Illan Rua Wall (University of Galway – School of Law) has posted ‘The Critical (Legal) Praxis of Costas Douzinas’ on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
Douzinas’ work is made up of shards of critique that lacerate structures of power, legal orders, political regimes and economic apparatuses. Piecing these shards together does not give us a complete theory, but this chapter argues that it does contain a singular critical praxis. The chapter takes the ‘Oubliez Critique’ essay of 2005 as the centrepoint around which a praxis of critique emerges. There is no simple negation of the texts or themes under consideration, instead Douzinas begins by traversing the subject under consideration from within. The purpose of this traversal is not (or not simply) to disprove the argument, so much as exhausting the imminent possibilities of the text. In this exhaustion, new possibilities of emerge and these are understood by bringing existing critical theories to bear. From this exhaustion, the final move emerges, often in a nascent or gestural form, that is Douzinas’s critical praxis seeks to overcome and move beyond the structure or subject under consideration. The essay traces this critical praxis across Douzinas’ writings on human rights, legal theory and social movements.
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