From Ron Rosenbaum's put-down of
Ulysses -
on the whole Ulysses is due for more than a little irreverence. People still speak of it in hushed tones, perhaps hoping nobody will ask them about the parts they skipped over.
So you do think Ulysses is overrated?
In general, yes. Loved Joyce's Portrait of the Artist, but didn't need it blown up to Death-Star size and overinfused with deadly portentousness. Ulysses is an overwrought, overwritten epic of gratingly obvious, self-congratulatory, show-off erudition that, with its overstuffed symbolism and leaden attempts at humor, is bearable only by terminal graduate students who demand we validate the time they've wasted reading it.
I do wonder what he'd say about 'Law, Space, Bodies: The Emergence of Spatial Justice' by Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos in
Deleuze and Law (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011) edited by L. de Sutter -
This is a text that brings together spatiality and legality in the work of Deleuze and Guattari, thus allowing for a renewed understanding of what is Spatial Law and Spatial Justice to enter the debate. Employing Deleuze and Deleuze and Guattari’s writings, I read diagrammatically a novel by Michel Tournier called Vendredi (Friday). The novel is a rewriting of Robinson meets Friday but through a spatial/legal lens. My reading enhances this perspective while extracting a few fundamental practices of law’s spatiality, namely its immanent, posthuman and material qualities. The island is part of the assemblage between the various bodies (human and otherwise) that move from logos to nomos, namely from a rational distribution to nomadic movement. While Robinson succumbs to Friday’s animalistic spatiality, the whole island bows to the emergence of what Deleuze has called "a second island." This is what I take to be the space of emergence of spatial justice, a concept immanent to the law yet only appearing at its very edge.
The author goes on to state that -
The second island is the body of Deleuzian jurisprudence. If the latter is that which “acts as the event or abstract machine of the legal assemblage”, then spatial justice is simply another name for Deleuzian jurisprudence. Deleuze’s engagement with the concept of jurisprudence was sporadic and incidental, and in many ways leaves an open space for concept construction. My aim therefore is to add to the existing subsequent literature on jurisprudence by emphasising two things that I believe emanate directly from Deleuzian thought: spatiality and immanence. Spatiality in spatial justice is as much a statement of something painfully obvious (can there ever be a justice that is not spatially emplaced? an abstract, universal justice that transcends the concrete?), as it is a political gesture that aims at moving law away from its traditional historicisation and into the open, fragmented, material space of geography, of earth and geophilosophy, of violent falls and dirty fingernails. My other aim is to emphasise the immanence of justice, namely its self-enclosed generation that is, however, necessarily based on a connection of withdrawal with the law. Spatial justice is immanent to law, flowing along the legal orientation towards justice, yet overcoded by the withdrawal of the law.
Spatial justice is jurisprudence that retains the law within, in withdrawal and perennial movement, like the empty square of the chessboard. As Deleuze writes, “there is no structure without the empty square, which makes everything function.” The second island orients everything on account of its empty space, a space of withdrawal within. And Deleuze carries on by urging us to keep moving the square: “today’s task is to make the empty square circulate”. The space of withdrawal is always there but needs to be constantly flowing, for otherwise justice becomes frozen in the regime, a pillar amidst other pillars. Just as justice cannot be disengaged from the law in its paradoxical flow of the logic and the nomic, in the same way there is no telling how much of either needs to be withdrawn for the empty square to follow the lines of escape and keep on moving. Withdrawal is a revolutionary, dangerous move that takes risks by allowing spaces to discover their immanent legality.
The second island is the product of a Deleuzian encounter, pulsating with its infinitely repeated singularity. It is the space of here into which the law throws itself, the luminosity of "erected" spaces, the singularity of "erected" times: “each day stands separate and erect, proudly affirming its own intrinsic value ... They so resemble each other as to be superimposed in my memory, so that I seem to be ceaselessly reliving anew the same day. The space of justice is the space of “second origin”, which is “more essential than the first, since it gives us the law of repetition, the law of the series” that repeats to the ‘nth’ degree the encounter every time anew. The second island, the space in which spatial justice emerges, is then the desert island par excellence. It is uncharted, unreachable except through the conjuncture of a shipwreck, closed, “a sacred island”. But to retain this sacredness, the island must remain desert yet open to shipwrecks and people arriving: "far from compromising it, humans bring the desertedness to its perfection and highest point. Humans pierce the island, make it a "holey space" that "communicates with smooth space and striated space", they set the ground on which the 'perfection and highest point of desertedness', namely of the world without law, might eventually emerge.
