Book Reviews : CHRISTOPHER STANLEY, Urban Excess and the Law: Capital, Culture and Desire. London: Cavendish Publishing, 1996, 226 pp., £19.95 paperback
| Published date | 01 June 1997 |
| DOI | 10.1177/096466399700600213 |
| Date | 01 June 1997 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
BOOK REVIEWS
CHRISTOPHER STANLEY, Urban Excess and the Law: Capital, Culture and Desire.
London: Cavendish Publishing, 1996, 226 pp., £19.95 paperback.
How
are we
to understand life in the postmodern city at a time when cities are places
both of great grimness but aso of great promise? How are we to live when daily life
is replete with alienation and violence? How are we to preserve possibilities of
freedom when networks of control are becoming more insidious? How are we to be
selves when the subject has been thoroughly and convincingly deconstructed? And
what of law? What is its place in the geography of control and resistance that makes
the postmodern city what it is? Is there a place for law in the fractured urban space
in which we are confined? It is to these questions that Christopher Stanley’s book
addresses itself.
These are, of course, ethical as well as political questions. And Stanley’s book
proudly proclaims its project to be ethical, to be part of a project of building a post-
modern ethics. Written to carve out a postmodern ethics and yet to contribute to a
politics of resistance, Urban Excess and the Law is demanding, in part, because it
respects neither disciplinary boundaries nor conventional oppositions of low and high
culture, aesthetics and ethics. It is both theoretically rich and sophisticated in its inter-
rogation of a wide range of literatures. It is a striking, and at times thrilling, read,
taking us from Lyotard and Kristeva to American Psycho and the practices of com-
puter-hacking and joyriding. But it is not a read for the feint of heart.
Stanley’s theoretical reach and grasp are outstanding. He knows his Foucault and
Baudillard as well as his Marx and Durkheim. And, he expects his readers to know
them as well. For those who do not, the book is not user-friendly. For those who do,
there is much put in play as Stanley deftly draws the most complex theorizations and
the most difficult theorists into a conversation about...
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