Sunday, August 06, 2023

Now Available: (Frank Fleerackers (ed)) "The Rearguard of Subjectivity On Legal Semiotics – Festschrift in Honour of Jan M. Broekman" (Springer, 2023)

 


 

I am delighted to announce the publication of (Frank Fleerackers (ed)) The Rearguard of Subjectivity  On Legal Semiotics – Festschrift in Honour of Jan M. Broekman (Springer, 2023) (available as an eBook and also hardcover ISBN978-3-031-26854-0 published: 02 August 2023; softcover ISBN978-3-031-26857-1 due: 16 August 2024). It forms part of the book series Law and Visual Jurisprudence (LVJ, volume 9).

The publisher announces the book this way:

Edmund Husserl’s ideas, informed by Kant’s Critiques, constituted a point of departure when rereading philosophical problems of subject and subjectivity. In his “Phänomenologie und Egologie” (1961/63), Jan Broekman revealed how Husserl analysed the “Split Ego” notion in Kant’s vision, which became fundamental for his phenomenology. The form and function of subjectivity were likewise positioned in psychiatry and literature, as well as in aesthetics, as Jan Broekman’s texts on ‘cubism’ demonstrated. Problems of ‘language’ unfolded in studies on topics ranging from the texts of Ezra Pound to the dialogic insights of Martin Buber, all of which were involved in the development of semiotics. Two themes accompanied these insights: the notion and later Parisian mainstream called structuralism, and the urgent need to arrive at deeper insights into the links between Marxism and phenomenology. Central language concepts also played a part: as early as 1986, Jan Broekman published on ‘semiology and medical discourse’, and in 1992 on ‘neurosemiotics’, before addressing the link between speech act and (legal as well as social) freedom in 1993. In all these works, the subject and the atmosphere of subjectivity were essential aspects. In addition to his writing, Jan Broekman gave courses on current philosophical issues, law and medicine until retiring in 1996, and in his “Intertwinements of Law and Medicine” revisited subjectivity aspects, while also offering a synthetic view.
In this Festschrift in honour of Jan Broekman, the contributions address the analogue/digital dichotomy in semiotics, the multicultural self in language and semiotics, semiology and legal discourse, the legal subject and the atmosphere of subjectivity, intertwinements of law and medicine, the semiotics of law in legal education, signs in law and legal discourse, making meaning in law, and legal speech acts.
For those interested in the organization and rationalization of knowledge, and around knowledge, the manifestation of conscience and sentience, the essays in this Festschrift will not disappoint. Indeed, the contributions provide a rarely available glimpse at the sausage-making that is the way n which humanity convinces itself about the "natural", "first principles", and the like and then manifests them in "truths" around which humanity is organized (through the disciplines of ideology) and managed. What makes the essays especially interesting is hinted at in the title: one here is summing up the perhaps greatest expression of theories of human collectivity of the last great era of human development; but it is a rear-view.  What lies ahead--in the world of the digital, of the virtual self--casts a quite unforgiving light on the summary of this great wave of human development that has, quite visibly, now spent itself. The rearguard is critically important, of course. It guards those who are moving forward against the possibility of being dragged back to something that no longer exists except as memory, and that therefore cannot be recaptures--however luridly reconceived and play-acted (with the blood sacrifices and on the bodies of millions). Broekman invites us to savor the history but to look beyond its increasing use as a historical artifact and guard within the world now increasingly shaped by other forces. That is an invitation that ought to be irresistible to those who prefer their seating in the vanguard rather than as the rearguard, or worse, as art of that horde drowning in a toxic nostalgia for that which can not be recaptured, just perverted.

More information about the book may be accessed through these links: 

The table of contents follows below. 

 

 

Table of contents (15 chapters)

  1. Front Matter

    Pages i-x
  2. On Language and Power

    • Lieven De Cauter
    Pages 79-82
  3. Rethinking Legal Thinking

    • Frank Fleerackers
    Pages 83-95
  4. Reflecting on Law and Language

    • Philip T. Grier
    Pages 97-109
  5. Jan Broekman and the Multicultural Self

    • Francis J. Mootz III
    Pages 111-125
  6. Narrativity and Memory. Towards an Ethics of Testimony

    • María Lucrecia Rovaletti
    Pages 147-156
  7. Juridical Dignity and (Inter)subjectivity: Semiotic and Normative Levels

    • Ana Margarida Simões Gaudêncio
    Pages 157-167
  8. Philosophy of Friendship

    • Antoon Vandevelde
    Pages 179-192
  9. From Life to Law: Towards an Evolving Conception of Ecocide

    • Anne Wagner, Sarah Marusek
    Pages 193-202
  10. Subject and Self

    • Jan M. Broekman
    Pages 203-207


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