of a vitalization of normativity which subverts the normative ordering of individual lives. Esposito’s intervention in biopolitical debates allows us to think of a micropolitics of life as zoe whi...

Book synopsis: The book seeks to open and explore the liminal space of critique at the intersection of law, aesthetics and politics. The essays in this volume elaborate and expand the meaning and significance of critique through an engagement with aesthetic forms. Although this endeavour has wider significance, the focus is primarily on South Afric...

Book synopsis: The Subject of Rosi Braidotti: Politics and Concepts brings into focus the diverse influence of the work of Rosi Braidotti on academic fields in the humanities and the social sciences such as the study and scholarship in - among others - feminist theory, political theory, continental philosophy, philosophy of science and technology,...

Book synopsis: Presenting feminist readings of texts from the legal philosophical and jurisprudential canon, the papers collected here offer an interdisciplinary and critical challenge to established modes of reading law. Feminist approaches to law usually take the form of either critical engagements with legal doctrine, legal concepts and ideas, o...

Book synopsis: Whilst the politics of reproduction have been at the heart of feminist struggles for over a century and a half, their analysis has not yet come to occupy a central place in the interdisciplinary study of citizenship. This volume takes up the challenge posed by Bryan Turner, when he noted "the absence of any systematic thinking about...

Book synopsis: Disobedience has been practiced and considered since time immemorial. The aim of this edited collection is to explore the concept and practice of disobedience through the prism of contemporary ideas and events. Past writings on disobedience represented it as a largely political practice that revealed the limits of government or law....

In Session 7 (26 February 2003) of The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume II, Jacques Derrida engages again with Maurice Blanchot, two days after the latter’s cremation. This intervention also appears as a post-face to Derrida’s 2003 edition of Parages, his collection of essays devoted to the work of Blanchot. In this article, I examine Derrida’s affi...

In 2004, the introduction of a restrictive law on assisted reproduction in Italy sees the privileging of a conservative model of family relations and a misogynist view of society by the political elite. This backlash politics excludes many individuals from full reproductive citizenship. In this regard what the Italian case allows us to see is the o...

At a time when social and political reality seems to move away from the practice of cosmopolitanism, whilst being in serious need of a new international framework to regulate global interaction, what are the new definitions and practices of cosmopolitanism? Including contributions from leading figures across the humanities and social sciences, Afte...

In her book Isolina: La Donna Tagliata a Pezzi, (Isolina: The Woman Cut Into Pieces), the Italian writer Dacia Maraini engages in a historical excavation with contemporary resonances. In this work, a reconstruction of a true story which occurred in Verona in 1900, the Isolina of the title is Isolina Canuti who becomes pregnant by an army officer. S...

From book description: Refusal, Transition and Post-apartheid Law under editorship of Prof Karin van Marle is indeed long overdue. As some of the authors in the relevant contributions to this publication rightly point out, Van Marle's call for a 'jurisprudence of generosity', enabled through an 'ethics of refusal', signals a new shift in South Afri...

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-pow...

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-pow...

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-pow...

Employing insights from Italian sexual difference theory on law and rights, this article examines how both the text of the Italian Abortion Law of 1978 and its operation reveal the contradictions within liberal rights discourse on reproductive freedom. The Act itself contains traces of both Roman Catholic and liberal pluralist worldviews and has, s...

Book synopsis: The formation of this book is a direct result of the unity of effort among all those who have contributed to it. The collaborations were gathered together from a researcher involved concern, indeed, who in recent years had been promoting various initiatives targeting the critical theory of law. On the agenda of their particular work...

Event synopsis: Organised by legal scholars in the Sussex Law School, the conference is the first to explore issues of gender as it relates to family responsibility in law - areas that continue to present problems for the courts and law makers. Conference organiser and Senior Lecturer in Law, Craig Lind, says: "Families are changing and the law can...

This article examines how the recently introduced law on assisted reproduction in Italy, which gives symbolic legal recognition to the embryo, came about, and how a referendum, which would have repealed large sections of it, failed. The occupation of the legal space by the embryo is the outcome of a crusade by a well-organised alliance of theo-cons...

One of the enduring features in Irish legal discourse in the postcolonial period is the manner in which the individual body has become a receptacle of contested meaning. In Ireland, with its birth out of a violent trauma based on a philosophy of blood sacrifice, the heroic patriot who dies in the service of his imagined nation is invested with part...

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No abstract available.

In this piece I want to (re)pose the relation of writing to law and politics, by interrogating the sense of a writing which is simultaneously an unwriting or undoing of legal and political discourse through Maurice Blanchot's involvement in the movement against the French colonial war in Algeria and, in particular, his framing of the Declaration of...

Law attempts to govern life and death through the appropriation of images which give a fantasy of control over death. The functioning of the thanatopolitical state is underpinned by a perceived control over death and its representation. This means of controlling death is challenged when someone wishes to die in an untimely fashion. Death may be tim...

Ireland is a country haunted by a past which refuses to remain buried. This past irrupts and interupts in texts as diverse as the Irish Constitution and the poems of W.B. Yeats. This piece ruminates on the representation of the state's violent past in legal texts and in the poetry of W.B. Yeats and Paul Muldoon and attempts to draw links between th...

This article examines the ``hidden'''' ideological appeal which the 1937 Irish Constitution attempted to make by the invocation of the rural ideal, a hybrid of Irish nationalism, Catholicism and, most importantly, Gaelic romanticism. In this move, the historical legitimacy of the new state could be defined through the constitution by an appropriati...

The failure of the legal imaginary to reflect sexual difference in the opening decades of the postcolonial Irish state led to what in psychoanalytical terms may be described as the creation of socially abjected groups. Lesbians and gay men were numbered among such groups. The failure of official discourse to contemplate sexual difference as an inte...

The Irish poet Eavan Boland has referred to the way in which the female has been portrayed in Irish cultural discourse as the 'passive projection of a national idea' (Eavan Boland, A Kind of Scar: The Woman Poet in a National Tradition (Dublin: Attic Press, 1989), pp.12-13). This trope of Ireland as submissive woman was appropriated by the framers...

Death has been viewed in cultural terms in Ireland more as rite than right. This view is rooted in deontological ideas about the intrinsic value of life. The sanctity-of-life model has been the dominant model in Irish legal discourse on the topic of the right to life. This model rather than being a flexible one, adapting to the needs of an evolving...

Once the idea of a nation influences the perception of a woman then that woman is suddenly and inevitably simplified. She can no longer have complex feelings and aspirations. She becomes the passive projection of a national idea.