Lecture
LCCP Research Seminar "Geoconstitutionalism: Authoritative Lawmaking in the Anthropocene"
- Date
- Thursday 2 May 2024
- Time
- Series
- LCCP work in progress and research seminar
- Location
-
Gravensteen
Pieterskerkhof 6
2311 SR Leiden - Room
- 1.11
Leiden Centre for Continental Philosophy is pleased to announce a talk by Hans Lindahl. He holds the chair of legal philosophy at Tilburg University, the Netherlands, and a chair of global law at the Law Department of Queen Mary University of London.
Please read the texts for discussion in the right column section in advance.
Abstract
The drive to become autonomous, to realize collective selflegislation, defines how modern constitutionalism has approached lawmaking, which is deemed binding if the members of a polity can view themselves not only as the object but also as the subject of lawmaking—as its authors. As such, autonomous lawmaking bespeaks a politics of self-identity. With the injunction to realize autonomy, to overcome dependent and heteronomous existence, modern philosophy responds to the radical challenge of contingent existence it inherits from the crisis of Scholastic philosophy. The Anthropocene challenges this account of lawmaking, inviting a critical examination of the ontology of agency governing what might be called modernity’s reflexive turn, a turn
tightly linked to the modern concept of subjectivity. The text presented to your consideration comprises Part I and most of Part II of this critical examination.
Part I focuses on three philosophical interpretations of the reflexive turn in modernity: Martin Heidegger’s critique of the modern subject, Hans Blumenberg’s defense thereof, with Bruno Latour as his main witness, and Donna Haraway’s account of sympoiesis and holobionts as an alternative to the systems-theoretical notion of autopoiesis. Part II proposes an alternative to all three positions. Rather than defenestrating collective selflegislation, the task at hand is to decenter collective self-legislation, articulating an abridged phenomenology of what I call “lawmaking in the accusative,” centered on a responsive reading of collective intentionality.
In this vein, Part II explores lawmaking as a modality of bodily responsivity. Whereas embodiment has become a central issue across the social and human sciences, it is glaringly absent from views of lawmaking prevalent in modern constitutionalism. Insisting on the corporeality of lawmaking evokes an anonymous, and intercorporeal dimension of “be-ing-with” that conditions the possibility of a more than human collective.
About
Hans Lindahl holds the chair of legal philosophy at Tilburg University, the Netherlands, and a chair of global law at the Law Department of Queen Mary University of London. He obtained law and philosophy degrees at the Universidad Javeriana, in Bogotá, Colombia, before taking a doctorate at the Higher Institute of Philosophy of the University of Louvain (Belgium). His current research explores how the challenges raised by the Anthropocene demand reconsidering key features of the ways in which modern legal and political philosophy have conceptualized legal order. This project draws on and radicalizes his earlier research on issues germane to globalization processes, such as the concept of legal order in a global setting; a politics of boundary-setting alternative to both cosmopolitanism and communitarianism; transformations of legal authority and political representation. In dealing with these topics Lindahl draws on phenomenology and theories of collective action of analytical provenance, while also seeking to do justice to the nitty-gritty of positive law.
All are welcome!