'Tell all the truth, but tell it slant': a poetics of truth and reconciliation

There is a voice that tries to speak the truth. This essay will suggest that the discourse on the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) has perhaps ignored this most invisible of things, and has looked for the truth of the Commission everywhere except where it might be found, if indeed it can be found at all. To the extent that it is possible to oppose the truth of the voice to another truth, it may be useful to make use of a notion of poetics; even a sublime poetics

W. E. B. Du Bois’ ambiguous politics of liberation: race, Marxism and pan Africanism

W. E. B. Du Bois summons the restless and provocative spirit of a Pan Africanism that, despite its association with the collapse of Kwamah Nkumah’s Ghanaian revolution, has not failed as an idea. Commentators have realised, to some extent, the ambiguities of Du Bois’ Pan Africanism. However, they have not shown how Du Bois’ deployment of the concept opens up a more radical political thinking. This Essay will trace the various twists and turns of Du Bois’ Pan Africanism as narrated in the text Dusk of Dawn. Pan Africanism demands a social, economic, and political revolution that goes beyond the civil liberties struggle and its focus on constitutional recognition. In leaving America for Ghana, Du Bois committed himself to a very specific understanding of the African revolution. Using the ideas of Etienne Balibar and Jacques Rancière, this Essay will argue that Du Bois’ Pan Africanism evoked energies of revolution that point at an unfinished, rather than failed, radical project

Like a dog: constitutionalism in J.M. Coetzee’s "Disgrace"

Coetzee’s Disgrace can be read as an engagement with the post apartheid constitution of South Africa. However, the novel does not focus on a legal text. It draws attention to what could be called an ethics of social being or the psychic life of constitutionalism. Disgrace thus resonates with the broader argument that a constitution is a complex of political, social and psychic economies that are bound up with (and in certain senses prior) to positive law. Any proper elaboration of these themes cannot be made from within the terms of legal discourse itself, at least as presently composed. This paper is therefore an exercise in deconstruction or, an attempt to develop a “language that is foreign to what [a] community can already hear or understand only too well”; a practice that will allow a cultural unconscious to speak through the text of Coetzee’s novel. But this problematic is not simply a question of language. An ethics of social being is also necessary. A culture must be held responsible for the symbolic forms of the secrets that it holds. How can we think about this strange matter? Our first task will be to engage with notions of being and social life that have not generally been deployed in constitutional discourse. We will then see how these terms relate to a psychoanalytic account of constitution at both a political and a personal level. The final section of this paper will be a reading of Disgrace

Equity and the social reproduction of capital

This essay draws on Marxist thinking to argue that equity is essential to the social reproduction of finance capital. Equitable doctrines can be seen as assemblages that define and reproduce the way in which money, people and property relate to each other. Assemblages of equity/capital are ideological complexes – ways of being, thinking and acting that effectively legitimize a particular mode of production. The role that equity plays in the functioning of a regime of profit making is effectively concealed from the student of the subject. Feminist scholars have perhaps been the most successful in drawing attention to the “hidden” patriarchal logic of the subject. However, unless feminist insights are linked to an understanding of the social reproduction of capital, we cannot appreciate how modes of capital accumulation operate under cover of the legitimizing effects of equitable doctrines

Poverty law and legal activism: lives that slide out of view

Linking critical legal thinking to constitutional scholarship and a practical tradition of US lawyering that is orientated around anti-poverty activism, this book offers an original, revisionist account of contemporary jurisprudence, legal theory and legal activism. The book argues that we need to think in terms of a much broader inheritance for critical legal thinking that derives from the social ethics of the progressive era, new left understandings of ‘creative democracy’ and radical theology. To this end, it puts jurisprudence and legal theory in touch with recent scholarship on the American left; and, indeed, with attempts to recover the legacies of progressive era thinking, the civil rights struggle and the Great Society. Focusing on the theory and practice of poverty law in the period stretching from the mid-1960s to the present day, it argues that at the heart of both critical and liberal thinking is an understanding of the lawyer as an ethical actor: inspired by faith or politics to appreciate the potential and limits of law in the struggle against economic inequality

‘We Want to Live’: metaphor and ethical life in F.W. Maitland’s Jurisprudence of the Trust

This essay argues that reading F. W. Maitland's jurisprudence of the trust alongside Hegel's philosophy of social recognition offers insights into the way in which metaphors 'structure' the modes of ethical life that inform legal and social institutions. Conventional ways of reading Maitland (and John Neville Figgis) have obscured the affinities their work shares with Hegel, and limited the impact of a way of thinking about law and society

Worms: primordial jurisprudence and viral being

Dasein is radically open to the possibility of viral infection. Thinking through Dasein’s ruined constitution is the task for primordial jurisprudence. Juris-prudence is etymologically the ‘seeing’ of iuris: that which binds or obligates. Prudence is the projection forward from the condition of being bound. Juris-prudence is, of course, conventionally focused on the ways in which legal and moral/ethical rules bind us, but the wager of this paper is that we are bound in a more primordial way to our condition: a condition that is radically open to ill health and to reliance on others. However, this re-reading of Being and Time is not just an exercise in a ‘typology of death’(Heidegger, 1962, 291; 292-3). Viral being connects us with countless others. In the most extended sense, viral being can be seized by Dasein as a resolute response to common suffering. Dasein’s resolute response will enable the link to be made between Heidegger’s notion of conscience, the primordial meaning of hospital and juris-prudence. Primordial juris-prudence thus seeks to understand the ontological articulation of a mode of public responsibility or solidarity for the burden borne by all Dasein

“You May Find Yourselves Changed in Unexpected Ways:” literature and poverty law

This paper outlines a tradition of Anglo-American literature that stretches from Jane Addams to Jack London and George Orwell. Locating poverty law scholarship in this tradition of poverty writing has important implications for how we understand lawyering for the poor. Borrowing the idea of unlearning from Addams, this paper argues that reading literature is central to the moral task of self-definition. It may be that poverty lawyering is best understood as a peculiar continuation of a tradition of unlearning that defines the problematic of poverty writing. Orwell's work is central to understanding unlearning. In order to develop these arguments, the latter part of this paper focuses on the work of Lucie E. White. Whilst White's concepts of honesty, self-criticism, and poverty lawyering as “piece work” carry forward elements of unlearning, her engagement with poverty is not pushed far enough. Questions remain about the extent to which understandings of poverty law allow the work on the self to engage with the abjection of being down and out and the politics of socialism that it throws up