Legal Oracularism and Theological Prophetism. Fleshly Silences Across Memories and Traditions

Pólemos ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Cristina Costantini

AbstractThis essay aims at providing a critical glance on the legal “fault lines” between voice and silence; utterance and dumbness; disclosure and mystery; discernability and ambiguity. At a theoretical level, the arguments suggested intend to innovate the conventional discourse on legal traditions, focusing on their proper and complex morphosyntax. Specifically, the main purpose is to call forth the haunted ventriloquism which animates and informs legal traditions in order to disfigure the ideological image portrayed for a legitimating project. On this ground what is proposed is an original understanding of the politics of memories, conceived as the inner force, which codifies heterogeneous canons of commemoration. The poles of usual contrapositions (memory/forgetting; remembrance/silencing) are questioned and scrutinized; the multiple facets of the voices of memory and the silence of oblivion are taxonomically typified. The proposed paradigm is consequently applied to the particularities of the English Legal Tradition, emphasizing how the culture of legal revelling dramatized the ambiguities concealed in the speakable word of Law: on the one hand, the internal articulation of these sumptuous festivities, which structurally reflected the osmotic threshold between speech and faintness, utterance and dumbness; on the other, it has been noted that Revels made patent the meaningful silence implied in the proper other face of the conventional appearance of Law, that is in its suspension or in its exception. Conclusive remarks are devoted to analyse the nexus among word, interpretation, and violence in Robert Cover’s thought. In this perspective the essay debates on the silent sacrifice behind the supposed creative act of judicial interpretation and intellectually claims for a counter-resistant act of unveiling heterodoxy.

Author(s):  
Emilios Christodoulidis ◽  
Johan van der Walt

This chapter traces the tradition of critical theory in Europe in the way it has informed and framed legal thought. A key, and distinctive, element of this legal tradition is that it characteristically connects to the state as constitutive reference; in other words it understands the institution of law as that which organizes and mediates the relation of the state to civil society. The other constitutive reference is political economy, a reference that typically grounds this tradition of thinking about the law in the materiality of the practices of social production and reproduction. It is in these connections, of the institution of law to the domains of the state and of the political economy, that critical legal theory locates the function of law, and the emancipatory potentially it affords on the one hand, and the obstacles to emancipation it imposes, on the other.


2015 ◽  
Vol 95 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 145-172
Author(s):  
Francesco Alicino

Far from taking place in a vacuum, in Morocco the 2011 constitutional revision was assessed both from an internal political perspective and within the broader context of what has come to be called the ‘Arab Spring’. In this manner, the 2011 Moroccan Constitution has indeed marked an unprecedented change, declaring the State’s adherence to the protection of human rights, which are strictly related to the Western history of ‘secular constitutionalism’. Yet, in order to better understand the constitutional transition, one has to consider the religious characteristic of Moroccan monarchy which, on the other hand, makes it a prototype of a ‘globalizing monarchy’, especially within the context ofmena(Middle East and Nord African) region.The Moroccan constitutional transition can in fact be seen as a peculiar tool for taking into account endogenous and exogenous factors respectively. On the one hand, it allows us to investigate how an Islamic specific legal tradition interacts with some principles that represent the pillars of constitutional democracies and that, as such, have been universally recognised; at least in the West. On the other, the exceptionalism of ‘Moroccan spring’ lets us to evaluate how these very principles are contextualized in a peculiar context ofmenaregion; by which, for the same reasons, one can draw more general considerations concerning the relationship between the pressing process of globalization and post-colonial Muslim-majority States.


Author(s):  
Armine Garibyan

The relationship between sentence processing and cognitive demand has received a lot of attention in the past decades. In valency theory, some elements of the sentence are determined by the verbs either in terms of their form or by their presence (Herbst & Schüller 2008). It has to be said that little attention has been paid to the processing of such fundamental categories in the theory of syntax. On the one hand, this is remarkable since given the amount of research, we still do not know whether this distinction is psychologically real, or whether it only serves a lexicographic and pedagogical purpose. On the other hand, there is a consensus among linguists about the problematic character of the distinction itself even on a more theoretical level (Dowty 2000; Herbst & Schüller 2008). Therefore, this study attempts to explore whether complements and adjuncts are associated with different kinds of processing. To answer the research questions, an experiment consisting in a mouse-controlled reading task has been designed. To the best of our knowledge, this is a new method in psycholinguistic research. The paper presents the results of a pilot study.


2019 ◽  
pp. 38-58
Author(s):  
Frederic Wehrey ◽  
Anouar Boukhars

This chapter takes Morocco as a case study to investigate the bifurcating paths that the most dominant strands of Salafism have taken in the kingdom. Special attention is paid to how the Arab uprisings of 2011 expedited the mutations, paradoxes, and adaptations of quietist Salafism. On the one hand, Morocco’s “Arab” Spring nudged Salafis toward political engagement as a means to protect their interests. On the other hand, the subsequent derailment of the Arab uprisings exposed major fault lines within the Salafi community. The chapter illustrates this great rift by tracing the course taken by two of the most prominent figures of this current and the critical stages that have influenced their ideological postures, relations with the ruling regime, and adaptability to local and regional changes.


2015 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 63-88
Author(s):  
Francesco Alicino

In this article the author analyses the influence of Islamic references in the 2011 Moroccan constitutional reform that, far from taking place in a vacuum, was informed both by an internal political perspective and by the broader context of what has come to be called the “Arab Spring”. It will be outlined that, on the one hand, Islamic legal tradition interacts with Western legal principles; while on the other hand the exceptionalism of the “Moroccan Spring” reveals that those very principles are contextualized and adapted within this executive Islamic monarchy.


2019 ◽  
Vol 67 (5) ◽  
pp. 97
Author(s):  
Paulina Mazurkiewicz

This article concerns the designation of civil unions expressed in French and Polish legal language, serving a dual purpose: epistemological and analytical. On the one hand, the relationship between conceptualization and the definition of real entities in the terminological perspective will be examined, as, indeed, terminological investigations, including jurilinguistics, allows for examining the relationship between real entities, concepts as mental constructions, and terms which designate them in languages for specific purposes. On the other hand, the designations of civil unions in the French and Polish law will be compared, demonstrating that sometimes they result from the same legal tradition and, in other cases, reflect cultural changes that inform the coinage of new terminological units.


Global Jurist ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ugo Mattei ◽  
Liu Guanghua ◽  
Emanuele Ariano

AbstractThis Article has a twofold purpose. On the one hand, it offers comparative materials for an informed discussion of COVID-determined emergency law in China and Italy by assessing its normative implications and political genealogy. On the other hand, it explores the essential contiguity between the ‘state of exception’ triggered by the pandemic and the possible geopolitical shifts in global legal hegemony in the actual phase of surveillance capitalism which is witnessing a decline of law as a form of social organization and its replacement by the predictive models elaborated by technology. In this respect, the traditional Western iconography has long described the Chinese legal tradition as a “law without law”, a despotic regime with intrusive population surveillance whose distance from the Western paradigm is deemed almost unbridgeable. And yet the legal response to coronavirus both in Europe and in the U.S. somewhat replicates the allegedly distant Chinese model in terms of restrictions and surveillance mechanisms which are being deployed to counter the crisis in the face of a formal commitment to the rule of law. This Article concludes that the emerging pre-eminence of the “rule of technology” over the “rule of law” in a critical event of historic proportions like a pandemic should and will set the future agenda of comparative studies in a double direction. On the one hand it calls for a truly critical reconsideration of role of law in society which in turn impels to rethink the hold of the liberal constitutional model and the obsolescence of traditional legal taxonomies. On the other hand, it might point to the emergence of an unexpected Chinese legal leadership, determined by the progressive undoing of the Western legal and political narratives whose backbone has been relentlessly eroded by decades of neoliberalism and populism.


Author(s):  
Barbara Bombi

This book is concerned with the modes and procedures of Anglo-papal diplomacy in the period 1305–60, when diplomatic affairs between England and the papacy intensified following the transfer of the papal curia to southern France in 1305 and on account of the on-going Anglo-French hostilities, which resulted in the outbreak of the Hundred Years’ War in 1337. On the one hand, the book investigates how diplomatic and administrative practices developed in England and at the papal curia from a comparative perspective, whilst, on the other, it questions the legacy and impact of international and domestic conflicts on diplomatic and administrative practices. In Part I, the book explores how foreign and diplomatic relations, conducted through both official and unofficial diplomatic communications among polities, prompted the need to adapt and ‘translate’ different traditions in order to forge a ‘shared language of diplomacy’. This was achieved thanks to the adaptation of house styles, formularies, and ceremonial practices, as well as through the contribution of intermediaries and diplomatic agents acquainted with different diplomatic and legal traditions. Part II of the book further assesses the impact of political change and conflict on administrative and diplomatic practices by means of four relevant case studies.


2021 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-76
Author(s):  
Dimitra Melissaropoulou ◽  
Christos Papanagiotou

Abstract This paper addresses variation and change in the realization of superlative constructions in the light of the evidence provided by Modern Greek dialectal variation as a window into the study of the organization of grammar. Dialectal data show that analyticity prevails in the realization of relative comparative constructions, while absolute ones seem to resist more persistently due to their high relevance with another morphological category, evaluative intensification. Our findings argue in favour of the strong interplay among all three processes, viewed as realizations of the conceptual category of gradation, accounted for in terms of a continuum. The proposed organization captures the strong interplay between intensification and absolute superlatives on the one hand, while relative and absolute superlative formations on the other. On a theoretical level, this account could contribute further to important issues such as the controversial status of comparison and evaluation in grammar, which may differ cross-linguistically, suggesting that a combined account of the three processes might prove more adequate.


1975 ◽  
Vol 26 ◽  
pp. 395-407
Author(s):  
S. Henriksen

The first question to be answered, in seeking coordinate systems for geodynamics, is: what is geodynamics? The answer is, of course, that geodynamics is that part of geophysics which is concerned with movements of the Earth, as opposed to geostatics which is the physics of the stationary Earth. But as far as we know, there is no stationary Earth – epur sic monere. So geodynamics is actually coextensive with geophysics, and coordinate systems suitable for the one should be suitable for the other. At the present time, there are not many coordinate systems, if any, that can be identified with a static Earth. Certainly the only coordinate of aeronomic (atmospheric) interest is the height, and this is usually either as geodynamic height or as pressure. In oceanology, the most important coordinate is depth, and this, like heights in the atmosphere, is expressed as metric depth from mean sea level, as geodynamic depth, or as pressure. Only for the earth do we find “static” systems in use, ana even here there is real question as to whether the systems are dynamic or static. So it would seem that our answer to the question, of what kind, of coordinate systems are we seeking, must be that we are looking for the same systems as are used in geophysics, and these systems are dynamic in nature already – that is, their definition involvestime.


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