Le Groupe de recherche sur les humanités juridiques et le Centre Paul-André Crépeau de droit privé et comparé vous invitent à la prochaine conférence du nouveau cycle des Ateliers de droit civil, sur le thème « Maladroit : les maladresses du droit privé ».

La conférence, intitulée « When it Comes to the Law, the Clumsier the Better », sera prononcée par le prof. James Martel (San Francisco State University) le vendredi le 28 février de 13h00 à 15h30 à la Faculté de droit de l’Université McGill (salle Scott (salle 16), Pavillon Chancellor-Day, 3644 rue Peel).

Résumé (en anglais) : If you squint a bit at the French word maladroit (translated into English as “clumsy”) it can look like you are saying (in French) “bad at law.” This seems like it would be a very bad thing indeed since we tend to think of the law as something that we want to only ever be good. Yet, I will be arguing that law is at it’s best when it is at its worst (most clumsy). This is because the law is constituted by an impossible tension between what it purports to be (just, neutral, fair) and the way that it actually manifests itself in the world (unjust, violent, discriminatory). In many ways this disjunction comes from the fact that law is by design an anxious self positing force that does not have the ontological origins and duties that it claims. Thus, it is in fact when law performs “well” that it is in fact at it’s worst. Law in this mode kills and punishes, it asserts its own existence by denying that of others. It is when law is bad at itself (“maladroit”) that we can see another side of it. A clumsy law is one that allows for its own imperfection and, in that way, for the human and humane acts that are often performed in the name of the law but actually run contrary to the mission of the law. Here, law is capable of being non or anti violent and comes closer to being what it pretends to be (but never is on its own terms). I will discuss these ideas with reference to Kafka, Benjamin and Cavarero.

Biographie (en anglais) : James Martel teaches political theory in the department of political science at San Francisco State University. He is the author, most recently, of Anarchist Prophets: Disappointing Vision and the Power of Collective Sight (Duke University Press, 2022); Unburied Bodies: Subversive Corpses and the Authority of the Dead (Amherst College Press, 2018) and The Misinterpellated Subject, (Duke University Press, 2017). He is currently working on two new book projects: Continuous Assembly: The Power and Promise of Non Archism and Eat the Administration! Co-written with Blanca Missé.