Thanos Zartaloudis

Giorgio Agamben: Power, Law and the Uses of Criticism is a thorough engagement with the thought of the influential Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben. It explores Agamben’s work on language, ontology, power, law and criticism from the 1970s to his most recent publications. Introducing Agamben's work to a readership in legal theory, as well as in the humanities and social sciences more generally, Thanos Zartaloudis argues that an adequate understanding of Agamben's Homo Sacer project requires an attention to his earlier philosophical writings on language, ontology, power and time. It is through this attentive and creative analysis of Agamben's work that Zartaloudis here presents a rethinking of the ideas of justice and criticism.

Power, Law and the Uses of Criticism

Giorgio Agamben

This book is a collection of essays honouring and engaging with the work of the late Professor Patrick McAuslan. It is a collection that narrates, analyses and critiques McAuslan’s contributions, as well as offering substantive perspectives on how his work has impacted the legal fields in which he was involved: including those of land law, urban planning law and policy, land use and participation in developing countries, democratic constitutionalism, and legal education. The essays present McAuslan’s contributions in the contexts in which they emerged, and according to both the circumstances and motivations that shaped them, as well as the challenges they encountered. It thus provides an ideal point of engagement for scholars, students and policy makers that have already interacted with McAuslan’s ideas and work, or who have yet to do so.

Essays on the Contributions of Patrick McAuslan

Land Law and Urban Policy in Context

This collection of articles brings together a selection of previously published work on Agambens thought in relation to law and gathered from within the legal field and theory in particular. The volume offers an exemplary range of varied readings, reflections and approaches which are of interest to readers, students and researchers of Agambens law-related work.

Agamben and Law

Peter Goodrich

Returning to the map of the island of utopia, this book provides a contemporary, inventive, addition to the long history of legal fictions and juristic phantasms. Progressive legal and political thinking has for long lacked a positive, let alone a bold imaginary project, an account of what improved institutions and an ameliorated environment would look like. And where better to start than with the non-laws or imaginary legislations of a realm yet to come. The Cabinet of Imaginary Laws is a collection of fictive contributions to the theme of conceiving imaginary laws in the vivid vein of jurisliterary invention. Disparate in style and diverse in genres of writing and performative expression, the celebrated and unknown, venerable and youthful authors write new laws. Thirty-five dissolute scholars, impecunious authors and dyspeptic artists from a variety of fields including law, film, science, history, philosophy, political science, aesthetics, architecture and the classics become, for a brief and inspiring instance, legislators of impossible norms. The collection provides an extra-ordinary range of inspired imaginings of other laws. This momentary community of radial thought conceives of a wild variety of novel critical perspectives. The contributions aim to inspire reflection on the role of imagination in the study and writing of law. Verse, collage, artworks, short stories, harangues, lists, and other pleas, reports and pronouncements revivify the sense of law as the vehicle of poetic justice and as an art that instructs and constructs life. Aimed at an intellectual audience disgruntled with the negativity of critique and the narrowness of the disciplines, this book will appeal especially to theorists, lawyers, scholars and a general public concerned with the future of decaying laws and an increasingly derelict legal system.

The Cabinet of Imaginary Laws

Aristide Antonas

The concept of Urban Protocol names a strategy concerning the condition of Athens today. It would serve as an experimental pseudo-methodology that faces the condition of the city. The Urban Protocols are meant to introduce legal temporary occupancies of the abandoned city center that will be accepted and controlled by a municipal authority; the purpose of an Urban Protocol would be to establish cluster-like micro-legislative constructions with communal functions. Urban Protocols are formed as systems of rules. Using a video game terminology we may say that the Urban Protocols are “play-tested” in the city, performed and improved via Internet. The system of rules they represent could be transformed and re-established easily. The Urban Protocol challenges the relation between the city and the Internet; the concept of user would function better for its performance than the one of citizen. Nevertheless its most sophisticated part would have to deal with the relation between user and citizen. Its most challenging legislative part is ruled by the relationship between the Internet and the state; the Internet is understood as the quick functional basis for the formation, installation and function of an Urban Protocol. With texts by Athena Athanasiou, Ethel Baraona Pohl, Keller Easterling, César Reyes Nájera, Andreas Rumpfhuber, Pelin Tan.

Thanos Zartaloudis

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