10:00

Welcome: Marko Daniel

10:05

Oren Ben-Dor: Introductory Remarks

10:15

Panel 1: Law Between Ethics and Aesthetics
Chaired by Panu Minkinnen

Krzysztof Ziarek: Poetic Justice: Art and the Measure of Morality
Much of the reflection on law and justice takes its cue from the notion of the subject as possessing rights and the capacity, given the proper freedom, to exercise them. Even the radical critiques of the notion of subjectivity have failed to introduce a significant change into the debates about justice. Perhaps the one notable difference is the emphasis on the idea of alterity and the notion that justice should be centred not on the subject but rather on the 'radically other,' and thus promote justice and rights of the other. In this essay, I take as the point of departure Heidegger's thought of the fourfold, and in particular, its displacement of the human from the position of centrality to the role of a participant in a nexus of relations constitutive of the world. The primary determination of the human in this context is neither the notion of the subject nor that of the other's alterity, but instead that of mortality and the perspective its opens onto being. Mortality becomes the measure of the place and relations of the mortals, always thought by Heidegger as a plural, within the world. Yet mortality reveals itself most strikingly in what Heidegger describes as 'poetic dwelling’ in his essays such as '...Poetically Man Dwells...,' 'The Thing,' or 'On the Way to Language.' For Heidegger, this poetic measure of the mortals’ dwelling discloses itself precisely in art, specifically in the poetic event of the world opened up in the artwork. In this context, justice would need to be approached from the perspective of the role of the mortals in the world, as justice of and for the world, and not simply for human beings. Justice, therefore, has everything to do with art’s poetic event of disclosure, that is, with the way in which the artwork, as Heidegger points out in The Origin of the Work of Art, suspends the usual ways of acting, perceiving, knowing, and valuing. Allowing us to experience the temporality of this suspension and displacement, the artwork opens up being as the historical-temporal event of finitude: the poetic measure of mortal dwelling. Justice then is always already 'poetic' justice, always 'in question' as a certain mode of being, free of power and dominance. Justice for beings, non-human and human, comes as part and parcel of the power-free, poetic way of world's being.

Igor Stramignoni: Seizing Truths: Art, Politics, and Law
The work of French philosopher Alain Badiou has been described as 'the most powerful alternative yet conceived in France to the various forms of postmodernism that arose after the collapse of the Marxist project' (Hallward). Art interests Badiou in and of itself but, also, as both that which during the twentieth century took over philosophy and as that which philosophy, now increasingly de-sutured from art, must nevertheless imitate in order to make clear that, quite simply, there are truths, after all. Law, on the other hand, is for Badiou the 'cipher of a finitude' (le chiffre d'une finitude), part and parcel of a specific political machine that must continuously perform certain problematic exclusions if it is to keep the fiction of parliamentary democracy together. So how is the relationship between art and law, between the poet and the city, in Badiou's oeuvre?

Ariella Atzmon: Judaism in the 'No man’s Land' between Law and Ethics
The Judaic prohibition of 'the image', recognized as the 'triumph of intellectuality over sensuality', results in a deficiency of 'art' and 'science', and implies a convoluted attitude towards ethics, morality and 'The Law'. Heidegger's approach, that hermeneutics is a 'search into ontological and epochal thinking' is alien to the Jewish tradition, which concentrates on immutable, preserved, textual knowledge. Hence, Judaism's claim as representing the zenith of hermeneutics fails. Since hermeneutical awareness impacts on rhetorical and political styles, I argue that because, in Judaism, the people's relationship to God is conceived both in legalistic terms and requiring strictly God-fearing obedience, this vitiates recourse to a vigilant ethical judgment.

Costas Douzinas: The blindness of law and the Insight of Justice
This talk reflects on the relationship between law, justice and regimes of visibility.

Adam Gearey: 'I wish you well': Aesthetics and Welfare
This paper uses Jean Luc Nancy's understanding of being-with as a way of thinking about the possibilities of a philosophy of welfare. The paper is committed to poetry rather than either social theory or social science as an authentic philosophical resource. The paper begins with a consideration of Walt Whitman's 'To a Stranger' and 'Once I Passed through a Populous City'. These poems are approaches to 'being with'- the circulation of meaning amongst bodies – the rooting of experience in reason, rhythms and sensuous responses to the world. Where does this take us? Being with might not lead to any direct political recuperation or institutional theory. However, it can point towards a notion of welfare as the open set of my encounters with others, with whom I am concerned and wish well. It also points towards one way in which we might think about institutionalised forms of welfare.

Panel discussion

12:00

Panel 2: Law, Art and Violence
Chaired by Ewa Ziarek

Oren Ben-Dor: The Sublime Origin of Violence and the Tragedy of Law
From now on, we will call ‘most thought-provoking’ what remains to be thought about always, because it is at the beginning, before all else. What is most thought provoking? How does it show itself in our thought-provoking time? Most thought provoking is that we are still not thinking - not even yet, although the state of the world is becoming constantly more thought-provoking. (Martin Heidegger, What is Called Thinking)

I argue that the essential relationship between law and art can not be assimilated into ‘critical’ usefulness but rather forms a relationship of call and response that manifests as primordial strangeness. Art persists for the sake of guarding ineliminable strangeness that characterises the guardianship of be-ing. Reflections will traverse the notions of 'hermeneutics', 'beginning', 'decision' and lastly, the relationship between 'being' and 'becoming'.

Resorting to critical thinking in law through engagement with ethics and aesthetics is inevitable, but at the same time does not yet respond to the call of be-ing, thus anticipating violence. Tragedy occurs as violence of be-ing when critical thinking silences the transcendence of strangeness which is itself characterised as a near/far movement – when, following Heidegger's quote, what is most thought-provoking provokes only as impossibility to provoke.

We can hear an echo of this violence and tragedy in the very condition of political possibility encapsulated in art. It is this tragedy which is political in art rather than any opening of possibilities that anticipate useful audibility in ethics, politics and the law. Strangeness to anything legal, I would argue, embodies the 'prophetic' in art. The strangeness of the prophetic embodies a de-cision that originates in the mystery of be-ing, and which embodies the be-coming of be-ing. Law, in its essence as art always estranges legal being and becoming.

Richard Wilson: As the Osprey to the Fish: Shakespeare and the Force of Law
I think he’ll be to Rome.
As is the osprey to the fish, who takes it
By sovereignty of nature. [Coriolanus, 4,7,33-5]

Shakespeare's plots turn on the tension between justice and positive law which has become a focus for postmodern philosophy thanks to Derrida's readings of the Weimar thinkers Carl Schmitt and Walter Benjamin. In play after play the dramatist poses the same question as these theorists of ‘the state of emergency': 'How to distinguish between the force of law of a legitimate power and the allegedly originary violence that must have established this authority and that could not have authorized itself by any anterior legitimacy?' [Derrida, 'The Force of Law']. This essay will therefore examine Shakespeare’s representation of the successor or post-war regime in a range of plays from A Midsummer Night's Dream to Hamlet and The Tempest, and consider how this relates to debates in contemporary jurisprudence about the conflict between prerogative and 'the voice of the recorded law' [Measure for Measure], 'the Norman Yoke' and the rights of 'Free Born Englishmen'.

Bernadette Buckley: Emergency Art: The Revolution will not be Curated!
This talk builds on my existing work on the relationship between art and terrorism—in particular on those artists who styles themselves as a artist-guerillas whose role it is, they believe, to subvert and challenge an essentially misguided 'authority'. The aim of this talk is to explore and to critique what I am calling the 'Emergency Art' tradition.
'Emergency Art' falls into two categories. Firstly it refers to artworks, the creation of which necessarily constitutes some kind of legal or criminal offence e.g. Situationist 'detournements', works by Alexander Brener, Josh Mac Phee, Mark McGowan, Yuan Cai and Jian Jun Xi, irational.org, graffiti artists from Banksy to Chairman Mao, CrimethInc, Baader-Meinhof etc. etc. Secondly, it refers to those situations in which artists' work has resulted in state or police 'actions' in order to 'protect' the public - e.g. Critical Art Ensemble, Manga, Tierney Gearon, Nan Goldin, Robert Mapplethorpe, Edward Kienholz, Allen Ginsberg, 'Degenerate Art'.
Overall, the talk will raise questions around the notion of 'artistic merit' when raised as a legal defence and will explore the related question as to whether or not the public needs to be protected from art and artists. Consequently, it will also raise issues arising from the 'democratisation of art', the notion of 'unauthorised' art and/or 'art against authority'.

Panel discussion

13:15

Lunch

14:15

Panel 2: Creativity, Singularity and the Law
Chaired by Adam Gearey

Jaime Stapleton: Copyright Activism as Art: Aesthetics, Ideology and Ethics
This paper treads the well-worn path between art and law, that of copyright. But, rather than exploring the usual conflicts between art and copyright law, the paper examines the development of anti-copyright activism as an art form. In particular, the paper focuses on the political and economic paradigms that underpin the current wave of copyright activism. The paper concludes with a discussion of the role of art in coalitions for copyright reform, and the ethical challenges this entails.

Zenon Bankowski and Maksymilian DelMar: Beyond the Text of Law
When people view art objects in galleries, too often they rely on textual explanation, looking for the text in the catalogue to explain it and not letting the object explain itself. Some curators try to get people to engage the art object without text, to use their imagination to let the object speak to them and not be subsumed by the text. Lawyers face an analogous situation when they encounter events that need decision; too often they look to the text and do not experience the particularity of the situation by letting it speak for itself.
For law is a text-based discipline. That is both its strength and its weakness. It is its strength in that it enables decisions to be transparent and constrained by the text; it is its weakness in that decisions tend to be dominated by text, and situations are shoehorned into the text with stultifying results. The answer is always sought within the text, viewing the situations law encounters through the optic of the text and thus manipulating them rather than transforming them, and not letting the situation speak to the text and the law.
I aim to examine how the visual and movement arts help in promoting the ethical imagination and creativity needed at the moment when law and lawyers encounter these situations.

Thomas Irvine: Musical Performance and the Law Givers, Then and Now
In the opening to the ninth chapter of his Violin School of 1756, Leopold Mozart writes that appoggiaturas, notes left unwritten yet customarily added to join together and embellish melodies, are products of nature herself (the emphasis in bold is original). They are, in other words, matters of natural law. This is a key passage in a signal work about musical performance in the eighteenth century. It illuminates a tension at the heart of this conference, between the singularity of the event and the ethical responses to it, for, then as now, the presence of musical performance challenges the law-givers of music. In this paper I will ask what natural laws mean to musical performance, and reflect on how a historical discourse like Leopold's might still resonate in the world of our own musical practice and theory.

Robin Lister: Reading Law and Literature: a Case for Conversation
Law's functionality is uncontested, art's sake a matter of endless argument. If art claims to see the world anew, accepting mystery and doubt, law claims to deal out order and finality, setting the world to rights. This talk argues that law's and literature's conversation tells another story about law's melancholic, troubled human soul. The talk focuses on a literary case of law v art and a number of chapters in common law's story of negligence. These stories show how law's negative incapability leads it on a 'frolic of its own', towards a solipsistic discourse aloof from its human subjects, the masters it should serve. This tendency, encouraged by a consumerist childish dependency on the part of litigants and audiences, may be one shared by law and art.

Panel Discussion

15:45

Tea

16:15

Panel 4: Law, Justice and the Image
Chaired by Richard Wilson

Panu Minkkinen: Crucifixion as Armature: Francis Bacon seen through French eyes.
Francis Bacon seldom discussed his art in theoretical terms, and most British art critics and historians have respected the artist's apparent disdain of high theorising by constraining themselves to descriptive analyses. But quite unlike their Anglophone counterparts, the French have regarded Bacon's paintings as archetypal representations of modern art worthy of the most abstract generalisations and speculations, a perspective that Bacon, through his personal friendships with French intellectuals like Michel Leiris, in a somewhat contradictory fashion seemed to endorse. What does Bacon look like seen through French eyes?

Desmond Manderson: Governor Arthur’s Proclamation: indigenous people and the deferral of the rule of law
This essay examines two iconic documents, one Australian and one North American, each of which lay claim to being both works of art and of law. As such, they demonstrate exactly the ways in which aesthetic representations can provide crucial insights into legal concepts and legal history. In this case, the images provide a complex and ambiguous reading of the nature and implications of the rule of law in colonial societies. Working with these images, and simultaneously with contemporary legislative measures in the treatment of indigenous peoples, especially in Australia, the essay develops a critique of the rule of law as it has been applied or, indeed, not applied to, aboriginal people. These pictorial laws shed a dramatically new light on fundamental issues in the rule of law; while contemporary issues in law and law-making shed new light on these works of art.

Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos: Awnings of Justice: De Chirico and Repetition
In the final stage of his career, Giorgio de Chirico produced a long series of almost identical paintings that copied and only partly developed his successful early metaphysical period style. This was less of a performance and more of an income-generating exercise based on the high demand for his metaphysical paintings, especially the ones of the Piazza d'Italia. Whether this rather technical repetition can also be considered 'art' is certainly worth considering, despite a rather facile rejection by the relevant literature. Its relevance, however, for this volume is revealed if one compares the technique that is undoubtedly present even in this blind, made-to-order repetition and the technicality of legal 'norm-applying'. Beginning with this parallelism, the text considers the edifice of the law as the repeating quotidian practice of judicial decisions. This is described as a way of evading the transcendental elements of judging and instead a way of returning to the safety of the normative repetition. In such an edifice, awnings of justice can be observed, artfully posited against the horizon of waiting, as windows capturing moments of transcendence. This connection between the edifice and the horizon is described here as the awnings of justice. The argument is substantiated through a discussion on Luhmann's theory of art and of justice from a poststructural critical position, employing the thought of Derrida, Kierkegaard and Cacciari.

Alain Pottage and Tatiana Flessas: The new museum: aesthetic form, cultural politics and legal means
Museums articulate a set of tensions between art and law. The legislative warrant, architectural form, curatorial politics and public self-representation of the museum purport to resolve a set of tensions between art or culture and diverse regimes of legality: the legality implicit in anthropological, taxonomic and art-historical knowledge and the national and international politics of cultural identity and educative democracy. The tensions between art and legality remained latent in the era of nineteenth-century imperialism, when the universalizing pretensions of reflections on art, science and culture went unchallenged, secured by the reach of imperial power. In the post-colonial era these tensions have become singularly acute, and the question of ownership has emerged as a leading theme in debates about the role of the museum as an articulation of art and legality. What is in question is the authorial and authoritative status of the museum. Taking the new Acropolis Museum as an example, we explore some aspects of these debates.

Panel discussion

17:45

End