... in a suffocating state displayed in law's numbers: high incarceration rates, police brutality, and summary killings. It argues against viewing Woodfox's testimony as a redemption story so as not to undermine its transformative power. To bring solitary confinement to an end, one must acknowledge...

... moral phenomenon, a function of human actions and intentions; strictly speaking, there is no natural violence. The critique of violence itself bespeaks a kind of violence. Benjamin's critique of the reifying “mythic violence” that founds and administers the law presupposes an expiatory “divine violence...

... different species of it. Rather, Benjamin establishes a hierarchy of forces with inner dependence whose logic, to put it initially as simply as possible, is one of arrogation. Just as in enforcement the police takes into its hands a force that belongs to the law, so is the violence of law an arrogation...

...James Martel In “Critique of Violence,” Benjamin writes that the “educative power, which in its perfected form stands outside the law, is one of [divine violence’s] manifestations.” To recognize the connection Benjamin makes between a messianic power and acts of pedagogy allows us to revisit...

..., colonialism, and nationalism, including Nazism, Nichanian sketches a genealogy of the figure of the native. The latter emerges as the eighteenth-century British jurist and linguist William Jones compiles and translates legalistic texts from India to be able to govern the “natives” by their own laws and in so...

... gone into the construction of liberal democracies. My chief exhibit will be the work of Paul W. Kahn (professor of law and the humanities at Yale Law School and director of its Center for International Human Rights) and the marriage of his thought to Carl Schmitt’s. Schmitt is not a late encounter...

..., in Western traditions, is presupposed through a binary schema of power whereby potency is exhausted in actuality. This binary of power corresponds historically to the Christian Trinitarian oikonomia that predates the transcendental foundationalism of sovereign power/law and secular government. Hence, the age...

... them with the “self-evidently natural laws” of the economic. One consequence of this substitution of the economic for the political is the emergence of “second-handedness,” a condition that may seem to be a contingent property of the region but may be the harbinger of things to come for the rest...

...,” the article argues that what brings these authors together is a unique understanding of democracy as the defining trait of modernity. This translates into a democratic pragmatics, in which moral norms and historical laws are fractured and questioned, leaving an “empty place” (Claude Lefort) at the center...

...Ahmed Jdey History has its own laws and its own tricks. Dictators, who are inherently antihistorical, do not realize it; yet humanity, in its rich and exciting trajectory, continues to instruct the great dictators and despots of the world about the force of history, in Africa as well as Asia...

...Christopher Connery Chongqing, a conurbation with province status about the size of Austria, was, between 2007 and 2012, under the leadership of Party Secretary Bo Xilai, the site of a number of political practices—in housing, law enforcement, industrial development, public “red culture...

...Colin Dayan What kind of legal history might account for the unique and continued practice of forfeiture in the United States? Law enforcement, as many recent writers have argued, has grown increasingly dependent on this fail-safe way to gain revenue, since civil asset forfeiture has few procedural...

...Yahya Elsaghe; Sina Rahmani; Yahya Elsaghe Why does W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz escape from the laws of fictionality and factuality? How do so many of the people and place names inside of it start so improbably with the letter A ? Why do so many iterations of A —as initials, as markings...

... of linguistic and social form—in the poetic writing of Paul Celan and the Arabic-language translations of Celan offered by the Iraqi poet Khālid al-Ma‘ālī; in Walter Benjamin’s essayistic writing on language and the law; in the tenth-century Arabic-language philosopher Abū Naṣr al-Fārābī; and in Aristotle’s...

... of Shar`iah , or Islamic law; and other crucial concepts such as ijtihad or independent reasoning and ijma' or consensus. This essay will argue that the so-called fundamentalist versions of Islam are burdened by a literalism that has no grounding and no sanction in the sacred texts of Islam. The myth...

... in a remote meadow ringed by second-growth redwoods. Brown developed his interest in the “law of metamorphosis,” which he thought poetry captures, and put his attention on how the human body changes, producing text as sound or performance. Using two anthologies compiled by Jerome Rothenberg, Brown drew...

... what his turn to literary criticism and narrative in the 1940s might have signified and allowed him to negotiate as a “counter‐law.” Finally, it turns to his time as a dissident postwar thinker who sought to invent ways of thinking capable of forgoing power, often formulated as an inoperative “relation...

... action to law, rule, and rhythm shows how audacious was the plan and why scientists even have quailed before it and, veiling their words in phrases, half-dimmed the intent of their science. For the Great Assumption of real life is that in the deeds of men there lies along with rule and rhythm...

... is to outline a broadly Lacanian theory of the subject of truth. This subject should be able to resist, on the one hand, assimilation to the law of the global economy, and, on the other, subjective identification with already established, so-called minority groups. Such a subject, in short, would...

... of the rules of war; he must additionally enact a violence that would preserve the laws of war against Colonel Tavington’s efforts to violate them. In order to protect the law against its destruction by Tavington’s alien legality, that is to say, Martin must proceed to occupy a space within the law...