The Writer's Refusal and Law's Malady
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-6478.2004.00276.x |
| Author | Patrick Hanafin |
| Date | 01 March 2004 |
| Published date | 01 March 2004 |
JOURNAL OF LAW AND SOCIETY
VOLUME 31, NUMBER 1, MARCH 2004
ISSN: 0263-323X, pp. 3±14
The Writer's Refusal and Law's Malady
Patrick Hanafin*
In this piece I want to (re)pose the relation of writing to law and politics,
by interrogating the sense of a writing which is simultaneously an
unwriting or undoing of legal and political discourse through Maurice
Blanchot's involvement in the movement against the French colonial war
in Algeria and, in particular, his framing of the Declaration of the Right
to Insubordination in the Algerian War in 1960. The piece analyses how
the sense of the event of the Declaration continues to call us to
acknowledge a `disastrous responsibility' to a non-community beyond
the time of law and politics.
INTRODUCTION
Begin to write. Not with your last ounce of strength, but with all the strength you
have no longer.
1
This piece attempts to examine the relation of the writer to the juridico-
political sphere by analysing Maurice Blanchot's appearance before the law
after he had taken part in the movement against the French war in Algeria.
Blanchot was the principal author, along with Dionys Mascolo, of The
Declaration of the Right to Insubordination in the Algerian War.
2
This Dec-
laration, more commonly known as the Manifesto of the 121 set forth a right to
refuse to take arms against the Algerian people. It placed individuals before a
3
ßBlackwell Publishing Ltd 2004, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and
350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA
*School of Law, Birkbeck College, University of London, Malet St., London
WC1E 7HX, England
I wish to thank Julia Chryssostalis for her incisive comments on an earlier draft of this
piece.
1 A. Smock, `Disastrous Responsibility' (1984) 3 L'Esprit Cre
Âateur 5, at 10.
2 This text was first published in Ve
Ârite
Â-Liberte
Âon 6 September 1960. The authorities
seized the edition of the review and the publisher was charged with inciting soldiers
to desert. The text is also known as the Manifesto of the 121, after the number of its
signatories, who included Simone de Beauvoir, Pierre Boulez, Andre Breton,
Marguerite Duras, Henri Lefebvre, J.-B. Pontalis, Alain Resnais, Alain Robbe-Grillet,
and Nathalie Sarraute.
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