Love and Communism: Jean-Luc Nancy’s Shattered Community

This paper takes as is its point of departure Jean-Luc Nancy’s argument that the occidental idea of community in the modern era has always meant a kind of project or work whose intention was to glorify death in order to redeem and make it meaningful. It does so in order to return the community to its self-identity; to inter or assimilate what intrudes. In so doing, it also produces us as beings who cast this glorious lost past retrospectively. Recalling a lost original communalism, then, is not only politically dangerous, it is a symptom: it operates as a kind of compensatory reinstatement of an imaginary lost unity. On this view, casting ‘back’ to a glorious communal past must not only be resisted on political grounds, it also provides, as a symptom, a way to undertake that resistance. In this paper, I investigate a narrow dimension of Nancy’s strategy for resisting this lure: Nancy’s notion of shattering reveals that the ‘lost object’ of community is a melancholically interred, narcissistically invested retroactive creation of the very work of mourning he resists and re-thinks. The work of mourning on this view, can itself only be resisted by a certain disouevrement or unworking.     

Sinthome Law: Theoretical Constructions upon Lacan’s Concept of the Sinthome

Lacan’s psychoanalytical theory is of interest to legal theorists for a number of reasons. In particular, the concept of the Name of the Father allows a sophisticated theorisation of law and legal institutions. However, the Name of the Father was not Lacan’s only theory of law. In his final Seminars, Lacan developed a second and fundamentally different theory of law: the sinthome. By drawing upon Roberto Harari’s commentary on Lacan’s concept of the sinthome, the sinthome can be investigated in terms of topology, chaos, and morphogenetic theories. This can allow a complex theory of the sinthome to be put forward as real, immanent, emergent ordering through the de-limiting of singularities. From this a concept of Sinthome Law can be developed as a novel concept of law, and as a potential way to understand some contemporary problematics in law. The example of the emerging law on electronic signatures is introduced to indicate this.     

Deliberation,Democratic Decision-Making and Internal Political Efficacy

Empirical research into the possible positive consequences of deliberation increasingly reveals that there is a complex relationship between deliberation and its effects on citizens. In this experimental study I examine the relationship between internal political efficacy and one type of deliberation: deliberative decision-making. I also test whether different structures of decision-making mediate between deliberation and internal political efficacy. The data suggest that deliberative decision-making had no direct effect on a global measure of internal political efficacy. Participants in face-to-face deliberative decision-making, though, had higher scores on a situation-specific measure of internal political efficacy than participants who only voted. The structures of decision-making had no effect on either measure of internal political efficacy. These results support claims that deliberation will not necessarily lead to direct, positive effects on citizens internal political efficacy, but they also highlight the likelihood that face-to-face deliberation can lead citizens to feel more competent in their deliberative abilities.     

The role of the state in voluntary environmental reform: A case study of public land

Conventional environmental reform is characterized by the compliance of firms with direct regulatory pressure from the state. Scholars are now turning their attention to alternative modes of reform where firms proactively improve their operations through the implementation of voluntary environmental strategies (VES). While previous research on VES has typically focused on the manufacturing sector, this study explores challenges to corporate greening in the natural resource extractive sector when strategies are undertaken on public land. Findings from two case study regions in the Canadian province of Alberta suggest that VES undertaken on public land are significantly constrained by certain features of the system of environmental governance and the regulatory regime, particularly the reluctance of the state to be involved as a co-regulator of public land. The importance of solid leadership from the state in environmental reform – including cases of voluntary corporate initiatives – is discussed.     

Costs of taxation and the size of government

Existing theory on the form of government suggests that a parliamentary system promotes a larger size of government than does a presidential system. This paper extends the existing theory by allowing for distortionary taxation. A main result is that if taxation is sufficiently distortionary, the parliamentary system may promote a smaller size of government than the presidential system. The proposed mechanism appears consistent with several empirical patterns in the data that cannot be explained by other theories.     

Nine points of the law: evidentiary rules and the costs of litigation

If the defendant in a lawsuit is better informed than the plaintiff about the value of damages that could potentially be assigned by the court, biasing the burden of proof toward the plaintiff may lower aggregate efficiency losses from litigation.     

Landnahme, das Wachstumsdilemma und die ?Achsen der Ungleichheit“

This contribution analyzes relations between capitalistLandnahme*, the current twofold??economic and ecological??crisis of capitalism and social inequality. The core assumption is that capitalist societies need to constantly seize non-capitalist social environments in order to safeguard processes of dynamic self-stabilization. At present however, a tipping point seems to have been reached as conventional economic growth, set to overcome economic crisis, inevitably increases ecological dangers. Advanced capitalist societies thus face a growth dilemma and it seems necessary to readjust the ??axes of inequality??. To this purpose a theory of capitalistLandnahme is essential, as this approach encapsulates an extended concept of exploitative relations, which allows for a pluralistic understanding of social antagonisms and relations of domination. This article offers a topical analysis of finance capitalism in order to exemplify this approach. It argues that theLandnahme theorem can be brought to bear fruitfully as an analytical link between a theory of capitalism and research in intersectionality.     

Autorisierung. Eine wissenschafts- und wirtschaftssoziologische Perspektive auf geistiges Eigentum

Property obliges??and intellectual property entails responsibility about the knowledge produced. The theoretical concept of authorization enables the development of a genuinely sociological perspective of intellectual property. Based on this perspective of intellectual property, it is possible to introduce new aspects in the current and for the advanced knowledge capitalism central debate. The concept of authorization is based on the observation that??from the perspective of knowledge users??it is very difficult (if not impossible) to assess in advance the quality of knowledge and knowledge goods, like for example drugs. This uncertainty entails the consumers?? demand for authorization for an attribution of responsibility. The need of authorization is caused by the extent of insecurity and it exists independently from the aspiration of intellectual property by a company or person (for the time being, the debate struggles only with the last problem). Starting from there, the article examines the question how authorization is being established in the social field. Thereby, it is not only contentious whether or not knowledge should be commercialized or is open access. It is also contentious to which extend the power of definition should be hierarchically monopolized or egalitarianly distributed. The theoretical perspective will be illustrated with a case study on the authorization of seed??the latter being an economic resource which is of elementary importance for human life.