About | HeinOnline Law Journal Library | HeinOnline Law Journal Library | HeinOnline
LOG IN
LOG IN

16 L. & Critique 1 (2005)

handle is hein.journals/lwcrtq16 and id is 1 raw text is: Law and Critique (2005) 16: 1 © Springer 2005 DOI 10.1007/s10978-005-4900-2 JULIA CHRYSSOSTALIS and PATRICIA TUITT INTRODUCTION A search for new critical directions that begins from a sense that critique has become stagnant - has fallen into crisis or malaise - is a search that begins far too late. Critical stances, strategies and meth- odologies must be continually rethought, reworked and resituated. For critique, there can be no hope or promise of closure: it is fated to occupy that enduring state of anxiety that accompanies the homeless, the wayward or the dispossessed. It was with the intention of revisiting some fundamental questions about the critical instance that a group of scholars met in London in the spring of 2002 to explore the objectives, aspirations and assumptions that frame critical engagements with the law. The seminar brought together individuals working on different critical agendas from a variety of backgrounds and critical perspectives: philosophy, politics, cultural studies, law and aesthetics, socio-legal studies, post-colonial and critical race theory, law and gender, feminist and queer theory. Though it would hardly be possible to represent the full range of intellectual concerns in this short volume, we believe that the essays that make up this volume have retained the productive restlessness that gave the impetus to that early exploration. In various ways the essays interrogate the notion of critique as exemplary judgement, question narratives on the origins of the critical legal project itself, explore the ontological distinction between nature and culture as it is expressed in legal practice, problematise the idea of critique as resistance and contemplate how contemporary constitutional forms have blunted familiar modes of political struggle. Yet, to read these 'instances' of critique as laying down a programme for a new direction in critique would be at best misguided. These contributions are there not to enable any particular critical position to take root, or to uproot others, but rather to relish in the notion that critique has no anchor and is bereft of friendships and allegiances. Like the meddlesome official who will not allow the vagrant to lie still a while, these essays urge critique to pack up its few possessions and keep on the move - surely a timely injunction, especially at times when critique does not appear to have occasioned any particular mischief? JULIA CHRYSSOSTALIS AND PATRICIA TUITT

What Is HeinOnline?

HeinOnline is a subscription-based resource containing thousands of academic and legal journals from inception; complete coverage of government documents such as U.S. Statutes at Large, U.S. Code, Federal Register, Code of Federal Regulations, U.S. Reports, and much more. Documents are image-based, fully searchable PDFs with the authority of print combined with the accessibility of a user-friendly and powerful database. For more information, request a quote or trial for your organization below.



Short-term subscription options include 24 hours, 48 hours, or 1 week to HeinOnline.

Purchase Access

Contact us for annual subscription options:

Contact Us

Already a HeinOnline Subscriber?

Log In

profiles profiles most