going away

Travelling, then holiday, then Violence conference. Normal service will be resumed around 27 July, from MELBOURNE!!!

Back in Bristol 29 August.

violence 2

so now I am reading Agamben's State of Exception, and where he writes

Obviously, it is not a question here of a transitional phase that never achieves its end, nor of a process of infinite deconstruction that, in maintaining the law in a spectral life, can no longer get to the bottom of it. The decisive point here is that the law - no longer practiced, but studied - is not justice, but only the gate that leads to it. What opens a passage towards justice is not the erasure of law, but its deactivation and inactivity - that is, another use of the law

I have written in the margin YES YES - LUCAN.

Given that what I am doing is making notes for my paper on violence and law in Lucan, I really wish I had the slightest idea what I'd been thinking when I wrote that --

violence

I'm starting work on the paper I'm giving in Brisbane on 23 July (yes, yes, about time too) and am rereading Benjamin's 'Critique of Violence', the 1921 essay where he makes a distinction between 'lawmaking violence' and 'law-preserving violence'. (I think he is actually still friends with Schmitt at this point,* and there's a strong similarity between some of the ideas here and some of the ideas in The Nomos of the Earth.) Anyway, Benjamin is talking about how 'a totally nonviolent resolution of conflicts can never lead to a legal contract' (because any legal contract 'confers on both parties the right to take recourse to violence in some form against the other, should he break the contract'), and he goes on to say:

When the consciousness of the latent presence of violence in a legal institution disappears, the institution falls into decay. In our time, parliaments provide an example of this. They offer the familiar, woeful spectacle because they have not remained conscious of the revolutionary forces to which they owe their existence.

I have no idea whether I agree with that or not.

(All quotes from Benjamin, 'Critique of Violence' [1921], in Reflections, ed. Peter Demetz [New York: Schocken, 1978], pp.277-300).

(I should actually be blogging about this conference, which I went to last weekend and which was marvellous, but in the countdown to setting off to Oz next Wednesday - by which time I have to have written the Introduction to Now and Rome, checked all the Latin in the manuscript, sent it off to beta-readers, and written the Brisbane paper, not to mention dyeing my hair and going to the spa with my best friend H - things are getting rather squeezed.)

*I looked this up on Google and found this extract from an essay by Horst Bredekamp in Critical Inquiry 25:2 (1999), which has some of the details about Benjamin's relationship with Schmitt, including the letter Benjamin sent Schmitt together with a copy of the Trauerspiel (The Origin of the German Mourning Play). Wikipedia (yes, I know, shush) says that, according to Agamben (States of Exception, pp.52-55),

Schmitt's conceptualization of the "state of exception" as belonging to the core-concept of sovereignty was a response to Walter Benjamin's concept of a "pure" or "revolutionary" violence [in 'Critique of Violence'], which didn't enter into any relationship whatsoever with right.

t rex on schmitt

As ever, Dinosaur Comics has pre-empted my thoughts.

on my holidays

Hey! I just got back from a weekend in Antwerp, staying with my and J's friend Inez, who - awesomely - is a nomadic writer going from place to place, residency to residency, across Europe and the States and India. And she just sent us this link to a YouTube video of an interview she did for Antwerp TV, which shows the very flat that we stayed in with her, as well bits and pieces of the city, which is beautiful.

(It was a great weekend, thanks. We had the obligatory long discussion about Kids Today And Their Essays, which was highly enjoyable, and also some fantastic rambling talk about science and religion and Communism over tapas, and J and Inez are both writing memoirs so I got to eavesdrop on a lot of writers' talk, which I enjoy. And we drank Belgian beer and looked at statues and parks with baby bunnies, and stunning Art Nouveau architecture, and I bought some new jeans, so that was a successful trip.)

bit of cyberactivism

Also, I'd ask everyone living in the UK to consider writing to their MPs and/or the Home Secretary about Marina Silva and Rosa de Perez, two women working as cleaners at SOAS (part of the University of London) who are facing deportation: several of their colleagues have already been deported, in some cases breaking up family relationships here in the UK. The deportations were carried out in an unnecessarily aggressive and possibly illegal way, and timed to coincide with a planned rally by the cleaners in support of their recently sacked Union rep. In a newspaper article here, the Labour MP John McDowell says:

As living wage campaigns are building in strength, we are increasingly seeing the use of immigration statuses to attack workers fighting against poverty wages and break trade union organising.

The message is that they are happy to employ migrant labour on poverty wages, but if you complain they will send you back home. It is absolutely shameful.

There is lots of information about the case here, with details about how to contact your MP and the UK Border Agency. The academic solidarity statement is kind of heartening.

deglobalization

This is interesting. More a note to myself to read it properly when my brane hasn't just been clubbed to bits by a three-hour exams board meeting (though actually it was infinitely smooth, efficient and pleasant, but still three hours long. Also I was up at 6am because I stayed in London last night and had to get back to Bristol for a 9:30 meeting).