The Legal Subject in Althusser’s Political Theory

© 2014, Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht. There are three dominant conceptual developments in Althusser’s work that suggest the significance of the subject. One is the perpetual work of ideology—its interpellation of individuals. The second is the primacy of the class struggle in relation to the state, and the consequential function of law and rights. The third is the materialism of the encounter as a process without subject. An examination of these three areas (in part, utilising a Foucauldian analysis of subjectivity and power relations) reveals the potentially and strategically important role of legal subjectivity in Althusser’s theory of the political

The problem of subjectivity and the critique of human rights after foucault

© 2010, Routledge. All rights reserved. The problem of subjectivity – of how to conceptualise the subject – remains at the threshold of our understanding of human rights, both as a historical construct and a functional, juridical technology. Moving away from the idea of liberalism as the thought relating to political society based on the juridicocontractual relation of sovereign to subject, Foucault’s account of the economic basis for liberal governmentality, developed in the series of lectures delivered during 1978 and 1979, provides scope to reconsider the problem of subjectivity in human rights. Our focus here should be on the possibility of situating the constitution of the subject of human rights within the historical processes associated with the development of the liberal and neo-liberal arts of government, and more specifically at the juncture at which the heterogenous forms of subjectivity associated with homo juridicus (the subject of rights) and homo economicus (the subject of interests) coexist. Further, a critique of human rights with this orientation might be used to address the fundamental political contradiction inherent in the divided subjectivity of the sovereign-subject, and of individual human life as the ultimate biopolitical foundation of the state

Survey Design and Estimating Equations when Combining Big Data with Probability Samples

The use of big data in official statistics and the applied sciences is accelerating, but statistics computed using only big data often suffer from substantial selection bias. This leads to inaccurate estimation and invalid statistical inference. We rectify the issue for a broad class of linear and nonlinear statistics by producing estimating equations that combine big data with a probability sample. Under weak assumptions about an unknown superpopulation, we show that our integrated estimator is consistent and asymptotically unbiased with an asymptotic normal distribution. Variance estimators with respect to both the sampling design alone and jointly with the superpopulation are obtained at once using a single, unified theoretical approach. A surprising corollary is that strategies minimising the design variance almost minimise the joint variance when the population and sample sizes are large. The integrated estimator is shown to be more efficient than its survey-only counterpart if dependence between sample membership indicators is small and the finite population is large. We illustrate our method for quantiles, the Gini index, linear regression coefficients and maximum likelihood estimators where the sampling design is stratified simple random sampling without replacement. Our results are illustrated in a simulation of individual Australian incomes.Comment: 42 pages, 4 figure

Kafka and legal critique

© 2017 Griffith University. Kafka’s preoccupation with the law and legal institutions within his fictional writings has always been a particularly fecund source of ideas for legal and political philosophy. Notwithstanding the justifiable emphasis on the historical and biographical situation of Kafka’s literary texts in jurisprudential commentary, those texts may also serve a valuable, autonomous function as a form of legal critique that supplements the doctrinal approaches of conventional legal theory. With this context in mind, the article presents a critical reading of three dominant juridical themes in Kafka’s fiction: the relationship between slander and guilt; the significance of judgement over justice in the legal process; and the association of necessity and immanence in the constitution of the legal subject. It seeks to demonstrate the specific contributions to legal critique of the rhetorical, structural and aesthetic elements of Kafka’s fictional treatment of law and legal authority

Literature, Human Rights and the Cold War

Despite the ambitions of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on 10 December 1948, the establishment of global justice and freedom made little progress over the following four decades. One of the results was a significant strand of Cold War literature that documented the brutalising effects of industrialisation, totalitarianism and superpower interventionism and that advocated for those who, still marginalised by class, gender, sexuality, race and ethnicity, felt excluded from the UDHR's conception of a common humanity. Taking up many of these themes, this essay analyses human rights literature from around the world, including examples of autobiographical testimony, political fiction, postcolonial poetry, dystopian drama and postmodernist fiction

The law of the origin in the ontology of consciousness: (Descartes\u27 third meditation)

The history of law is a history of finitude, which would be only one of the many histories of finitude, of the human condition or ontology. This irreducible point escapes those who invest all their efforts in understanding law through the scope of legitimacy how does the law come to calculate, decide, institute, pronounce and effect? By what right? On what foundation, origin, universalising pretext, does it so act? If we abandon this line of questioning, the pursuance ofwhich would only lead us through a gyre ofself-referential dilemmas circumventing the concept of \u27origin\u27, it becomes dear that it is precisely the role of the origin in its law-configuring mode that problematises what law can and does do, that is to say, what law is. But, even having isolated this theoretical agenda, there are no obvious signposts to navigate one\u27s journey into this \u27law-configuring origin\u27