Des Manderson - August 7
Presenter: Professor Desmond Manderson
Future Fellow, ANU College of Law / Research School of Humanities & Arts
Australian National University, Canberra Australia
Title: Three episodes from the scopic regime of sovereignty
Abstract:
The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses’—Walter Benjamin.
Visual culture is subject to ‘scopic regimes’ which, at different times and places, govern how we read and make sense of images. Since the US Civil War, the photography of war has played a pivotal role in constructing these regimes. But the relationships between image, spectator, and subject have not remained static. Tracing these structural and aesthetic transformations allows us to understand how changing scopic regimes differently frame the justification, implications, and limits of the exercise of sovereign power and more generally organise our on-going relationship to legal authority and our own legal subjectivity. How violence and death abroad is depicted and mediated is not unrelated to how it is depicted and mediated in everyday life; the images that present the exercise of sovereign power in war are not unrelated to the terms on which it may be questioned at home. This essay focuses on three episodes from that history, focusing on the sharpest contrasts and developments in the visual discourse of sovereignty—between the US Civil War and World War I, on the one hand, and between those two periods and contemporary representations of war on the other. Together the dimensions of temporality, affect, and judgment position the viewer in relation to sovereign violence and help to construct social norms around sovereignty, accountability, and responsibility. In particular the function and structure of war imagery has notably modified in recent years, implicating us in profoundly new relationships to politics, technology, and sovereignty.
Biography:
Desmond Manderson is a pioneering figure in interdisciplinary scholarship in law and the humanities.
He is the author of several books including From Mr Sin to Mr Big (1993); Songs Without Music: Aesthetic dimensions of law and justice (2000); Proximity, Levinas, and the Soul of Law (2006); Essays on Levinas and Law (2009); and Kangaroo Courts and the Rule of Law—The legacy of modernism (2012). He has written about and lectured in literature, philosophy, ethics, public policy, history, cultural studies, musicology, human geography, and anthropology, as well as in law and legal theory. Throughout this work Manderson has articulated a vision in which law's connection to these humanist disciplines is critical to its functioning, its justice, and its social relevance. After ten years at McGill University in Montreal, where was Canada Research Chair in Law and Discourse and inaugural Director of the Institute for the Public Life of Arts and Ideas, he returned to Australia in 2012 to take up a Future Fellowship at ANU, where he is jointly appointed in the ANU Research School of Humanities & the Arts and in the ANU College of Law.
