Althusser and Law

Description

Althusser and Law is the first book specifically dedicated to the place of law in Louis Althusser’s philosophy. The growing importance of Althusser’s philosophy in contemporary debates on the left has - for practical and political, as well theoretical reasons - made a sustained consideration of his conception of law more necessary than ever. As a form of what Althusser called ‘Ideological State Apparatuses’, law is at the forefront of political struggles: from the destruction of Labour Law to the exploitation of Patent Law; from the privatisation of Public Law to the ongoing hegemony of Commercial Law; and from the discourse on Human Rights to the practice of judicial courts. Is Althusser still useful in helping us to understand these struggles? Does he have something to teach us about how law is produced, and how it is used and misused? This collection demonstrates that Althusser’s ideas about law are more important, and more contemporary, than ever. Indeed, the contributors to Althusser and Law argue that Althusser offers a new and invaluable perspective on the place of law in contemporary life. Cover Althusser and Law Title Page Copyright Page Table of Contents Notes on contributors Introduction 1 The threat of the outside: Althusser’s reflections on law 2 Althusser on laws natural and juridical 3 Monarchy, despotism, and Althusser’s ‘linguistic trick’: William Robertson and the literary reproduction of Montesquieu’s concept of ‘fundamental law’ 4 Althusser’s paradoxical legal exceptionalism as a materialist critique of Schmitt’s decisionism 5 Prohibitionary law as apparatus of subjectivation: Butler’s Psychic Life of Power and Althusser 6 Althusser in Avatar : comparative law as a science and the haunting of the subject 7 Rereading Capital: notes towards an investigation of law, politics and pensions 8 The Althusser fact: for madness creates no right – on the the secularization of law 9 Aleatory materialism and speculative jurisprudence (II): for a new logic of right Index