JSI Seminar: Politics all the way down? A qualified defence of critical legal theory
JSI Seminar: Politics all the way down? A qualified defence of critical legal theory
In-person event
In this talk, Dr Ntina Tzouvala sets out to defend the potential for legal theory of what Edward Said called ‘contrapuntal reading’, Louis Althusser (drawing from Jacques Lacan) described as ‘symptomatic read-ing’, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick denounced as ‘paranoid reading’. Albeit different in their origins and orientation, all three approaches demand that we take law seriously, but not literally. They suggest that legal texts neither are nor can be made complete and coherent and they presume that nobody is in full control of those text, perhaps least of all their authors.
Dr Tzouvala argues that this ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ (Ricoeur, 1970) establishes the specificity of (critical) legal theory as opposed to both doctrinal work that strives for consistency and to a particular form of legal history and legal biography that place the conscious plans, desires and ideas of the individual subject at the centre of the law. Importantly, this approach does not simply defer to ‘politics’ for the validity for its arguments but posits that symptomatic reading is the only way to establish rigorous knowledge of the law as an autonomous subject.
About the speaker:
Dr Ntina Tzouvala’s work focuses on the political economy, history and theory of international law. She is especially interested in historical materialism, deconstruction, feminist and queer legal theory. Her first monograph, Capitalism as Civilisation: A History of International Law, was published by Cambridge University Press in late 2020. Her book was awarded the 2022 ASIL Certificate of Merit for a preeminent contribution to creative scholarship and the Australian Legal Research Award (ALRA) in the book category. In addition, it was shortlisted for the Deutscher Prize and was awarded a honourable mention in the context of the 2021 Sussex Prize in International Theory. Her work has also appeared in leading journals, including the European Journal of International Law, the Leiden Journal of International Law and the Journal of International Economic Law.
Between 2019 and 2021 Ntina was a founding member of the editorial collective of the Third World Approaches to International Law Review. In early 2020, she was appointed Senior Advisor to the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food.
Thursday 20 April 2023, 6-7.30pm AEDT
Venue: Level 4, Common Room, New Law Building (F10), Eastern Avenue, Camperdown campus
CPD Points: 1.5
This event is co-hosted by the Julius Stone Institute of Jurisprudence and the Sydney Centre for International Law at The University of Sydney Law School.