The Subject May have Disappeared but its Sufferings Remain

Today there is no sophisticated theory, which continues to rely on subjectivist premises. It is important, however, that anti-humanism theory's disinterestedness in the (imaginary) subject of voluntarism does not lead to an indifference towards being's constitutive non-essence and passivity in the manner of the worst kind of humanism. Emmanuel Levinas' places ‘absurd’ suffering in the place of essence as the knot of subjectivity; his view of the quiddity of suffering as mode of being passively rather than as psychological content and of the modality of disinterested compassion are used in order to formulate the question `who comes after the subject' in ways which allow us to continue thinking of what it means to be affected in an individuated manner without returning us to the subject of self-presence and autonomy. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Development of a harmonised method for the profiling of amphetamines: IV. Optimisation of sample preparation

The suitability of liquid-liquid extraction (LLE) and solid-phase extraction (SPE) for the preparation of impurity extracts intended for gas chromatographic profiling analyses of amphetamine were evaluated. Both techniques were optimised with respect to the extraction of selected target compounds by use of full factorial designs in which the variables affecting the performance were evaluated. Test samples consisted of amphetamine synthesised by the Leuckart reaction, by reductive amination of benzyl methyl ketone and by the nitrostyrene route. The performance of LLE and SPE were comparable in terms of repeatability and recovery of the target compounds. LLE was considered the better choice for the present harmonised amphetamine profiling method due to the lack of information on the long-term stability of SPE columns.     

Reformation,Regulation and the Image: Sumptuary Legislation and the Subject of Law

This article considers the development of the individual subject of law and his constitutional status in the early modern English State, within the context of sumptuary legislation enacted by the Crown and the Inns of Court. During the sixteenth century, the legal community took upon itself the role of exemplifying the correct use of symbols and of elucidating the purpose of sumptuary law. The image of the lawyer was manipulated to represent the inherent divinity of common law. The reformation of the image was inevitably influenced by the doctrinal concepts of the European Reformation and is a graphic indication of the centrality of Anglicanism to the development of early modern common law. I discuss these developments with reference to theories of the image proposed by Goodrich, Legendre and Marin. I refer also to Carlyle's satirical treatise on the symbolism of clothes,Sartor Resartus. The constitution of clothes represents the idea of citizenship and the centrality of reason to the body-politic. The rediscovery of classical texts during the Renaissance was instrumental in shaping a constitution in which an embryonic social contract was apparent, as represented in the sumptuary legislation of the Inns of Court. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

《中华人民共和国信托法》中的创造性规定及其评析

《中国信托法》中的重要的创造性规定包括 :将信托合同规定为诺成合同 ,确认信托财产所有权由委托人享有 ,将登记确定为信托的生效要件 ,将委托人的三项重要权利规定为其以自己的行为干预信托的权利 ,为委托人增设因其重大侵权行为而变更受益人或者解除信托的权利 ,为受托人增设对信托的保密义务 ,将受益人不确定的信托规定为无效信托 ,将信托监察人制度限定适用于公益信托并规定公益信托应当设置信托监察人。     

Ideation and Appropriation: Wittgenstein on Intellectual Property

This paper provides a critique of the contemporary notion of intellectual property based on the consequences of Wittgenstein's “private language argument”. The reticence commonly felt toward recent applications of patent law, e.g., sports moves, is held to expose erroneous metaphysical assumptions inherent in the spirit of current IP legislation. It is argued that the modern conception of intellectual property as a kind of natural right, stems from the mistaken internalist or Augustinian picture of language that Wittgenstein attempted to diffuse. This view becomes persuasive once it is shown that a complete understanding of the argument against private language must include Wittgenstein's investigation of the role of the will in the creative process. It is argued that original thought is not born by decree of the will, but engendered by a public context of meaning and value. What marks a person as a genius is, therefore, according to Wittgenstein, not some sovereign capacity of conceptual world-making, but merely a propitious dose of intellectual courage. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Unraveling the <Emphasis Type="Italic">Kāvyaprakāśa</Emphasis>: Jayadeva Pīyūṣavarṣa’s idiosyncratic sequence of topics in the <Emphasis Type="Italic">Candrāloka</Emphasis>

In his twelfth century alaṃkāraśāstra, the Candrāloka, Jayadeva Pīyūṣavarṣa reverses the sequence of topics found in Mammaṭa’s Kāvyapr-akāśa, an earlier and immensely popular work. With such a structural revisionism, Jayadeva asserts the autonomy of his own work and puts forth an ambitious critique of earlier approaches to literary analysis. Jayadeva investigates the technical and aesthetic components of poetry in the first part of the Candrāloka, prior to his formal semantic investigations in the latter half of the text, thus suggesting that aesthetic evaluations of poetry beneficially inform scientific investigations of language. Jayadeva’s organization of his chapters on the semantic operations, moreover, intimates that the study of suggestive and metaphoric functions of language clarifies our understanding of denotation, which is conventionally understood to be the primary and direct path of verbal designation.     

A Distant Hand Fell from His Shoulder

This essay is concerned to trace a materialist current within the work of Peter Goodrich, with the aim of evaluating it in the light of the work of Deleuze and Guattari. The are two reasons for this: firstly, it serves to encourage the development of Deleuzean perspectives within critical legal studies, and secondly, it presents the potential of a re-invigoration of a branch of criticism based not only upon the problems raised by issues of meaning and representation, but one which is also sensitive to the conditions of the relations of production of both meaning and desire. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Anticipation,Critique and the Problem of Intervention: Understanding the Messianic: Derrida through Ernst Bloch

This paper looks at the concept of themessianic as a means of understanding theMarxist tradition, particularly therelationship between the ethical and thepolitical. It examines the positions of JacquesDerrida and Ernst Bloch, whereby both utilisethe messianic as a means of upholding anethical space which is not reducible to being,while at the same time emphasising the need anddemand of the messianic to be brought intobeing. This contradiction operates as the basiccharacteristic of the messianic and it isasserted that Bloch, rather than Derrida,offers a stronger version of the messianic andthe relationship it constructs between ethicsand politics, by attaching a notion of thegood, that of human dignity which operates toguide the ethical command. While Bloch'sdignity may lead to the position of sacrificewhen engaging within the political, theco-ordination of the ethical by dignity doesnot itself sacrifice ethics as a totality.     

Structuring Legal Institutions

The article is concerned with the question of how legal institutions are structured with the use of constitutive, institutive, consequential, and terminative rules. To that end, the regulation of international treaties as laid down in the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties of 1969 is analysed. This leads to the discovery of two additional categories of rules: content rules and invalidating rules. Finally, the special status of unique legal institutions is investigated. Unique legal institutions – for example, heads of state, parliaments, and supreme courts – enjoy validity in a legal system to the exclusion of the validity of any other legal institution of the same category in that system.     

Interrupting the Myth of the <Emphasis Type="Italic">Partage</Emphasis>: Reflections on Sovereignty and Sacrifice in the work of Nancy,Agamben and Derrida

Agamben traces the bio-political essence of modern politics to the non-sacrificial killing of Homo Sacer in Roman law. Nancy, on the other hand, links the history of Western politics to the fundamental logic of sacrifice in Western metaphysics. He nevertheless contemplates the possibility that Western societies may finally have arrived at the threshold of a non-sacrificial existence. Derrida seeks to resist the sacrificial logic of Western metaphysics and politics, but nevertheless appears to accept it as an irreducible fact of human co-existence. Unlike Nancy, he envisages no actual or actualised beyond beyond the realm of sacrificial metaphysics and politics. He thus can be said to interrupt Nancy’s ‘myth’ of a non-sacrificial partage. This article compares these three philosophical stances in the hope of throwing more light on the role of sacrifice in the law and politics of our time. Professor of Law, Rand Afrikaans University. Conversations with Ann van Sevenant, Carol Clarkson, Louise du Toit, Peter Fitzpatrick, Costas Douzinas and Adam Thurschwell gave impetus to many of the themes developed in this article. Concomitant shortcomings and inaccuracies, as always, are mine.     

调解、诉讼与公正——对现代自由社会和儒家传统的反思

调解作为一种解决纷争的做法和制度 ,是我国传统法律文化尤其是儒家法律文化的重要部分。在现代法治社会中 ,调解否已经过时 ?本文首先介绍中国的调解传统的哲学基础、理论和实践 ,然后从现代自由主义和法治理想的角度 ,对传统的调解提出批判。本文进而指出 ,调解在当代的中国以至西方仍有顽强的生命力 ,西方学者对调解作为“解决纠纷的另类选择”之一提出了多种理论依据 ,其中不少与儒家传统的睿见不谋而合。本文的结论是 ,经过“创造性转化”后的调解理论与实践能对现代文明作出贡献 ,由此可见 ,传统文化遗产在现代仍是十分宝贵和有用的资源。     

At the Court of the Strange God

This article revisits the decision of the Australian High Court in Mabo (No. 2)for the purpose of determining what, in the legal thought displayed in the judgments, makes the category of sovereignty exclusive of the sovereignty of aboriginal peoples. Having regard to the téchnē of legal thought, it locates this exclusion in the substitution of nation for property relations of class, sex and race and, more specifically to sovereignty as a category of a still colonial law, in denial of the partiality of the standpoint of legal thought. This article proposes the need in Australia to attend to, thoughtfully, a fantastic and reconciliatory moment in the idea of sovereignty. This revised version was published online in July 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Fictions of Origin: Law,Abjection, Difference

This article seeks to offer a critique of what it terms ‘Law-as-Logos’ (the Western conceptualisation of ideal Law in terms of pure ‘Presence’) from a perspective that combines some of the insights of contemporary psychoanalytic, deconstructive and feminist theory with recent developments in critical legal studies. The essay seeks to offer a re-theorisation of law, not as ‘Logos’ but as ‘difference’. The law, it will be argued, exists only as that arbitrary point of demarcation between the space of the sacred and the space of the abject and, to re-orient psychoanalytic readings of abjection towards a Derridean understanding of differance, the law may be articulated as the ‘trace’ that makes ‘presence’ possible whilst at the same time threatening its total erasure. Law-as-difference thus becomes maddening in its capacity to establish and erase boundaries and the second part of the essay examines this phenomenon particularly in the context of the relation between law-as-difference and the textuality of a Law that requires to be ‘put into writing’. It argues, in conclusion, that a theorisation of law-as-difference raises inevitably the question of the relation of ‘woman’ to the law and it ends with a re-positioning of the figure of Antigone as a means of interrogating the relation of the ‘feminine’ within the Western symbolic economy to the scandalous impurity of law-as-difference.¹ P. Goodrich, Languages of Law: From Logics of Memory to Nomadic Masks (London: Weidenfield and Nicolson, 1990), 268     

论自然法学的权利观

自然法学发展史是一部人类权利观念的发展史。自然法学的权利观的发展分为三个阶段 ,并各有其特点 :古代与中世纪自然法学的权利观是以正义为基础的 ,近代自然法学的权利观是以自由为核心的 ,现代自然法学的权利观是以平等为核心的。     

论科学主义心理学的困境与出路

科学主义心理学的发展面临着许多困境。这主要是由于它本身存在着自身无法解决或克服的局限性或缺陷：对心理学研究对象的理解偏差和对心理学研究范围的不恰当缩小;对人性的偏离和对心理学学科性质的认识偏差;“价值中立”与对“普遍性”知识的片面追求;对方法和技术的过分崇拜和对理论的极端轻视以及由此导致的与现实生活相脱离。因此,科学心理学要走出困境,就需要与其它心理学取向加以整合,以弥补它自身的不足;加强心理学的哲学研究,从宏观把握心理学的发展方向,并以科学的方法论作指导;加强理论研究和理论思维,把材料系统化;加强与现实的联系,增强心理学的价值。     

Mothers,Maidens and the Myth of Origins in the Irish Constitution

This article examines the ``hidden' ideological appeal which the 1937 Irish Constitution attempted to make by the invocation of the rural ideal, a hybrid of Irish nationalism, Catholicism and, most importantly, Gaelic romanticism. In this move, the historical legitimacy of the new state could be defined through the constitution by an appropriation of diverse symbols from an imagined past, a golden age of Gaelic unity and moral certainties. Particular attention will be paid to the image of woman as a representation of the nation in the 1937 Constitution, and to the context of Irish nationalist discourse generally, where she repeatedly appears in the archetypal forms of either mother or virgin. The predominance of the image of woman as mother in the Constitution, in contrast to her appearance in pre-independence nationalist discourse (where she regularly figured as a combination of mother, helpless maiden, seductress and destroyer) will be examined in terms of the Lacanian themes of Lack and jouissance (or enjoyment). This cultural (and legal) shift will be examined in terms of the renunciation of enjoyment inherent in this new national imagery, and in relation to the redemptive potential of the image of woman as mother; themes which appear significant in relation to post-colonial political formations generally, and to post-independence Irish political discourse in particular.     

系统论视野中的有组织犯罪

本文认为,基于有组织犯罪的“组织性”特质,在有组织犯罪的理论研究中注入系统论的研究方法显得异常迫切和必要。文章从系统本体论的角度出发,对有组织罪系统的要素、结构和功能作了详尽的分析,并在此基础上,从系统认识论的角度提出了破除有组织犯罪系统的基本策略。     

稳定:中国改革和发展的社会阈值——江泽民同志维护社会稳定思想简论

江泽民同志关于维护社会稳定的一系列论述,是十三年来中国共产党第三代中央领导集体坚定不移地贯彻邓小平关于“稳定压倒一切”的思想,正确处理改革、发展、稳定的三者关系,领导全国人民建设中国特色社会主义伟大实践的科学总结,是在实践基础上的理论创新。(一)全面而深刻地揭示了改革、发展、稳定三者的“内在联系”。一是改革、发展、稳定共处于一个统一体,是辩证统一的关系。二是改革、发展、稳定三者间存在着一种总的联系,“把改革的力度、发展的速度和社会可承受的程度统一起来”是其中最有规律性的联系;而“不断改善人民生活”则是这种“总的联系”中的重要结合点。(二)在理论上已初步形成了较为完整的观念体系。一是具备了理论认识价值;二是生成了一系列论述观点的概念集合;三是提出了检验其理论的实践标准。(三)在实践上回答了正确处理改革、发展、稳定三者关系的一系列重大问题,制定了一整套策略措施。一是总揽全局,整体推进;二是注重关联,把握过程;三是抓住关键,巩固基础;四是先务当务之急,不务不急之务;五是为之于未有,治之于未乱。     

At the Walls of Athens: What Remains?

In this contribution, the author takes as his starting point two paintings by Poussin on the subject of The Death of Phocion and their (aesthetic) implications for subjectivity and a contemporary politics. Focusing on the South African context, he makes use of the metaphor of the wall (or hedge), as representative of both the politics of oppression (in the case of Van Riebeeck’s hedge of bitter almonds in Kirstenbosch Gardens, Cape Town) as well as the politics of reconciliation (in the case of The Wall of Names in Freedom Park, Pretoria). The wall is consequently related to the transformative role of mourning in what he refers to as a politics that comes after—a politics that itself depends on a disruption of the traditional model of rational politics depicted in the Poussin paintings by the brightly-lit walls and buildings of Athens. In this regard the author defends an ethico-politics of unboundedness where the wall no longer primarily functions as a cipher of exclusion or a stable inside/outside but, in addition, comes to stand as a marker of the radical disruption of a politics founded in subjectivity. Here the author refers to the ongoing interruption of the South African political landscape by the return of the remains which highlights the significant transformative relationship between mourning and democracy.

In depth investigation of the capabilities and limitations of combined proteomic-MALDI MS based approach for the forensic detection of blood

For the past 7 years, Matrix Assisted Laser Desorption Ionisation Mass Spectrometry (MALDI MS) based methods have been developed and published for the forensic detection of blood in stains and fingermarks. However, in the view of adoption in an operational context, further investigation into the capabilities and limitations of this approach must be conducted. The refinement and testing of this approach must also be tailored to the requirements of the end users, enabling them to address the specific circumstances most encountered in a forensic scenario. The present study delves deeper into the assessment of the applicability of MALDI MS based strategy for the reliable and robust detection of human blood through: (i) a semi-qualitative assessment of the sensitivity of the method, (ii) a wider investigation of the compatibility of the method with the prior application of commonly used presumptive tests and (iii) assessment of the specificity of the method (when blood is present in mixture with other biofluids) and of its robustness, by assessing blood detection from a range of porous materials. The findings strengthen the evidence supporting the adoption of MALDI MS based approaches as a confirmatory test for the forensic detection of human blood in an operational context.