SEMINAR: Michele SPANÒ (EHESS, Paris) on "Re-reading Pasukanis" [CORE Seminar in Legal Theory] (Brussels: VUB, 4 APR, 12:00) [HYBRID]

(image source: University of the Underground)

Prof. Laurent De Sutter organises the CORE Seminar in Legal Theory. For the next session, Michele Spanò will be our guest.

On the speaker:

Michele Spano is Associate Professor of Law at Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (Paris). He is interested in the ways in which law deals with collective entities. His researches focus on class action lawsuits and consider, both historically and theoretically, how the logical and practical hegemony of individualism in private law is being reframed and contested through and by the emergence of common or collective actors, interests, goods and rights. His most recent book is Fare il molteplice. Il diritto privato alla prova del comune (Rosenberg & Sellier, 2022).

Talk description:

The "General Theory of Law and Marxism" (1924), the most famous work by the Soviet jurist E. B. Pašukanis, celebrates its centenary this year. I am dedicating my research seminar at EHESS and a manuscript to this extraordinary book. It is probably one of the most renowned books in Marxist jurisprudence. Among the most famous, but perhaps not among the most representative. Pašukanis' volume is indeed light-years away from the prevalent idea of law typical of certain strands of Marxism focused on the separation between structure and superstructure and inclined to identify law as a tool in the hands of the ruling class: structurally violent and ideologically mystifying. Pašukanis' fundamental insights are on a collision course with an ideological critique of law (a critique aimed primarily at the class content of norms). What he proposes and develops is an application of the tools and methods of the critique of political economy to the critique of law. At the center of his investigation lies the problem of the legal form. One could say with a quip that Pašukanis is a Marxian jurist more than a Marxist. But even this statement is true only to a certain extent. I would like to show that his "General Theory" is traversed by three hypotexts: the hypotext of tradition (or Savigny hypotext); the hypotext of critique (or Marx hypotext); the hypotext – or the context – of revolution (or Lenin hypotext- context). The articulation – whose logic needs to be illustrated – between the three hypotexts animates a unique and singular text. It is nothing less than the genesis of the capitalist social relation that is at stake: the encounter between legal abstraction and determinate abstraction. Pašukanis is a jurist capable of debunking – as only very few other philosophers and jurists have been capable of doing (Louis Althusser, Yan Thomas) – the intertwining of history and forms, names and things, that holds the secret of the legal form. This genuinely speculative and faithfully Marxian dimension that interrogates the nexus between abstractions and historical time, however, encounters, outside the pages of the text, a unique context: the October Revolution (and Lenin's State and Revolution). When one begins to read Pašukanis, the question is thus also: can one be – at the same time – a jurist and a revolutionary? *** I would like our seminar to also be a tribute to a master, friend, and comrade who first taught me (how) to read Pašukanis: Antonio "Toni" Negri (Padua 1933- Paris 2023) *** 

Room C 4.09.

Teams-link upon request. Contact Laurent dot de dot Sutter at vub dot be.