Books by Costas Douzinas
Law and the Image: The Authority of Art and the Aesthetics of Law
by Costas Douzinas, Lynda Nead
This highly original collection brings together some of the most important minds in both contemporary art history and theory, and law and legal history. The result is a fascinating discussion of the diverse relationships between law and the artistic image.
The essays draw on the critical procedures of law, art history, and cultural studies in order to create a new interdisciplinary field of visual culture and law. In exploring the hidden interdependence of law and art, the writings refute the generally held conception that law is fixed and rational while the judgment of art is autonomous and ambiguous. Among the topics addressed are the history of the relationship between art and law, the ways in which the visual is made subject to the force of the law, and the complex relations between law, the image, and identity.
With its groundbreaking ideas from a variety of intellectual traditions and disciplines, this book puts law and art into a new and exciting conversation that will introduce a new field of study and spark international debate.
Contributors are: Georges Didi-Huberman, Costas Douzinas, Hal Foster, Peter Goodrich, Piyel Haldar, Martin Jay, Mandy Merck, Lynda Nead, Jonathan Ribner, Katherine Fischer Taylor.
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The Meanings of Rights The Philosophy and Social Theory of Human Rights
by Costas Douzinas, Conor Gearty
Does the apparent victory, universality and ubiquity of the idea of rights indicate that such rights have transcended all conflicts of interests and moved beyond the presumption that it is the clash of ideas that drives culture? Or has the rhetorical triumph of rights not been replicated in reality? The contributors to this book answer these questions in the context of an increasing wealth gap between the metropolitan elites and the rest, a chasm in income and chances between the rich and the poor, and walls which divide the comfortable middle classes from the 'underclass'. Why do these inequalities persist in our supposed human rights-abiding societies? In seeking to address the foundations, genealogies, meaning and impact of rights, this book captures some of the energy, breadth, power and paradoxes that make deployment of the language of human rights such an essential but changeable part of so many of our contemporary discourses.
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The Idea of Communism
by Slavoj Zizek, Costas Douzinas
Do not be afraid, join us, come back! You’ve had your anti-communist fun, and you are pardoned for it—time to get serious once again!—Slavoj Žižek
Responding to Alain Badiou’s ‘communist hypothesis’, the leading political philosophers of the Left convened in London in 2009 to take part in a landmark conference to discuss the perpetual, persistent notion that, in a truly emancipated society, all things should be owned in common. This volume brings together their discussions on the philosophical and political import of the communist idea, highlighting both its continuing significance and the need to reconfigure the concept within a world marked by havoc and crisis.
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