Book Review by Tormod Johansen The unexpected success of the book State of Exception has made the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben an indispensable political thinker of the 21st century. But like a Greek drama, his star has now seemingly fallen. His controversial statements about the government of the pandemic have frustrated those who previously praised…

We live in troubled times: old forms, albeit waning, still hold sway over our world, but thenew forms are still in the dark. The liberal hegemony is no longer able to sustain the ideologyof capitalist tranquil happiness. Authoritarianism rears its ugly head both in the liberal andilliberal camps. The space for reason, justice and freedom…

Christos Marneros The relationship between law and anarchy tends to be characterised, to say the least, as an uncomfortable one. Taking, usually, a purely negative approach towards law, anarchist thought – in all its heterogeneous tendencies – is characterised by a total opposition against law, as the latter is understood as an irrational, immoral and…

Alexandra Mercescu In the sea of uncertainty that we are currently navigating, at least one aspect seems beyond doubt: countries have responded for better or for worse with local answers to a universal threat. To recall that France decided to keep its wine shops open as they were considered indispensable to the life of the…

Gian Giacomo Fusco 1. Eugene Thacker opens his In the Dust of this Planet, with these words: The world is increasingly unthinkable – a world of planetary disasters, emerging pandemics, tectonic shifts, strange weather, oil-drenched seascapes, and the furtive, always-looming threat of extinction. In spite of our daily concerns, wants, and desires, it is increasingly…

Przemysław Tacik When a particular formation of the world is thrown out of joint, the first instinct is to grope for a vantage point that could provide at least a provisional perspective on what is happening. But this moment of passage, traversed in inevitable darkness, is decisive and therefore shudderingly risky. Within days decisions that…

Cosmin Sebastian Cercel 1 In the introduction to our edited collection States of Exception: Law, Theory, History written at six hands together with Gian Giacomo Fusco and Simon Lavis weeks before the real state of exception of the global COVID-19 pandemic, I was railing as much as academic conventions and well manners still permit, against…

Ein Gespenst geht um Europa – das Gespenst des Populismus, one could say, paraphrasing Marx. But what is populism and what stance should critical legal scholars take towards it? On the one hand, we – critical legal scholars – share with the populists our scepticism about liberal narratives on ‘rule of law’ or ‘fundamental rights’,…

Gian Giacomo Fusco “This study is, in one sense, about two words, or rather a family (or two) of words. By its nature, it is inevitably a fragmented juxtaposition (rather than a mapping) of the uses of the words nómos and nomós and the family of words to which they belong, subject to a number…

Book Review by Gian Giacomo Fusco For those wanting a clear and concise summary of the left case against the euro and of the misrepresentation of German European Hegemon as the consummation of the “European Idea”, there is no way around this book. Nowhere has the political economy of the common currency and of German…