Before identity, gender and human rights

This is the beginning of an exploration of before as the thesis ‘before’ (temporally) and ‘be-fore’ (spatially) difference. Before denotes the origin and the desired destination. Before (in the double sense of ‘before’ and ‚be-in-the-fore’) opens up a space of pre-difference, of origin and of forgotten memory, as well as a space of desire, objective, illusion of teleology, unity, completion. Applied to the two domains of Human Rights and Sex/Gender, the space of ‘before’ yields two slightly different vistas: in human rights, a premodern, functionally undifferentiated society which had to invent human rights as its safeguards of functional differentiation. In Sex/Gender, 'before' brings a self-referential construction: that of ipseity, as the form of identity beyond comparison that does not play with id but with ipsum. Ipseity is inoperable but not useless. It is inoperable because it cannot be observed from anywhere without suffering rupture. It is not useless because it offers a ground for the reconceptualisation of difference, both through awe and desire.

From space immaterial: the invisibility of the lawscape

This article aims to interrogate law's ambivalent relationship with urban space. It deals with the paradoxical relation between law and the city, visibility and invisibility, materiality and abstraction, and polis and metropolis. It builds on previous work on the lawscape, namely the priority of invitation by law or the city to be conditioned by the other, and expands this line of thought towards a more tangible understanding of visibility and its mutual constitution with invisibility. We believe that spatialisation is a relevant avenue for law's (re)conceptualisation because it moves away from a description of humanism based on the universality of subjectivity, and paves the way for a particularised and material description of law's multiplicity that specifically addresses law's social positioning. This inevitably leads to a dematerialisation of space and the reinstatement of circularity between concreteness and abstraction. Inspired by some of the themes addressed by the contributors in this issue, we begin constructing a vocabulary of lawscaping, where law and urban space are brought together in an epistemological embrace that targets and eventually questions the solipsistic way in which the two of them have been conceptualised so far.

Spacing abstraction: capitalism, law and the metropolis

In considering contemporary accounts of the interrelations of economic, legal and urban forms of social relations in the emergence of a global capitalist modernity, this paper argues that politico-juridical imaginaries of new forms of transnational universality have tended to be limited by virtue of both an anachronistic recourse to spatial models of the polis and a failure to confront the ineliminability of abstraction to any idea of global social interconnectivity. In such terms, it argues, Lefebvre’s famous call for a ‘right to the city’ needs to be reinscribed as a properly modern right to the metropolis; one that would allow us to conceive of the possibility of new kinds of relation between individual and collective subjectivity and the development of abstract social forms.

Neoliberalism in Britain

The Conservative Party has in the 2015 British general elections won an absolute majority under David Cameron’s leadership. Cameron’s rule signifies an important phase in British politics in the 21st century. This paper asks the question: What is Cameronism? Cameron argues that Margaret Thatcher “was a big influence” for him. It is therefore appropriate to study the relationship between Thatcherism and Cameronism. The article revisits theories of Thatcherism and understands it as a unity of ideology and policies that is organised along three dimensions: the economy, politics, and culture. An ideology critique study of key speeches, interviews and documents analyses these three dimensions of Cameronism. A comparison of Cameronism and Thatcherism shows that questions of national identity, the European Union and immigration form a key ideological and political dimension of Cameronism.