The Semiotic Fractures of Vulnerable Bodies: Resistance to the Gendering of Legal Subjects

While the turn to vulnerability in law responds to a recurrent critique by feminist scholars on the disembodiment of legal personhood, this article suggests that the mobilization of vulnerability in the criminal courts does not necessarily offer female drug mules a direct path to justice. Through an analysis of sentencing appeals of female drug mules in England and Wales, this article presents a feminist critique of the dispositif of the person and its relation to vulnerability. Discourses on drug mules’ vulnerability mobilize the trope of the colonial victim in need of protection, which is often translated into legal mercy. But mercy is rather an expression of biopower which inscribes not only fragility onto the bodies of drug mules by figuring them as exemplar paradigms of colonial subjectivity, but also reinvigorates the dispositif of gender implicit in the legal person. In this set-up, it would appear as if law and politics totalize the registers of life, in this case the contours of vulnerable body. The article suggests we must revisit the image of the wounded body in order to carve out a space for resistance. Drawing on Elaine Scarry and Judith Butler, it suggests vulnerable bodies are marked by a semiotic openness, which renders them subject to appropriation but also able to signify the precarity produced by the law through their resistance to representation

Moralisering i hverdagslivet

Jeg vil i det følgende ved hjelp av flere eksempler fra hverdagslivet diskutere det jeg oppfatter som kostnadene ved å definere moralisering på en ensidig negativ måte. Å anse moralisering – som jeg vil definere som kritikk med moralsk fortegn av andres atferd – som per definisjon negativt, som i utgangspunktet problematisk, innebærer å skjære all slik kritikk over en kam. Det som da går tapt, er distinksjonen mellom tilfeller der kritikk er velbegrunnet og tilfeller der den ikke er det. Kostnadene jeg sikter til ved tendensen til at enhver slik kritikk avfeies som utidig, og det helt uten å gå inn i substansen/saken, er av både moralsk og sosial art: dels en kostnad i form av en lowering of expectations, den moralske standarden vi alle bidrar til å opprettholde for samfunnet vi tilhører, og dels en kostnad i form av å svekke limet i de sosiale relasjonene vi inngår i

Arne Johan Vetlesen (ed.): Nærhetsetikk.

Anmeldes af Kirsten Andersen

"The intellectual in Auschwitz: Between vulnerability and resistance"

The significance of being an intellectual when taken prisoner and sent to a concentration camp by the Nazis is rarely discussed – instead, the importance of being either a Jew or a political prisoner (say, a German communist) is highlighted. By contrast, Jean Amery’s recollections of being tortured and sent to Auschwitz concentrate on his self-understanding as an intellectual. What difference does the identity and outlook as an intellectual make in the extreme circumstances found in Auschwitz? The paper discusses Amery’s views on this question, invoking that of others who have also addressed it, like Primo Levi and Theodor Adorno