Alain Badiou’s Suturing of the Law to the Event and the State of Exception

Abstract

This article questions whether we can posit a more radical desuturing of the law from the event: Can radical shifts in law produce events? Can the law itself be an event, thereby conditioning the very nature of the event itself, creating a new subjectivity and a new time? I would like to argue that the law can do so. How? Badiou begins “The Three Negations” by discussing the work of the German jurist Carl Schmitt (TN 1877). I would like to argue that the state of exception, as elaborated by Carl Schmitt, can serve as the willed decision of a sovereign that brings about an event. We can understand the sovereign as a kind of legal subject that has the force to bring about a new event, rupturing with an established order and introducing a new form of subjectivity and time.

Active Viewership and Ethical Representation: Responsible Spectatorship in Alfredo Jaar’s “Real Pictures” and Gil Courtemanche’s Un dimanche à la piscine à Kigali

“…The characters in Un dimanche à la piscine à Kigali aptly demonstrate the universality of prejudice, the desire for power, and the perception of superiority, all of which lead to the violence that was seen in Rwanda. 19 The stereotypes of helpless African in need of a savior, or aggressive, monstrous African, for instance, make up what is known as cultural violence, a concept coined by Johan Galtung in his essay entitled Cultural Violence. He explains that cultural violence is an invariant, which makes direct and structural violence look, even feel, right -or at least not wrong.…”