Examines the significance of the Faustian pact in international law.
The book provides an original and captivating perspective on international law and Giorgio Agamben’s work. The manuscript is profoundly aesthetic-textual in its approach, as exemplified in its deft and insightful close readings of drama (Goethe’s Faust), prose fiction (Melville’s Bartleby and Benito Cereno) and lyric, be it devotional (Laudes Regiae, Handel, ‘The Lord is a Man of War’) or otherwise (Edwin Starr’s ‘War’, Boy George’s ‘War Song’). Attentive to language, plot, theme and characterisation, these readings not only read the texts in question, but they also read them anew, yielding fresh, innovative, and unique cultural legal interpretations.
Arvustused
International law as political theodicy - via Faust and Agamben - is rendered new and strange in Edwin Bikundos bracing book on the intimacies of law and violence. -- Gerry Simpson, London School of Economics and Political Science
Introduction: Goethes Faust, Giorgio Agamben, and International Law
1. Behold, I tell you a mystery: Tracing Fausts Influences on Giorgio
Agamben to and from International Law
2. Reading Faust into International Criminal Laws Metaphorical References to
the Devil
3. What is Real about Experimental Norms? Thinking with Giorgio Agamben about
Medical Trials
4. Carl Schmitt as a Subject and Object of International Criminal Law:
Ethical Judgement In Extremis
5. Saving Humanity from Hell: International Criminal Law and Permanent
Crisis
6. Artificial Islands, Artificial Highways and Pirates: An East African
Perspective on the South China Sea Disputes
7. Follow your Leader I Prefer Not to: Models for Non-violent Resistance in
Giorgio Agamben via Herman Melville
8. The Presidents Two Bodies: A Study in Applied Political Theology
9. People, Politics and Populism in International Criminal Law
10. War! What is it Good For? Law, Violence, the Laudes Regiae and
Laudatory Reggae
Edwin Bikundo is Senior Lecturer at the School of Law at Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia. His teaching and research interests focus on international and comparative law and critical legal theory. Edwin has written a number of journal articles and is author of International Criminal Law: Using or Abusing Legality? (Routledge, 2014).
