Book Review: ELENA LOIZIDOU, Judith Butler: Ethics, Law, Politics. Abingdon: Routledge Cavendish, 2007, 184 pp., ISBN 9780415420419, £28.99 (pbk)
| Published date | 01 September 2008 |
| DOI | 10.1177/09646639080170030706 |
| Date | 01 September 2008 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
law are invested tends to flow back to an all-powerful judicial subject, whose agency
becomes part of the book’s unreadable ‘background noise’ (p. 150). Legal language is
indeterminate (an ‘empty vessel’, p. 190), but subjectivity is never so. Likewise, the
disruptive power of the act of ‘speech’ that the habeas corpus petition is said to entail
becomes the power of an ideal petitioning subject: an undisciplinable ‘commandeer
of constitutional language’ (p. 67). In Federman’s reading, the making of a juridical
appeal to liberty seems to amount to the realization of some latent human liberty
that evades question: juridical speech promises to give birth to presence. Hence, for
Federman, ‘[h]abeas corpus is a preservative of individual liberty that exists in suspense
in language’ (p. 167).
If The Body and the State does not quite fulfil its promise to provide ‘a fuller under-
standing of how legal change occurs’ (p. 5), it nonetheless has much of interest to say
about the constitutive violence and epistemic productiveness of habeas corpus juris-
prudence. The cogency of Federman’s reading of the case law is evidenced by the
prescience of his chapter on ‘Habeas Corpus and the Narratives of Terrorism’ from
1996 to 2004. In reading the United States’ Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty
Act of 1996, alongside its Supreme Court’s Hamdi v Rumsfeld and Rasul vBush
decisions of 2004, as both an affirmation of habeas corpus and a sign of its further
‘split[ting]’ along jurisdictional lines (pp. 182–3), Federman seems to anticipate the
habeas provisions of the Military Commissions Act of 2006 (preventing aliens who
have been determined to be ‘enemy combatants’ and those awaiting such determina-
tion from accessing US courts via a habeas corpus petition). With this prescience
comes an acute sense of the violence sanctioned by such measures. To a set of debates
that tend to be captive to highly proceduralized accounts of ‘fairness’ and to revolve
around such seemingly innocuous words as ‘federalism’, Federman has restored the
smell and taste of body fluids. Against the righteous or proprietary inflection of the
phrase habeas corpus – ‘you (shall) have the body’ – Federman would have us hear
an open question. Given booming incarceration rates and the proliferation of adminis-
trative and extra-territorial detention across the common law world, that question
could not be more timely.
FLEUR JOHNS
University of Sydney Faculty of Law, Australia
ELENA LOIZIDOU, Judith Butler: Ethics, Law, Politics. Abingdon:Routledge Cavendish,
2007, 184 pp., ISBN 9780415420419, £28.99 (pbk).
Now appears to be ‘the Butler moment’. Although Judith Butler’s work has long been
recognized as making crucial contributions to a diverse set of fields – from feminism
to philosophy, from queer theory to politics – just a few years ago one could still have
argued that there was no real secondary literature on Butler. Yet the past 24 months
have seen the appearance of more than a dozen books with the name ‘Judith Butler’
placed squarely and prominently in the title (e.g. Breen and Blumenfeld, 2005; Kirby,
2006; Armour and St. Ville, 2006; Lloyd, 2007; Davies, 2007). And I must confess at
the outset of this review that I myself am part of this phenomenon (Chambers and
Carver, 2008; Carver and Chambers, 2008). It remains to be seen how this new litera-
ture on Butler will develop and what its significance will be, but, in any case, there is
little danger of Elena Loizidou’s contribution to the nascent Butler scholarship getting
lost in the shuffle. This proves to be the case not merely because Loizidou makes a
fine and important contribution to the emerging field of Butler studies (though she
most certainly does), but more importantly because Loizidou wants to bring Butler
418 SOCIAL & LEGAL STUDIES 17(3)
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