When individuals face a decision to end their life in their own way an in their own time, they attempt to overcome established ways of acting and being acted upon by forming micro-political arrangements or becomings challenging the established position of the prohibition to end their life. This micro-political movement however, encounters the macro-political when they approach a court and question the established order. Hanafin (2009: 56) explains that these agencements (arrangements/assmblages) or becomings ‘call for another politics, a politics of becoming beyond the time of the political’. These micro-political becomings calling for another politics forces thinking law to become other than it presently is. It opens questions of bioethics calling for a focus on actual desires and interests in relation to the ending of life and the nebulous borders between life and death. However, courts assign a molar identity to these arrangements and I hope to explain this by working  with Deleuze and Guattari’s abstract faciality machine.

Furthermore, the law perceives such a request, as a treat to the legal order which requires that the law through prohibition in legislation manage and prevent the action of the subordinate individual to end their life (Hanafin 2009: 47). Braidotti, Colebrook and Hanafin (2009: 5) argues that

What is at stake here is a politics beyond the bureaucratic rights-giving or rights-depriving state, which remains after the word has been said. This is the self declaring itself not in response to the call of the state or as the subject matter of rights, but as an active participant in political affairs. It is a self which exceeds fixing.

In this and the followings post, I intend to work with Deleuze and Guattari’s abstract faciality machine as an attempt to think intensively and to investigate the possibility of exploring the leakages or lines of flight out of the confined spaces in which courts operate as explained in previous posts (here and here). By firstly focussing on the most general function of facialisation that of biunivocalization or binarisation, I illustrate that courts functions as a faciality machine producing both the concrete face and the landscape when addressing the possible infringements of human rights (Deleuze and Guattari 2005: 180-181).

Although these posts only focus on the operation of biunivocalization, I hope to explore the judge faciality machine in subsequent posts in the context of limit judge faciality machines. The biunivocalization function merely illustrate how courts function as normality computers and deviance detectors and as such I argue that possibilities of leakages or lines of flight will only be presented when working with the court as a limit machine.

This post aims to provide background on how the faciality machine operates. The following post, focuses on two recent cases in two different domestic jurisdictions, Canada and South Africa (that is so to speak worlds apart) that concerned the sensitive and controversial issue of the right to passage (euthanasia, assisted dying or assisted suicide).

Continue reading →