Back from a law conference at the University of Sydney, where "discussants" "give utterance" to statements such as "ontological corruption defines the monster" and "transgressive" members of the audience such as myself get to play genuflection bingo (ie shout Gordon! after accumulating 100 bits of legal bling such as 'Bhabha', 'subaltern', 'Lyotard', 'hermeneutic', 'Zizek' or 'Judith Butler').
The spiffy new Law Faculty building was impressive - fins, louvres, halogen lighting, a dash of titanium cladding around a Piranesi-style void, a glass bridge flung between the towers and overlooking the Moreton Bay figs (alas, no fruitbats in sight). Black rucksacks are in, apparently ... nothing like conformity in uniforms and carry-ons to accompany the proclamation of boldness and individuality from baby academics. We genuflected, genuflected as one, to the name of St Judith Butler and the Blessed Michel Foucault. We even got to embrace a delightfully ahistorical view of popular anxieties about crime and migration. (The 'other' - ontologically corrupt or otherwise - for many of the participants seems to be the wild, scary, needing-to-be-reproved, punished or otherwise tamed entity known as the population outside the university. As Edmund Wilson said, "ooh, those awful Orcs".)
All in all it was great fun - a dfay of fieldwork in the anthropology of legal academia rewarded by hearing people invoke Zizek, Cover, Arendt, Foucault and Irigary. The highlight was the earnest (or maybe just very very deadpan) question from one of the audience in search of crime genes - he apparently envisages discrete genes for theft, fibbing, murder and arson - and a question about whether we can find the "genocide gene". Hunter S Thompson meets Lombroso and Daniel Goldhagen! After that it's just a hop, step and a jump (or is it a snip) to the Jukes: "feeblemindedness, indolence, licentiousness and dishonesty" and a spot of social prophylaxis or insurance redlining. V sad.
Having said that, the weather was fine and I met a charming ibis rootling for treats in the main quad at Sydney U. Read Vrasidas Karalis' Recollections of Mr Manoly Lascaris (Blackheath: Brandl & Schlesinger 2008) and Kenneth Abraham's The Liability Century: Insurance & Tort Law From the Progressive Era to 9/11 (Cambridge: Harvard Uni Press 2008) on the bus back before attending a Halloween cum Birthday Party, where I got to hold Yoda the WereRabbit. I don't think that Yoda was impressed by his master's Patrick Bateman costume, or maybe it was just the big axe.
