E-grāmata: Law in Crisis: The Ecstatic Subject of Natural Disaster

Miller (Middle Eastern history, U. of Massachusetts-Boston) analyzes the legal and political structures that appear in the aftermath of crises such as earthquakes, floods, or fires; and argues that such laws are designed to make the disaster intelligible by assigning a politically normative function to the subject in ecstasy--people who are shattered, dispossessed, displaced, and beside themselves. And thus she comes to her underlying motive: to revive ecstasy as a point of departure in the study of law. Ecstatic subjects have always loomed large in legal or political analysis, but she contends that ecstasy is, or should be, central to legal structures. She covers writing about disaster: metaphors in crisis; the gift of life: blood, organs, and viruses; respect in death: ghouls and corpses; and seismic space: camps, cemeteries, squares, and monuments. Annotation ©2010 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com) Law in Crisis is an unsettling history of natural disaster and political subject formation in the modern world. Taking natural disaster as the political and legal norm is uncommon. Taking a person who has become unstable and irrational during a disaster as the starting point for legal analysis is equally uncommon. Nonetheless, in Law in Crisis Ruth Miller makes the unsettling case that the law demands an ecstatic subject and that natural disaster is the endpoint to law. Developing an idiosyncratic but compelling new theory of legal and political existence, Miller challenges existing arguments that, whether valedictory or critical, have posited the rational, bounded self as the normative subject of law. By bringing a distinctive, accessible reading of contemporary political philosophy to bear on source material in several European and Middle Eastern languages, Miller constructs a cogent analysis of natural disaster and its role in modern subject formation. In the process, she opens up exciting new lines of inquiry in the fields of law, politics, and gender studies. Law in Crisis represents a promising new development in the interdisciplinary study of law.