Dear colleagues,
I am pleased to invite you to the next in the series of Public Law and Legal Theory seminars run by the Gilbert + Tobin Centre of Public Law. The next seminar will be given by Dr Charles Barbour from the University of Western Sydney. He will be speaking on the topic of 'Action and Ambivalence: Arendt and Rancière on rights and law'. The seminar will be on Thursday 7 October in the Staff Common Room on Level 2 of the Law School from 1.00-2.00pm. There will be a light lunch available for those attending the seminar. A brief bio and abstract appear below. Best, Ben Abstract: This paper begins by drawing our attention to a fundamental tension in the political and legal thought of Hannah Arendt. For Arendt, the purpose of both politics and law, perhaps the only reason humans live together at all, is the experience of freedom, which is manifest in our capacity to act, or our inherent ability to break with an established sequence of events and begin something new. That said, while on the one hand Arendt insists that such freedom relies on the prior establishment of what she calls a 'politically organized space', or an institutional stage on which a plurality of actors might meet and engage one another in word and deed, on the other hand, and at the same time, it would seem to be the prior condition for such a space, or the prior condition for its constitution. Freedom is, in this sense, both inside and outside of political and legal order. Rather than seeking to criticize, much less dismiss, Arendt's work on the basis of this tension, I propose to treat it as the key to understanding her specific insights into the law - an area that, until very recently, most Arendt scholars have conspicuously avoided, preferring instead to debate her approach to the relationship between politics and ethics. If Arendt remains ambivalent as to where freedom might be located (especially with respect to law), this is, I maintain, because the phenomenon itself is fundamentally ambivalent, and impossible finally to locate. For Arendt, I propose, an act is free precisely insofar as it challenges established understandings of the differences between law and lawlessness, order and disobedience. And in this sense, Arendt finds an ally rather than a foe in one of her most vociferous contemporary critics, namely Jacques Ranciere, who conceives of the political agent as 'the part that has no part', or the one who splits the line that separates subject and citizen. Bio: Charles Barbour is Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Western Sydney, and a member of the Center for Citizenship and Public Policy. Along with a number of book chapters, he has published in such journals as 'Law, Culture and the Humanities', 'Theory, Culture and Society', 'Educational Philosophy and Theory', 'Philosophy and Social Criticism', 'Parallax', 'Telos', and 'The Journal of Classical Sociology'. He has co-edited two collections: 'After Sovereignty: On the Question of Political Beginnings' (with George Pavlich, Routledge 2009), and 'Action and Appearance: Politics and the Ethics of Writing in Hannah Arendt' (with Anna Yeatman, Phillip Hansen and Magdalena Zolkos, Continuum, 2010). Along with his abiding interest in social theory, especially Marx, his current research falls into two broad areas: contemporary theories of equality, and the question of mendacity or lying. Dr Ben Golder * Lecturer * Faculty of Law * The University of New South Wales * UNSW Sydney NSW 2052, Australia * Phone: +61 (2) 9385 1843 * Fax: +61 (2) 9385 1175 * Website: http://www.law.unsw.edu.au/staff/GolderB/ * Some of my papers can be accessed at: http://ssrn.com/author=1207959 This email and any attachment(s) transmitted with it are intended solely for the use of the addressee(s) and may contain information that is confidential or subject to legal privilege. If you receive this email in error, please disregard the contents of the email and attachment(s), delete them and notify the sender immediately. Please note that any copying, distribution or use of this email is prohibited. Any views expressed in this message are those of the individual sender, except where the sender expressly, and with authority, states them to be the view of The University of New South Wales. Before opening any attachments, please check for viruses. UNSW ABN 57 195 873 179. CRICOS Provider No: 00098G. P Please consider the environment before printing my email.
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