[-empyre-] Vor dem Gesetz/Before the Law, hoveringly

[Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos]

is there a before the law?

At least one reading of K's parable might be that there is never a before when it comes to the law. There is nothing more surreptitiously colonising than the law, taking up the space before and after the door, the time before and after the passage. Law is a lawscape, a vast plane of tilting flatness where bodies are being sacrificed daily in the name of fairness.

Law does not stop, nor does it reserve an antechamber for the reluctant ones amongst us.
Non-liquet (not in my jurisdiction=cannot decide) was a freak privilege of the Roman courts. We are now all drenched in a stagnant liquidity that demands (while incapacitating) action, slow thick liquid of undecidability.

Can law observe itself? What is the legal spectacle? Human rights is the latest candidate for that stage, following up from an illustrious series of divas such as the rule of law, sustainability, equity, fairness, oh so many.. But there was nothing more spectacular than the grand legal declaration of terra nullius (this land belongs to no one), where the coloniser's law saw before it not another law, not another lawscape, not another body, but itself, perpetuating in an infernal mise-en-abyme.





Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos
Professor of Law & Theory, LLB, LLM, PhD

Co-Director The Westminster Law & Theory Centre<http://tinyurl.com/WestminsterResearchCentre>
Winner / Current Judge OUP Law Teacher of the Year<http://www.oup.co.uk/academic/highereducation/law/prizes/lawteacher/judging/>
Editor Space, Materiality and the Normative Routledge Series<http://www.routledge.com/books/series/SMNORM/>
Editorial Committee Law & Critique<http://www.springer.com/philosophy/value+theory/journal/10978>

download my Research texts here<http://ssrn.com/author=959502>
visit my Westminster page here<http://www.westminster.ac.uk/about-us/our-people/directory/philippopoulos-mihalopoulo-dr-andreas>
visit my Academia page here<http://westminster.academia.edu/AndreasPhilippopoulosMihalopoulos>





On 19 Nov 2014, at 22:30, Johannes Birringer <Johannes.Birringer at brunel.ac.uk<mailto:Johannes.Birringer at brunel.ac.uk>> wrote:

----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------

[photograph of Hamed Taheri's "Home is in Our Past"]


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