FRENCH PHILOSOPHY AND LAW, Westminster University Press, 2018-2021

We begin with the publication of Dies Irae by Jean-Luc Nancy, edition, foreword and traslation by Carlo Grassi.

The others are the following-up titles, since the idea behind this project is a sustained book series with translations into English of important but mostly untranslated major French sociology and philosophy texts.

1) EDITORS

Carlo Grassi

Angela Condello

Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos

2) series

1. (June 2018) Jean-Luc Nancy, Dies Irae (1985), 50 pages (100.000 characters), edition, foreword and traslation by Carlo Grassi. What does it mean to judge when there is no general and universal norm to define what is rights and what is wrong? Can laws be absent or is law always necessary?

2.  (december 2018) Jean-François Lyotard, Judiciousness in dispute, (1985), 50 pages (100.000 characters), edition, foreword and traslation by Angela Condello. Lyotard faces the faculty of judgement and connects it with jurisprudence. Kant describes a conflict among the different theories of knowledge. A productive conflict whose emergence is the origin of a renewal: it awakens the spirit and it leads it to think critically. It is not possible, nor desirable, to substitute the battle field with the court and to subordinate the individual interests to the general logic of argumentation, because the synthesis of the different voices might imply totalitarianism and the end of the différend might correspond to the beginning of terror.

3.  (June 2019) Maurice Blanchot, Literature and the right to death (1947), 40 pages (80.000 characters), edition, foreword and traslation by Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos. Language has the power to decide on life and death: metaphors, and legal metaphors in particular, shape and inform our life. This metaphorical power dominates subjects and activates their relationship with life and reality.

4.  (december 2019) Pierre Klossowski, The evil and the denial of the other in the Sade's work (1934), 30 pages (60.000 characters); Pierre Klossowski, Who is My Neighbor, (1938), 22 pages (44.000 characters); Georges Bataille, Reflections about hangman and victim (1942), 6 pages (12.000 characters); edition, foreword and traslation by Carlo Grassi. By acting in the name of the State, law represents an ambivalent instrument that betrays and iterates the force and the violence on which the State is grounded.

5.  (June 2020) Jean Carbonnier, The hypothesis of Not-Law (1963), 23 pages (46.000 characters), edition, foreword and traslation by Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos.

6.  (december 2020) Florence Dupont, La scène juridique, 1977,  8689 words, edition, foreword and traslation by Angela Condello. Unlike in Athens, where tragedy is part of the social order, in Ancient Rome, those who perform in the theatre have no civil rights, and theatre spaces are dissociated from social, juridical and political institutions. Roman tragedy represents juridical institutions such as the confession in order to show aspects of it that otherwise would remain secret and obscure.

7. (June 2021) Nicole Loraux, La main d'Antigone, 17347 words, edition, foreword and traslation by Carlo Grassi.  Both Dupont and Loraux are quoted by Lyotard, Nancy about judgement and these texts give interesting insights on the relationship between law and justice.

3) Editors’ Bios

Carlo Grassi is Associate Professor of Sociology of Culture and Communication at the University Iuav, IUAV University Venice, Architecture and Arts.Venice, Italy. He is ordinary member of AIS, Italian Association of Sociology. He taught in France, EHESS and University of Paris North; and in Italy, Luiss and Sapienza. He has been awarded the 2009 Napoletani Eccellenti nel Mondo for his scientific works by the Italian President of the Council of Ministers. His research activities include artistic practice in history, archaic philosophy, roman law, sociology of law, theory of sovereignty, renaissance studies, Dadaism and philosophy of the Avant-Garde, media studies. His Academic books are La macchina e il caso (The camera and the chance), 1995, Le appareil et le hazard, french edition 2012; Tempo e spazio nel cinema (Time and space in the cinema), 1998; Non Sapere. Georges Bataille sociologo della conoscenza (Not knowledge. Georges Bataille as sociologist), 1998; Sociologia della comunicazione (Communication sociology), 2002; La communauté des usagers. De la réalité augmentée au réseautage social (The prosumers community. From the augmented reality to the networking), 2012; Sociologia della cultura tra critica e clinica (Sociology of culture between critic and clinic), 2012; Progettazione e produzione delle arti in quanto azione sociale. Dall’arte popolare all’industria transmediale (Design and production of artworks as social action. From popular art to transmedia industry), 2012. He edited and translated the book Georges Bataille, Conferenze sul non sapere e altri scritti (Conferences about not knowledge and others writings), and published papers on many collective books and on the scientific reviews «Art and Artifacts in Movie – Technology Aesthetics Communication», «Cahiers de l'Imaginaire», «Media Philosophy», «Mediterranean Journal of Human Rights», «Meridione – Sud e Nord del Mondo», «Rivista di Estetica», «Sociétés», «Sociologia del Diritto», «Teatro Pubblico».

Angela Condello is Adjunct Professor (Jean Monnet Module “Cultures of Normativity” 2017-2010) at the Deparment of Philosophy of the University of Torino where she also directs LabOnt Law and coordinates the Jean Monnet Project “I work, therefore I am European” (http://labont.it/i-work-therefore-i-am-european). She is Research Fellow at the Law Department of Roma Tre where she has been teaching Law and Humanities since 2013.

Starting from December 2018, she will be a member of the Westminster Law and Theory Lab directed by Prof. Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos. She obtained her PhD in 2013 in legal philosophy (Roma Tre). She created and teaches a course on law and gender at Roma Tre for which she got a teaching award. She worked as of 2013 - and she currently cooperates - with the Human Rights Committee of the Italian Senate of the Republic. In 2015, she has been awarded with a Fernand Braudel Fellowship to conduct research on exemplarity between law and philosophy at the CENJ at the EHESS in Paris. In 2014, she was a Fellow at the Käte Hamburger Center for Advanced Study in the Humanities “Law as Culture”. In 2015 and 2016 she was Guest Professor (Law and Humanities) at the Law School of the University of Ghent. She has organized the International Roundtables for the Semiotics of Law (New York 2017, together with Prof. Goodrich at Cardozo Law School and Turin 2018, with LabOnt and Turin Law School) and is a member of the following editorial boards: Law Text Culture, Law and Literature, International Journal for the Semiotics of Law, Rivista di Estetica (for which she is editing an issue on law and the faculty of judgment). She has published widely on analogy and exemplarity in legal discourse, on law and literature and law and humanities with a special focus on new perspectives on law and language. Her writings have a appeared on: Politica del diritto, Mélanges de l’école française de Rome, Ratio Juris, Journal of Law and Society, International Journal for Semiotics of Law, Semiotica. She co-edited with Carlo Grassi a special issue of Rivista di Estetica on law and the faculty of judegment (2017) and one for Law and Literature on the normativity of exemplarity. Her book Analogica. Il doppio legame tra diritto e analogia in forthcoming with Quodlibet (early 2018). In January 2018 will appear, for Einaudi, Il denaro e i suoi inganni, by John Searle and Maurizio Ferraris, edited by and with an essay by Angela Condello. The edited volume Sensing the Nation’s Law. Historical Inquiries into the Aesthetics of Democratic Legitimacy (Springer) is in press (eds Mark Antaki, Angela Condello, Stefan Huygebaert, Sarah Marusek).

Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, LLB, LLM, PhD, is Professor of Law & Theory at the University of Westminster, and founder and Director of The Westminster Law & Theory Lab. He is regularly invited to talk in institutions around the world and holds permanent professorial affiliations with the Centre for Politics, Management and Philosophy, Copenhagen Business School since 2006, and the University Institute of Architecture, Venice since 2009. Andreas has been awarded the 2011 OUP National Award for the Law Teacher of the Year, and has since been invited to join the Judging Committee. His research interests are interdisciplinary and include space, bodies, radical ontologies, post-humanist studies, critical autopoiesis, literature, psychoanalysis, continental philosophy, gender studies, art theory, and their connection to the law. Andreas is also a practicing artist, working on photography, text and performance under the name of picpoet. His recent art publication is called afjord eating its way into my arm, published by AND publishers, London. His academic books include the monographs Absent Environments (2007), Niklas Luhmann: Law, Justice, Society (2009), Spatial Justice: Body Lawscape Atmosphere (2014), and the edited volumes Law and the City (2007), Law and Ecology (2011), Observing Luhmann: Radical Theoretical Encounters  (co-edited with Anders La Cour, 2013), and Knowledge-creating Milieus in Europe: Firms, Cities, Territories (co-edited with Augusto Cusinato, 2015). Andreas is the editor (with Christian Borch) of the Routledge Glasshouse series Space, Materiality and the Normative. He is currently preparing the Environmental Research Method Handbook (with Victoria Brooks, Elgar, 2016) and the Routledge Research Handbook on Law and Theory (2016), as well as completing a monograph on Material Justice (2017).

4) A mini-summary of the series in around 20 words (this is as it would appear in the library search)

Nancy’s Dies Irae, as well as the publication of mostly untranslated but major works by French philosophers, contributes to philosophical, juridical, political debates on themes such as evil, violence, measure, sacredness, sovereignty.

5) What’s this series about?

We propose a series of translations of works by French thinkers that have engaged with themes relevant for critical legal theory. We begin with the translation of Jean-Luc Nancy’s Dies Irae.

The type of questions addressed by this book and by the other titles that might be included in the book series are (among others): injustice, State and sovereignty, material normativity, the body and mind problems as it relates to law, law and the political. The system of contemporary institutions, power, norms and laws is also at the core of the works that we propose to translate, together with the questions of individual needs and desires and of their encounter with collective needs and desires.

Dies Irae has a clear central argument: it is impossible to imagine the realisation of an ideal of justice that corresponds to each one’s ideal of justice. Every subject has a different (or potentially different) ideal of justice that translates into an ideal of justice. This is the first limit of law: the impossible realisation of all the ideals of justice at the same time in the same system. Nancy analyses the limits of legal normativity starting from this problem. Moreover, a question addressed is: how can legal normativity be legitimised?

A nomos basileus only based on performativity and formal validity is insufficient: there are other forces that lie beyond juridical normativity and these forces are at the centre of the work of Nancy and of the other works that we intend to translate in this series. This allows to focus on the processes of inclusion and exclusion that characterise contemporary juridical systems: identity, hostility, self-representation are without a doubt important current issues in Europe and in the UK.

Specific points about J.L. Nancy’s text

Dies Irae is a transcription of a talk given by Nancy at the conference «Comment juger? À partir du travail de Jean-François Lyotard». It thus constitutes also a good introduction to the work of Lyotard that we suggest as a possible second title for a series on French philosophy and law. Nancy has often dealt with law and judgement, themes on which he wrote the following texts:

i.           Dies irae, [1985].

ii.       Lapsus judicii [1977], translated by James Williams and David Webb in «Pli», vol. 3, n°2, University of Warwick, 1991.

iii.      Guerre, droit, souveraineté – techné [1991], (4) Démesure humaine [1995] and (5) Cosmos Basileus [1998], in the nouvelle édition augmentée by Jean-Luc Nancy, Être singulier pluriel, Paris, Galilée, 2013 [1996], translated by Robert D. Richardson and Anne E. O'Byrne - Jean-Luc Nancy, Being Singular Plural, Stanford University Press, 2000: War, Right, Sovereignty - Technê, V. Human Excess and VI. Cosmos Basel Ius.

iv.    Dies illa. D’une fin à l’infini, ou de la creation [1999], translated by Ullrich Haase in «The Journal of the British Society of Phenomenology», vol. 32, n°3, October, Checkshire, Jackson Publishing, 2001.

v.        Préface à l’édition italienne de “L’Impératif catégorique” [2005], translated by Benjamin C. Hutchens in Jean-Luc Nancy. Justice, Legality and World, edited by Benjamin C. Hutchens, London-New York, Continuum, 2012.

How has it been picked up in legal philosophy law and circles?

The text is quoted in

i.          Ignaas Devisch, Doing Justice to Existence: Jean-Luc Nancy and ‘The Size of Humanity’, in «Law and Critique», 22,· February 2011; Jean-Luc Nancy and the Question of Community, London- New York, Bloomsbury, 2013; Thinking Nancy's 'Political Philosophy', in Nancy and the Political, ed. by Sanja Dejanovic, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press Ltd, 2015;

ii.        Ignaas Devisch and Kathleen Vandeputte, Sense, Existence, and Justice; Or, How Are We To Live In A Secular World?, in Re-Treating Religion. Deconstructing Christianity With Jean-Luc Nancy. With a preamble and concluding dialogue by Jean-Luc Nancy, ed. by Alena Alexandrova, Ignaas Devisch, Laurens Ten Kate and Aukje Van Rooden, New York, Fordham University Press, 2012;

iii.     David Ingram, Reason, history, and politics : the communitarian grounds of legitimation in the modern age, State University of New York Press, Albany, 1995;

iv.    Ian James, The fragmentary demand an introduction to the philosophy of Jean-Luc Nancy, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2006;

v.       Sami Santanen, Wickdness inscribed in freedom. Jean-Luc Nancy on evil, in Law and Evil: Philosophy, Politics, Psychoanalysis, ed. by Ari Hirvonen, Janne Porttikivi, Routledge-Cavendish, London, 2010;

vi.  Christopher Watkin, Difficult Atheism. Post-Theological Thinking in Alain Badiou,Jean-Luc Nancy and Quentin Meillassoux, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press Ltd, 2011;

vii.    Martta Heikkilä, Doing Justice to the Particular and Distinctive: The Laws of Art, Chapter 4 di Jean-Luc Nancy. Justice, Legality and World, ed. by Benjamin C. Hutchens, London SE1 7NX New York NY 10038, Continuum, 2012;

viii. Michel Lisse, Literary Creation, Creation ex Nihilo,  in Re-Treating Religion. Deconstructing Christianity, cit.;

ix.    Irving Goh, The Reject: Community, Politics, and Religion After the Subject, New York, Fordham University Press, 2015.

Why might it not have been translated before?

Being the transcription of a talk given at a conference, the text has been published in French in the La faculté de juger, Paris, Editions de Minuit, 1985. The copyright belongs to the Association Centre Culturel International di Cerisy-la-Salle and not to Editions de Minuit. This might be the reason why the text has not been translated into English: the published did not have the rights. We have the rights both from the Association Cerisy and from Nancy himself.

Are there any comparable works already in English or titles or material that in some way it can be compared to and will enter into a dialogue with?

There are many texts that could be related to Dies Irae: in particular the texts we quoted and that quote directly Nancy.

What audience might this title specifically be likely to have? 

Dies Irae can address scholars in philosophy, sociology, and legal anthropology. The text can address the audience that would usually read Nancy and authors like Derrida, Malabou, Lyotard, Deleuze, Cixous, Irigaray, Foucault, Lacan, Barthes, Baudrillard.

6) STRUCTURE OF THE SERIES

We propose the translation of a long essay by Nancy as a first step of the series, and we have  already planned translations by the editors of the first five books. Each book critically explores the relationship between law with evil, violence, measure and excess, sacredness and rituality, sovereignty. The conceptual structure and the content for each title are subject to a collective revision and review of the editorial board. For the purposes of delivering the issues and achieving high standard contributions, however, there is a responsible sub-editor that takes the role of a ‘main editor’ of each book, tasked also with the writing of a brief, contextualising introduction.

7) TITLES FOR THE BOOK SERIES

1.        (June 2018) Jean-Luc Nancy, Dies Irae (1985),  18124 words.

What does it mean to judge when there is no general and universal norm to define what is rights and what is wrong? Can laws be absent and is law always necessary?

       Responsible: Carlo Grassi

2.       (december 2018) Jean-François Lyotard,  Judicieux dans le différend, (1985) -- 16770 words.

Lyotard faces the faculty of judgement and connects it with jurisprudence. Kant describes a conflict among the different theories of knowledge. A productive conflict whose emergence is the origin of a renewal: it awakens the spirit and it leads it to think critically. It is not possible, nor desirable, to substitute the battle field with the court and to subordinate the individual interests to the general logic of argumentation, because the synthesis of the different voices might imply totalitarianism and the end of the différend might correspond to the beginning of terror.

       Responsible: Angela Condello

3.    (June 2019) Maurice Blanchot, La litterature et le droit à la mort (1947), 17987 words.

     Language has the power to decide on life and death: metaphors, and legal metaphors in particular, shape and inform our life. This metaphorical power dominates subjects and activates their relationship with life and reality.

Responsible: Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos

4.     (december 2019) Pierre Klossowski, Le mal et la négation d'autrui dans l'œuvre de D.A.F. de Sade (1934),  10907 words; Pierre Klossowski, Qui est mon prochain 1938, 7105 words; Georges Bataille, Reflexions sur le bourreau et la victime (1942),  10145 words.

      By acting in the name of the State, law represents an ambivalent instrument that betrays and iterates the force and the violence on which the State is grounded.

       Responsible: Carlo Grassi

5.     (June 2020) Jean Carbonnier, L'hypothèse du non-droit (1963), 13054 words.

Legal scholars often claim that law is everywhere and that is influences every aspect of our life. This is a quite naive idea that is questioned by Carbonnier. The mistake is caused by the fact that because society is everywhere, we might be tempted to claim that law is also everywhere.

       Responsible: Angela Condello

6.   (december 2020) Florence Dupont, La scène juridique, 1977,  8689    words.

    Unlike in Athens, where tragedy is part of the social order, in Ancient Rome, those who perform in the theatre have no civil rights, and theatre spaces are dissociated from social, juridical and political institutions. Roman tragedy represents juridical institutions such as the confession in order to show aspects of it that otherwise would remain secret and obscure.

           Responsible: Angela Condello

    7.    (June 2021) Nicole Loraux, La main d'Antigone, 17347 words.

       Both Dupont and Loraux are quoted by Lyotard, Nancy about judgement and these texts give interesting insights on the relationship between law and justice.

     Responsible: Carlo Grassi

8) FORMAT AND READERSHIP

The target readership are scholars in legal theory, political philosophy, and social sciences that engage with critical thinking.

We envisage the series to include small-format books between 50.000 and 100.000 characters each, each of which will be the translation of a work, contextualised by an introduction by the responsible of the publication.

The format of a small, portable book emulates some of the continental editions of such works, and aims at an audience that would be interested in testing their limits and knowledge through a book in the form of everyday companion.

9) Numbers of titles anticipated and delivery dates for final drafts

The series will be intimately connected to the Westminster Law & Theory Lab scientific activities. This will help the dissemination of the work since the Lab has an extensive network of fellows, subscribers and connections.

Importantly, the prospect of publishing this through an open access platform has a significant role not only because of its reach and accessibility, but also because it supports the trans-disciplinary nature of the contributions. More specifically, the online open access platform allows diverse contributions that are not only limited to text but also can include different mediums. Finally, the resources available online will impart to the actual paper-based book issues, inviting the readers to engage interactively with the materials presented and as such contribute to the scholarship experience of the series. 

  

10) MARKET, COMPETITION AND RELATED LITERATURE

Taking into consideration that the essential quality/attribute of the series comes from their interdisciplinary nature, both in terms of their multi-perspectival approach to the subject matter and contributors’ background, the book’s (and series’) audience is extensive and wide-ranging. It also contributes to the growing scholarship of the legal theory through innovative perspectives and methodologies.

The first title, as well as the other titles proposed, are of extreme relevance for legal theory and legal sociology. The aim of this project is to bring back titles that have disappeared from the academic debate and that (as it is the case with Nancy’s text) have never been translated into English or (as it is the case with Lyotard’s text) have been translated into English some time ago and are not widespread within legal theory, law and humanities and critical legal thinking global community.