Vestiges of the Phoenix: De Quincey, Kant and the Heavens

© Edinburgh University Press, 2011publication-status: Accepte

A jurisprudence of indignation

This paper argues that the images evoked in the literature of the Spanish indignados, and other contemporary global justice movements, specifically those of disciplinary and social decadence, a space–time beyond the limits of the possible, obligations across generations, and, ultimately, of universal history as horizon and anticipation, reactivate the legal critique of absolute property that featured so prominently in nineteenth-century accounts of law, civil society, and revolutionary right, and then again in the context of twentieth-century decolonization and revolutionary movements. Insofar as such images can be distinguished from concepts, following a certain reading of the critical tradition (Milton, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Fanon) against the grain, they pave the way towards the formulation of a systemic critique or a ‘jurisprudence of indignation’, in the wake of the emergence, rise and current crisis of the global market