Adil Khan seminar
'Tragedy and the tasks of International Legal Ordering'
21 September 2017
Dr Adil Khan is a McKenzie Postdoc Research Fellow at the University of Melbourne Law School.
Abstract
The seminar's aim is to reflect upon the lessons tragedy, as a dramatic form and a mode of narrative employment, can teach international lawyers in the present, as they grapple with a time that is characterized by crisis, catastrophe and dis-jointure. Drawing upon the scholarship of Louis Gernet, Jean Pierre-Vernant, Michel Foucault and Simon Critchley, amongst others, it attempts to show how the problem of law, especially that pertaining to the existence of multiple and contesting legal orders, figures at the heart of tragedy. It concludes by drawing an outline of what it argues is an exemplary mode of authorization enacted by a group of international lawyers 'of the South' in the wake of times of crisis past, one which it suggests displays a tragic vision that is truly vital for international lawyers today.