1,721,133 research outputs found
Governing through normality: law and the force of sameness
Get PDFThis article claims that the existence of social groups hinges on the production of
sameness, which allows distinguishing members from non-members. Sameness is described as
a shared set of standards whereby social subjects can provide mutually understandable
accounts of themselves, their practical activities and their environment. The author argues that
sameness is not an intrinsic property of groups but is produced within the very practices that it
is meant to support. By building on a Wittgensteinian interpretation of meanings and rules, he
illustrates how sameness is an intrinsic feature of the process through which the members of a
practice construct the latter by issuing its rules and establishing roles. At the same time, the
article draws on Carl Schmitt’s institutional thinking, elaborated in the 1930s, and particularly
his analysis of the relevance of normality to the existence of law. In doing so, the author claims
that sameness and normality are key, co-original aspects of there being an effective legal order.
Against this analytical background, the article goes on to claim that the legal orders typical of
liberal regimes hold sway on social practices through the protection of normality and the
revision of its boundaries as new challenges arise. As a case in point, the author examines the
hypothesis that today’s push for legal recognition of same-sex marriage could be interpreted as
an immunity response of liberal regimes to homosexual sexualities’ former critique of
traditional models of kinship
Social theory and the analysis of transactions
Get PDFThis article discusses a serious objection to social theories that claim opaque
mechanisms and hidden forces operate over social actors’ head: they bespeak the theorists’
need to confirm their presuppositions whether they are proven or disproven
by the phenomena they focus on. The author first explores the way in which Latour
has convincingly unearthed this problem. He then analyzes one of Latour’s primary
polemical targets, Bourdieu’s social theory, to show that in reality Bourdieu shared
Latour’s concerns. The article does so by exploring the nexus between Wittgenstein’s
notion of rule-following and notion of Bourdieu’s habitus. Based on this analysis, the
author elaborates on the concept of “transactions”, which draws attention to both the
actors’ discursive performances and the semiotic context where they take place. The
article concludes by illustrating the theoretical-political consequences of this methodological
commitment
La grammatica della sottrazione: il diritto come tecnica e la giuridificazione del sociale
No full textThis text offers a view of law as a special language that categorises reality and institutes a
microcosm where disputes can be settled with recourse to law’s categories. Building on Yan
Thomas’ study of the value of things in Roman law, the author claims that this understanding helps decipher the ongoing juridification of society and the reason why law is becoming a new means for individuals and collectives to make claims and construct themselves as social subject
From gay liberation to marriage equality: A political lesson to be learnt
Get PDFThis article deals with the issue of resignification to advance a hypothesis on the way in
which social practices are transformed with recourse to the language of institutions.
It first discusses the transition from gay liberation to same-sex marriage equality by
exploring the trajectory of homosexuals’ rights claims. The article continues by providing
a theoretical interpretation of what brought this shift about, that is, what the author
calls a movement ‘from the street to the court’: in both civil law and common law
jurisdictions, legal means are increasingly being used by individuals and groups to make
their claims audible to political institutions and to society at large. Then, an analysis is
offered of the shape that social struggles take when socio-political claims are articulated
with recourse to the legal language. The conclusion is that reliance on the law as a
device to achieve political goals and construct same-sex group identity risks producing
but a feeble resignification of the conventional heterosexual matrix. In light of that, a
more effective way to defy this matrix is to create awareness of what is gained and what
gets lost in becoming legally visible
Apologia dell'ambivalenza. La negoziazione come trama della politica
No full textAbstract: This article aims to analyse the relation between politics and law in the face of a growing global legal pluralism and the multifarious changes this emerging condition is bringing about in both the political and the legal fields. The author casts some light on the current crisis of politics and its increasing proclivity for relying on the activity of legal actors. He argues that, while law has long been subjected to the control of the state, to such an extent that state law was believed to be the sole valid law, today the rise of a plurality of legal sources and the emergence of new political mediators are gradually eroding the supremacy of the state and shaping novel, unexpected scenarios. The article plunges into these issues to emphasise the productive ambiguity that characterises such processes: at one and the same time they can be as potentially harmful and disempowering as able to yield a state of affairs in which social actors become the driving force of political change
Postcritica: oltre l’attore niente
No full textThis article addresses postcritique as a novel epistemological and methodological attitude that invites to get closer to how social actors put the social together. It first discusses the break with critical scholarship by juxtaposing alternative conceptions of what guides people’s conduct. While most critical approaches concern themselves with the invisible mechanisms governing social action, postcritique is more attuned to how people’s doings produce effects of connection. The article goes on to discuss the notion of theory postcritique entails. Theory becomes a form of mediation whereby the theorist enters a network and becomes one of its node. By doing so, theory makes the network transitable to those who are outside it. The conclusion insists on the transformative potential of postcritical theories as they disseminate conceptual resources of the practices they traverse and at the same time create potential connections between those who are inside and those who are outside them
Juridification as politics: an institutional view
Get PDFIn the existing literature on depoliticization, the increasing use of law as a medium to tackle social and political issues is deemed to be detrimental to the legitimacy of political processes. Against this view, I argue that this trend – which some scholars call ‘juridification’ – can be key to giving life to new forms of politics. First, I show why juridification is a political more than a legal process. Second, I illustrate recent critiques of the dangers inherent in the particular type of juridification that involves the growing use of rights. Third, while concurring with these critiques, I make the case that other facets of juridification are often underrated that can ignite a novel kind of politics. On this account, I go on by elaborating on the idea of self-organization of social groups vis-a-vis the state that is entailed in this notion of politics. Finally, I discuss the recognition of non-conventional family networks to exemplify how a politics of uridification could work. The conclusion is that, while juridification calls for a thorough revision of the tasks of politics, it does not thwart it. Rather, traditional representative politics could and should take stock of how it involves social actors in the creation of new bodies of regulation
Quod non est in actis non est in mundo: legal words, unspeakability and the same-sex marriage issue
Get PDFThis article centres on the legal recognition of same-sex marriage with a view to exploring the issue of unspeakability; that is, the condition whereby some questions cannot be articulated because of a lack of words. More specifically, the article will explore what happens to those social practices that are not given legal speakability and thereby legal recognition/protection. To this end, I first focus on how words are produced in the sphere of everyday life and their dependence on the existence of a widespread normality. I then discuss how the law sees to the preservation and the reproduction of normality by providing a set of categories which are made available to law-abiders to settle disputes when they arise. In doing so, I elucidate the twofold role played by law as both a selective and a creative device. To cast some light on the particular way law operates, I discuss an important
decision by the Italian Constitutional Court in 2010, which provides a telling example of how legal officials are able to seal off the set of legal categories and to leave some issues in the sphere of the unspeakable. I then unearth a paradox: while unspeakability reveals a condition of powerlessness, the acquisition of speakability could bring about even harsher exclusionary effects. I conclude by arguing that the entry into the sphere of official law is always a Janus-faced achievement, but can
play as an effective instrument of critique
Secularization, legal pluralism, and the question of relationship-recognition regimes
No full textIn this article I contend that the re-emergence of religion in Western liberal states is a feature of a much broader phenomenon, namely, the re-establishment of legal pluralism whereby various social actors claim to be the legitimate producers of their own law. To prove this, I first offer an account of secularization as the successful attempt of modern states to dismantle a legal-pluralist system. Based on this, I argue that the reviviscence of religions is the reviviscence of their practical side: religious practices tend to be perceived by religious group members as providing guidance for conduct, one that challenges the rules of the state legal order and its monistic structure. Finally, by exploring the issue of same-sex union recognition, I defend the claim that, in a truly post-secular society, the state should allow a multiplicity of relationship-recognition models that reflect and meet different interests and needs
- …
