scholarly journals Uncertain Credit: Melville's Affective Economies

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Alistair Murray
Keyword(s):  
Literary Texts ◽  
Legal Authority ◽  
Confidence Man ◽  
Conditions Of Possibility ◽  
Contractual Relations ◽  
The Law ◽  
Benito Cereno

<p>Despite taking place in putatively “lawless” settings, Melville’s maritime fiction maps complex economies of obligation: characters draw up contracts, extend credit, and broker promissory exchanges for goods among themselves, in spite of the absence of any state or legal authority which would enforce their agreements and thereby guarantee the speculative values they call into being. Instead of being underwritten by the law, these contractual relations are characterised by their affective conditions of possibility. In these works, transacting business with strangers in mobile and itinerant spaces requires characters to develop ways of reading the character and creditworthiness of others in order to suppress suspicion and install confidence in its place. Taking “Benito Cereno” (1855) and The Confidence-Man (1857) as its key texts, this thesis tracks these economies of obligation as they emerge in and around Melville’s maritime fictions, which solicit the credit and trust of their readers while continually revising and renegotiating the terms on which that credit is to be extended. By interpolating spurious or broken contracts between characters into the structure of their narratives, these texts foreground the unstable or even illegible terms of the contract which literary texts make with their readers.</p>

scholarly journals Uncertain Credit: Melville's Affective Economies

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Alistair Murray
Keyword(s):  
Literary Texts ◽  
Legal Authority ◽  
Confidence Man ◽  
Conditions Of Possibility ◽  
Contractual Relations ◽  
The Law ◽  
Benito Cereno

<p>Despite taking place in putatively “lawless” settings, Melville’s maritime fiction maps complex economies of obligation: characters draw up contracts, extend credit, and broker promissory exchanges for goods among themselves, in spite of the absence of any state or legal authority which would enforce their agreements and thereby guarantee the speculative values they call into being. Instead of being underwritten by the law, these contractual relations are characterised by their affective conditions of possibility. In these works, transacting business with strangers in mobile and itinerant spaces requires characters to develop ways of reading the character and creditworthiness of others in order to suppress suspicion and install confidence in its place. Taking “Benito Cereno” (1855) and The Confidence-Man (1857) as its key texts, this thesis tracks these economies of obligation as they emerge in and around Melville’s maritime fictions, which solicit the credit and trust of their readers while continually revising and renegotiating the terms on which that credit is to be extended. By interpolating spurious or broken contracts between characters into the structure of their narratives, these texts foreground the unstable or even illegible terms of the contract which literary texts make with their readers.</p>

“An Unquestionable Source?”

2013 ◽  
Vol 68 (2) ◽  
pp. 145-179
Author(s):  
John Cyril Barton
Keyword(s):  
South America ◽  
Source Material ◽  
Travel Narrative ◽  
Old World ◽  
Spanish Inquisition ◽  
Moby Dick ◽  
Confidence Man ◽  
Benito Cereno ◽  
The Town ◽  
Parallel Action

This essay is the first to examine Melville’s “The Town-Ho’s Story” (Chapter 54 of Moby-Dick [1851]) in relation to W. B. Stevenson’s then-popular-but-now-forgotten British travel narrative, Twenty Years’ Residence in South America (1825). Drawing from suggestive circumstances and parallel action unfolding in each, I make a case for the English sailor’s encounter with the Spanish Inquisition in Lima as important source material for the Limanian setting that frames Melville’s tale. In bringing to light a new source for Moby-Dick, I argue that Melville refracts Stevenson’s actual encounter with the Inquisition in Lima to produce a symbolic, mock confrontation with Old-World authority represented in the inquisitorial Dons and the overall context of the story. Thus, the purpose of the essay is twofold: first, to recover an elusive source for understanding the allusive framework of “The Town-Ho’s Story,” a setting that has perplexed some of Melville’s best critics; and second, to illuminate Melville’s use of Lima and the Inquisition as tropes crucial for understanding a larger symbolic confrontation between the modern citizen (or subject) and despotic authority that plays out not only in Moby-Dick but also in other works such as Mardi (1849), White-Jacket (1850), “Benito Cereno” (1855), Clarel (1876), and The Confidence-Man (1857), wherein the last of which the author wrote on the frontispiece of a personal copy, “Dedicated to Victims of Auto da Fe.”

Epilogue

2015 ◽  
pp. 334-344
Author(s):  
Yaron Harel
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Ottoman Empire ◽  
Government Official ◽  
Free Expression ◽  
Legal Authority ◽  
Religious Leadership ◽  
Jewish Communities ◽  
Administrative Functions ◽  
The Law ◽  
Official Recognition

This epilogue studies how the Young Turk Revolution further weakened both Jewish autonomy within the Ottoman Empire and, along with growing secularization, the official recognition and legal authority hitherto accorded to the law of the Torah and to the religious leadership. In the controversies that broke out after the Young Turk Revolution, the call to remove the chief rabbis in a number of Jewish communities drew on revolutionary, reformist, and Enlightenment arguments, including the idea of free expression. Struggles over power in the community began to assume the character of a confrontation between those who were defined as enlightened liberals and their opponents, who were seen as benighted conservatives. Ultimately, the ‘secularization of the rabbinate’ — that is, the involvement of the ḥakham bashi in political matters and his role as a government official fulfilling explicitly administrative functions — led to a ‘cheapening of the rabbinate’. Modernization, and especially the expansion of education, disseminated ideas of secularism and individualism, and facilitated the emergence of new kinds of leader. During the first decade of the twentieth century, patterns of leadership that had been accepted in the Ottoman Empire for generations, including the placing of a religious figure at the head of the community, were increasingly perceived as outdated.

The Development of Legal Reasoning

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tom R. Tyler ◽  
Rick Trinkner
Keyword(s):  
Moral Development ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Legal Reasoning ◽  
Developmental Model ◽  
Legal Authority ◽  
Legal Institutions ◽  
Legal Socialization ◽  
The Law ◽  
Legal Judgments ◽  
The Relationship

The cognitive developmental model of legal socialization is discussed in chapter 5. This approach emphasizes the development of legal reasoning and focuses on how such thinking shapes legal judgments about the purpose of laws, how legal authority should be used, and whether people should feel obligated to obey legal institutions. Basically, legal reasoning provides a framework to understand the nature of society and the requirements of social order, leading to judgments about the legitimacy of the law. Building on Kohlberg’s work in moral development, the legal reasoning perspective argues that people develop increasingly abstract and sophisticated models of the relationship between society and the law with respect to the position and duties of the law and the responsibilities and obligations of citizens. This provides a basis for understanding when to follow appropriate laws and when to violate laws viewed as unjust or unprincipled.

Derrida and the Ethics of the Im-possible

2008 ◽  
Vol 38 (2) ◽  
pp. 270-290 ◽  
Author(s):  
François Raffoul
Keyword(s):  
Moral Decision ◽  
Conditions Of Possibility ◽  
The Law

AbstractDerrida often insists that ethics must be the experience and encounter of a certain impossible. A proposition all the more troubling, as it is proposed by Derrida in the context of a return precisely to the conditions of possibility of ethics. It will appear that returning to the possibilities of ethics implies a return to its limits, to its aporias, which are both constitutive and incapacitating, possibilizing and impossibilizing. The purpose of this paper is to begin exploring this aporetic structure of ethics and to identify how it is tied to the impossible. I will pursue this inquiry by reconstituting how Derrida appropriates Heidegger's expression of "possibility of the impossible," and by reconstituting the aporias of the law, of moral decision, of responsibility, and of an ethics of hospitality as welcome of the event of otherness.

Conflict-of-Law Regulation of Obligations, Arising from Faulty Negotiations of Treaties (culpa in contrahendo) in Russia and the European Union

2016 ◽  
Vol 4 (5) ◽  
pp. 0-0
Author(s):  
Ольга Муратова ◽  
Olga Muratova
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Analysis ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
The European Union ◽  
Applicable Law ◽  
Culpa In Contrahendo ◽  
Contractual Relations ◽  
The Law ◽  
Contractual Obligations ◽  
Law Regulation ◽  
Conflict Of Law

The article covers the questions of comparative analysis of conflict-of-law regulation of obligations, arising from faulty negotiations of treaties in the Russian legislation and the European law. Such regulation is envisaged in article 12221 of the Civil Code of the Russian Federation and in article 12 of the Regulation (EC) No 864/2007 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 11 July 2007 on the law applicable to non-contractual obligations (Rome II). The author considers conflict-of-law regulation of pre-contractual relations from the point of view of the following aspects: possibility of applying the agreement about the law chosen by the parties to regulate their pre-contractual relations; applying the contractual connecting factor to determine the law applicable to precontractual relations; exploration of other connecting factors applicable to the precontractual relations in case of impossibility to determine the applicable law on the basis of the contractual connecting factor. The author’s conclusion contains the results of the comparative analysis, such as deduction of common and specific features of the Russian and European conflict-of-law regulation of the above-mentioned group of obligations. Also the author offers some recommendations on the improvement of the Russian legislation.

scholarly journals POLITIK HUKUM JUDICIAL REVIEW DI INDONESIA

2011 ◽  
Vol 11 (Edsus) ◽  
Author(s):  
Kartono Kartono
Keyword(s):  
Judicial Review ◽  
Equal Treatment ◽  
Constitutional Court ◽  
Legal Authority ◽  
Legal Certainty ◽  
Review System ◽  
Concrete Problem ◽  
The Law

Although Indonesia judicial review system is not opens the possibility of regulations review under the act against the constitution, das sollen pracitically these conditions may still occur. From political of law the legal authority of constitutional court should be able to put the interests of citizens rights that are based on the principles of recognition, guarantees, protection and legal certainty of a fair and equal treatment before the law. Given that changes in the constitution can not be done easily, then the judicial review in UUD 1945 should not be formulated too limitedly that restricting the organic law to complete and explore the authority that is adaptable to any concrete problem. Keywords: politics of law, constitutional court, UUD 1945, limitedly.

Gershom Scholem and the Mystical Foundations of Authority

Living Law ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 133-190
Author(s):  
Miguel Vatter
Keyword(s):  
Political Thought ◽  
Political Theology ◽  
Legal Authority ◽  
Death Of God ◽  
Divine Sovereignty ◽  
Mystical Tradition ◽  
The Law

This chapter is dedicated to reconstructing Gershom Scholem’s analysis of Jewish messianism in light of political theology. Scholem’s political thought is often associated with a critique of any attempt to endow Zionism with messianic traits. This chapter, instead focuses on Scholem’s conception of legal authority, arguing that his historiographical work on the mystical tradition of Judaism shows that the authority of the law is a function of the abdication of divine sovereignty and of a mystical idea of God’s Nothingness. Scholem articulates Jewish political theology around motifs found in Nietzsche’s critique of Christianity and nihilism. His is a political theology of the law after the “death of God.”

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