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Wednesday, 28 December, 4.00 - 6.00 pm (Performing Arts Studio)
Chair: Veena Das (Department of Anthropology, Johns Hopkins University)
Plenary speakers
Chaucer voiced for many the sentiment that envy was the greatest sin, and love its prime antidote, able to restore the order that envy undermined. This paper reexamines this longstanding relationship of love and envy in the context of the long American legal mobilization around the issue of equal rights to marriage. I see envy as a useful handle to understand the contribution of emotional and affective life to revealing “gaps” within which sociolegal studies and rights politics strive for justice. Envy not only contributes to a desire for leveling social inequalities, but also fortifies other inequalities, particularly around the issue of love and its legal recognition. Envy additionally serves as a motivator for opposition to the “excess” demands of rights seekers in the countermobilization against gay rights. It also undergirds countermobilization in a frequently overlooked temporal dimension that this paper strives to bring to light: envy for an age in which love is understood to be valued and experienced, an age threatened by legal changes recognizing love in different forms. I develop the significance of a temporal understanding of envy in several sites of inquiry.
Using literatures of psychoanalysis (including psycho-analytic novels), I explore the ways that generational relationships within families are capable of becoming sites for envy, and therefore available grammars for broader political struggles over love. In order to understand the political form of these struggles, I suggest, we must be intellectually sensitive to the ways in which emotions are simultaneously fleeting and enduring, capable of transforming themselves in new ways over time, therefore forcing new generations to reconcile with the forms of the next.
The neo-Hegelian philosophy of Catherine Malabou helps construct a perspective on love that can be considered “plastic,” and I show how her ideas of plasticity help us to understand the dynamism of love and some of the ways that law modulates these forms in distinctive ways within modern life. I look to colonial encounters with law to illustrate early modern experiences with law and love, echoes from which continue to be heard in contemporary sites of encounter. In a final section of the paper, I apply these frameworks to the political struggle over Proposition 8 in California that would terminate rights to marriage for same-sex couples in order to examine the ways that struggles for gay rights have provoked powerful temporal dynamics around which envy can cohere, and I illustrate several cultural sites where this may be in play. Emotional politics such as these lie in tension with many aspects of legal doctrine, and I use this tension to raise ethical and strategic questions about the significance of temporality in legal mobilization, and the future of love in a time of envy.
Clearly bounded familial spaces are clawed out from dense thickets of human and non-human inter-relationships by different orders of regulation including the Law - defining, purifying, rendering, clarifying; producing, through their practices, the very flesh-and-blood of the family. The replication of the family requires laws of endogamy as well as exogamy in marriage to be strictly maintained: not the Other but not the Self, either – neither outside the caste nor inside the gotra. ‘Honour’ killings stand at the interface of Law with other forms of social regulation of the legitimate family form. Which order of regulation is more just? And can the family form escape regulation?
The emergence of the modern legal system is often predicated on the replacement of revenge with a system of justice. But can vengeance and justice be so easily set apart? Why have cultural representations been obsessed with the theme of vengeance? In this paper I seek to examine the relationship between revenge, time and memory. Revenge often manifests itself as a stubborn memory that refuses to be subsumed by the time of law. Do certain kinds of memories sustain vengeance while others diminish it? What are the political and ethical challenges that passions of a ‘rage in grief’ pose to our understandings of law and justice?