Human rights

LIFE RIGHTS

2014 LUCY (13)

“Right(s) as a concept emerges in any arrangement triggered by a relationship of power (pouvoir) which concerns established ways of acting or being acted upon together with the affirmation of the multiplicity and the capacity of individual and collective bodies to affect and to be affected (puissance) by an event. RADICALLY THINKING rights, AS THINKING a life, AS THINKING LIFE RIGHTS, entail a jurisprudence of multiplicities for it is directed at accommodating multiple relations to transform the established ways of acting and being acted upon (Linda Stewart).”

Presentation: The witch’s flight in Erehwon

FIGHTING FOR FREEDOM: JURISPRUDENCE AS CREATING RIGHTS

Presentation for Deleuze And Guattari And Africa: Southern Responses 15-16 July, UCT, Cape Town

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THE JUDGE FACIALITY MACHINE (PART 2)

Still from Stereoscope, 1999, animated film, 35 mm film, video and DVD transfer, 8’ 22’’. Courtesy of Marian Goodman Gallery New York (via http://www.imageandnarrative.be/inarchive/Timeandphotography/vancaelenberghe.html)

Still from Stereoscope, 1999, animated film, 35 mm film, video and DVD transfer, 8’ 22’’. Courtesy of Marian Goodman Gallery New York (via http://www.imageandnarrative.be/inarchive/Timeandphotography/vancaelenberghe.html)

I shall look into faces, and I shall see them seek some other face (Virginia Woolf, The Waves).

 Introduction

Judicial adjudication affords the individual and collective bodies an alternative / additional space in the event of a possible rights infringement, to challenge enacted laws, policy and the action of the sovereign. Although constitutionalism in modern liberal democracies has opened up a previous enclosed space for courts in the form of judicial adjudication to possibly creatively deal with rights alongside traditional forms of democratic participation, courts remain trapped within institutional boundaries when they rely on interpretative approaches, legal convention, legal culture, and legal history. Courts often defer a situation of rights-infringement to the legislature or executive branches of government as a macro-political matter. As such the concept of human rights grounded in the notion of a supposed fixed identity and judicial interpretation grounded in presupposed values confines movement or change. An underlying reason for this confinement is the artificial blockages created by our current knowledge apparatus and the overemphasis on medico-legal considerations on the issue of the right to passage.

In this post, I focus on two recent cases in two different domestic jurisdictions, Canada and South Africa that concerned the sensitive and controversial issue of the right to passage (euthanasia, assisted dying or assisted suicide). I argue that courts functions as a faciality machine producing both the concrete face and the landscape insofar the judge as faciality machines, manages decisions about health including decision-making between the messy borders of life and death on behalf of micro-political agencements (arrangements or assemblages). I focus on the most general function of facialisation that of biunivocalization function arguing that courts functions as normality computers and deviance detectors. Continue reading →

Kay Lalor – Making different differences: Representation, rights and sexuality

Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition in the context of [human] rights
Published on 3 Aug 2012
The Law of Law – Dialectics in Critical and Sociolegal Research
by Kay Lalor @ “Making different differences: Representation, rights and sexuality”
Kay Lalor (2012) Uneven encounters and paradoxical rights: embodiment and difference in sexual orientation rights and activism PhD thesis: School of Law (University of Westminster) [electronic version].

Abstract: “Daughters of Chaos: Practice, Discipline, A Life”

Abstract for Daughters of Chaos: Practice, Discipline, A Life – 8th international Deleuze Studies conference, Sweden, 29th of June and the 1st of July 2015.

Thinking law, doing jurisprudence: A continued creation of a system of rights

‘If Deleuze and Guattari parse out the potential for thinking into these three styles – art, science and philosophy – where would we place law?’ (Colebrook 2009: 14-22).

Continue reading →

Gilles-Deleuze-Quotes-5

Law as a mixed form of thinking

If Deleuze and Guattari parse out the potential for thinking into these three styles – art, science and philosophy – where would we place law? (Claire Colebrook ‘Legal theory after Deleuze’ in Rosi Braidotti, Claire Colebrook and Patrick Hanafin eds., Deleuze and Law, 2009, pp. 14-22).

Law is a mixed form of thinking philosophy, science and art. Law proceeds from philosophical concepts such as rights and justice but it also engages in scientific thinking for example posing questions as to what constitutes ‘a grievous and irremediable medical condition’. Furthermore, law also produces affects. The invalidation of prohibited physician assisted suicide in the Carter v Canada case, for example, produced affects such as sympathy and horror in not only the legal case but also through rights activism narratives (as illustrated below).

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Banksy_I_fought_the_law

Judicial review – making decisions about life and death

Constitutional democracies – moving beyond abstraction and reflection – a politics of bodies, things and relations (continue)

1 Introduction

With reference to Deleuze’s Course on Rousseau, Kleinherenbrink in his translation of the course (A politics of things p.5) emphasis Deleuze’s remark that “we know how to legislate, but we do not know what to do”. Kleinherenbrink explains that Deleuze

reminds us that the Sovereign only has the law itself as its object, in a purely formal sense. In other words, after the completion of the fourth stage, we know how to legislate, but we do not know what to do. One more thing must be added, and this is precisely the relation with things or with concrete situations which confront the people: ‘to determine a law, the general will does not suffice. The formal determination of the will must be joined to the content of objective circumstances of a given society’ and adapt itself to concrete situations. Deleuze sees the figure of the legislator as referring to this ‘injection’ of material circumstances: without the legislator, the general will formally know what it wants. But it needs him to be determined materially. A good law must not consider particular persons – formal aspect – and adapt itself to concrete situations – material aspect– (p. 27) (A politics of things p.5).

This post refers to case law on socio-economic rights to use it as examples where the judiciary are continually confronted with the apparent tension between democracy and constitutional reason and illustrates the judiciary’s unresponsiveness to deal with the question what to legislate, given the court’s role as quasi legislator in constitutional democracies.

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A politics of bodies, relations and things

First published on http://syntheticzero.net

Constitutional democracies – moving beyond abstraction and reflection

Part of an unpublished paper by Linda Stewart

“These days it’s the rights of man that provide our eternal values. It’s the constitutional state and other notions everyone recognizes as very abstract. And it’s in the name of all this that thinking’s fettered, that any analysis in terms of movements is blocked. But if we’re so oppressed, it’s because our movement’s being restricted, not because our eternal values are being violated. In barren times philosophy retreats to reflecting “on” things. If it’s not itself creating anything, what can it do but reflect on something? So it reflects on eternal or historical things, but can itself no longer make any move (Deleuze Negotiations 121-122, emphasis added).”

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Why Deleuze?

A radical Deleuze for South Africa

Polarized

Born in-between Apartheid

apartheid kids
sad kids
angry kids
fighting kids
damaged kids
kids trying to forget
but who remember in vagueness the strokes of reality
shadow kids
kids who were never kids, kids
and their struggle continues
craving love but always receiving judgment

AND NOW

The sadness of a rain bowed nation of middle aged kids

wanting to be kids

TO WHAT?

repeat their damaged past?

BUT
they were kids born in apartheid,
damaged kids,
shadow kids,
forever struggling to survive kids.
they carry apartheid in their bodies
their guts,
their hearts
their very existence

let go, let be

WHAT?

HOW?

they carry in them the open wounds of forgotten ideals
they rein act apartheid on themselves –
confronted by contradictions,
isolation and
too much consciousness leading to their self inflicted destruction.

Linda Stewart (25 November 2014)

Continue reading →

Everyday violence, the poor and human rights in South Africa

Since published here: http://www.ldd.org.za/by-type/refereed-articles/130-articles-vol-18/417-auto-generate-from-title.html as Stewart L “Rights discourse and practices, everyday violence and social protests: Who counts as subject and whose lives are real in the neo-colonial South African nation state?” 2014 LDD 1 – 21

WHOSE LIVES ARE HUMAN AND WHOSE LIVES ARE ‘REAL’?

Who but the police and armed forces that co-exist with democracies can control and manage poverty and the deterritorialisation-reterritorialisation of shanty towns? What social democracy has not given the order to fire when the poor come out of their territory or ghetto? Rights can neither save men nor philosophy that is reterritorialised on the democratic State. Human rights will not make us bless capitalism. (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994, pp. 103, 107 translation altered by Paul Patton 2010a, p. 165)

How does the unspeakable population speak and makes its claims? What kind of disruption is this within the field of power? And how can such populations lay claim to what they require? (Butler, 2009, p. xiii)

Continue reading →