Osnabrück Summer Institute on the Cultural Study of the Law

As the last contributor to our lecture series of this year’s Osnabrück Summer Institute on the Cultural Study of the Law, we are happy to announce Richard Perry. Prof. Perry will speak on “A Law of Natures, Nations, Nativs, and Narratives” on Thursday, 14 August 2014, at 9.30 am in room 11/212. Richard Perry is Lecturer-in-Residence and Senior Fellow in Legal Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He is also Professor of Justice Studies at San Jose State University. His research currently focuses on questions of temporal ordering after the alleged end of history.

Abstract:

It is generally recognized that legal rights claims – whether private property rights, collective-cultural rights, or even the jus cogens of human rights claims – are speech acts that may “do things with words” by virtue of their illocutionary force that is made explicit in the lexical-grammatical forms in which they are uttered and as that force is rendered performatively intelligible against the background of the canonical discourse genre of “Narrating the Nation” (Bhabha 1990).

This presentation will reflect on Judith Butler’s recent accounts of performativity in politico-legal discourse (in Who Sings the Nation-State? with Spivak 2007, and in Dispossession: The Performative in the Political with Athanasiou 2013). Primary data considered will include legal cases from Calvin’s Case (1608) to the present time, as well as other materials. The audience is hereby cautioned that media may be mixed in your presence.

We are happy to announce  our next focus lecture within the context of this year’s Osnabrück Summer Institute on the Cultural Study of the Law. Prof. Karen-Margrethe Simonsen will talk about “The Comedy and the Politics of Natural Rights” on Tuesday, 12 August 2014, at 6 pm in room 11/212.

Karen-Margrethe Simonsen is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Director of the Research Group “Humanistic Studies of Human Rights” at Aarhus University, Denmark. Her research focuses on law and literature, justice in classic literary texts, world literature, and human rights.

Abstract: This talk will argue that comedy is an apt genre for reflections on the political functions of human or natural rights. The premise is that human or natural rights is a discourse appropriated both by perpetrators and victims. Therefore, in order to understand how rights work within a political context one needs to analyze the ‘relation’ between dominant and dominated. Comedy is especially apt at this as it is a genre hugely occupied with power and the downfall of power. I will take my point of departure in Lope de Vega’s comedy “The New World Discovered by Christopher Columbus” from 1598-1603. Theoretically, this talk is mainly inspired by Alenka Zupančič and Etienne Balibar. A supplementary argument is that by looking at this early history of natural rights, we can modify our understanding of the modernity of human rights.