Oratie uitgesproken door Prof.dr. F.W.A. Korsten bij de aanvaarding van het ambt van hoogleraar Literatuur, Cultuur en Recht aan de Universiteit Leiden op vrijdag 15 maart 2024
The terms “politics” and “political” have become so overdetermined that it is difficult to use them in any effective manner. We argue that this has dangerous political consequences, and that this... Show moreThe terms “politics” and “political” have become so overdetermined that it is difficult to use them in any effective manner. We argue that this has dangerous political consequences, and that this could be addressed by providing a new, sounder, notion of politics. This paper argues that defining politics in relation to the notion of play can provide a notion both intuitively appealing and able to withstand the problematic overdeterminations. We argue that politics is the set of practices through which the indeterminate of Spielraum is made more determinate. This suggests that politics is always partly a matter of play: it is about instituting values without making any claims about the legitimacy of this instituting act. With reference to Huizinga and Nietzsche’s analyses of play, we define play as the living unity of seriousness and frivolity, and non-play as either seriousness without frivolity or frivolity without seriousness. In order to illustrate this, we comparatively analyse the attitudes of Barack Obama and Donald Trump in the single context of the well-known yearly White House Correspondent’s Dinner. There, we see two opposed attitudes to playfulness. Our analysis allows us to apply our Spielraum model of politics to show that the thrust of Obama’s attitude involves an embrace of the non-foundational nature of politics as play, whereas Trump’s attitude is politicidal: it is animated by a refusal to acknowledge its own lack of foundation, leading to an oscillation between over-seriousness and over-frivolity. Show less
This Element describes the development of an affective economy of violence in the early modern Dutch Republic through the circulation of images. The Element outlines that while violence became more... Show moreThis Element describes the development of an affective economy of violence in the early modern Dutch Republic through the circulation of images. The Element outlines that while violence became more controlled in the course of the 17th century, with fewer public executions for instance, the realm of cultural representation was filled with violent imagery: from prints, atlases and paintings, through theatres and public spectacles, to peep boxes. It shows how emotions were evoked, exploited, and controlled in this affective economy of violence based on desires, interests and exploitation. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core. Show less
A principal element of law is the unpredictable outcome of its proceedings. This unpredictability has fueled the hopes of many and the fears of equally as many. In recent years populists and other... Show moreA principal element of law is the unpredictable outcome of its proceedings. This unpredictability has fueled the hopes of many and the fears of equally as many. In recent years populists and other political mavericks have become highly capable at exploiting the element of chance in law, aiming not so much to prove guilt or maintain innocence, but rather to reconfigure the judiciary affectively as a game of winners and losers. Populists’ legal and luysory tactics make it urgent to reconsider the relation between the fields of law and the humanities. By paying more attention to the genres and media of play and game we can better assess the ways in which contemporary actors are playing with law and exploring the limits of the rules of the game. Here, the plurality that characterizes culturally and medially determined forms of legality, as Greta Olson calls it, has a counterpart in an equally culturally inspired and mediatized form of totalitarianism. In analyzing the populist play with law, my guide will be Johan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens, in which he considers law’s origin in play and chance. For Huizinga, play is serious, as is the law. The populist play with law is equally serious, since it may have serious consequences for the Rechtsgefühle of citizens. Show less
This article compares theatrical courtroom provocations by leftist activists and militants in the 1960s and 1970s with recent ‘bad faith’ actions in court by the American right-wing activist Alex... Show moreThis article compares theatrical courtroom provocations by leftist activists and militants in the 1960s and 1970s with recent ‘bad faith’ actions in court by the American right-wing activist Alex Jones. The article proposes that law’s theatrical way of showing a general audience how the judiciary aims to serve justice is annoyed but not threatened by defendants acting the fool. The reason is that acting the fool provokes a confrontation between two different kinds of theater in court. In this confrontation, the agonistic logic of the court case is still operative, with the law embodying power and the accused acting as its carnivalesque challenger. When the accused acts in bad faith, however, there is a double confrontation, namely inside and outside the court. Those acting in bad faith are what Johan Huizinga defines as spoilsports who pretend to play the game while aiming to destroy it. The article considers how the spoilsport manifests itself in and outside of court through contemporary media and concludes that the theatrical nature of the judiciary needs protection in order to do justice to victims. Show less
The common saying is that people have a culture. This book argues that people live a culture; which may explain why they are so affectively attached to it. By considering cultural interactions on a... Show moreThe common saying is that people have a culture. This book argues that people live a culture; which may explain why they are so affectively attached to it. By considering cultural interactions on a global scale, this book investigates how cultures can be understood in terms of conflict and cooperation, in relation to the nation-state, a multiplicity of worlds, society, civilization and community. It considers how culture is at the basis of the construction of individual and collective selves; how they can come to be alienated; are defined in relation to others; are perhaps in-comparable; when they are considered to be dis-abled; and whether we can speak of animal cultural selves and mechanical cultural selves. Its twelve chapters consists of two parts each that both start with a piece of music. The pieces are taken from different cultures and all connote that getting to understand cultures depends on listening, first and foremost. Show less
Herstelrecht, oftewel restorative justice, is een vorm van alternatieve geschillenbeslechting (ADR), waarbij de betrokken partijen in staat worden gesteld om hun conflicten zo veel mogelijk zelf op... Show moreHerstelrecht, oftewel restorative justice, is een vorm van alternatieve geschillenbeslechting (ADR), waarbij de betrokken partijen in staat worden gesteld om hun conflicten zo veel mogelijk zelf op te lossen, ook als die conflicten uit misdaad zijn ontstaan. Het herstellen van schade staat hierbij centraal; daarbij kan worden gedacht aan materiële en immateriële schade alsook relationele en morele schade. Vooralsnog krijgt herstelrecht vrijwel uitsluitend aandacht binnen de rechtswetenschap en de criminologie. Deze bundel legt niet alleen de basis voor een meer multi- en interdisciplinaire doorontwikkeling van herstelrecht, maar ook voor een meer herstelgerichte benadering binnen andere vakgebieden en domeinen. De 27 bijdragen in deze bundel laten namelijk niet alleen zien dat de theorie en de praktijk van herstelrecht verrijkt kunnen worden van uit andere disciplines dan de rechts wetenschappen de criminologie, maar ook dat de filosofie achter en de uitgangspunten van herstelrecht een meerwaarde kunnen hebben binnen andere vakgebieden en domeinen dan de rechtswetenschap en de criminologie. Deze bundel bevat reflecties op herstelrecht vanuit het perspectief van de biologie, de neurobiologie, de psychotraumatologie, de neuropsychologie en filosofie, de emotiewetenschap, de victimologie, genderstudies, de sociologie, de bestuurskunde, de economie, fotografie en architectuur, de culturele antropologie, de koloniale geschiedenis, de corporate antropologie, de natuur- en milieufilosofie, de rechtstheorie en -filosofie, de mensenrechten, therapeutic jurisprudence, preventive law, transitional justice, internationale veiligheidsstudies, de literatuurwetenschap, de communicatiewetenschap, geweldloze communicatie, de boeddhologie, de joods-christelijke theologie en de islamologie. Show less
In the Dutch Republic, in its Baroque forms of art, two aesthetic formal modes, theatre and drama, were dynamically related to two political concepts, event and moment. The Dutch version of the... Show moreIn the Dutch Republic, in its Baroque forms of art, two aesthetic formal modes, theatre and drama, were dynamically related to two political concepts, event and moment. The Dutch version of the Baroque is characterised by a fascination with this world regarded as one possibility out of a plurality of potential worlds. It is this fascination that explains the coincidence in the Dutch Republic, strange at first sight, of Baroque exuberance, irregularity, paradox, and vertigo with scientific rigor, regularity, mathematical logic, and rational distance. In giving a new historical perspective on the Baroque as a specifically Dutch republican one, this study also offers a new and systematic approach towards the interactions among the notions of theatricality, dramatisation, moment, and event: concepts that are currently at the centre of philosophical and political debates but the modern articulation of which can best be considered in the explorations of history and world in the Dutch Republic. Show less
