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 →