Next Wednesday Riccardo Baldissone will be presenting his research in a joint CCT/KLS seminar in Eliot Extension Rm 9 at 1pm.
‘Mystical bodies and bodies of law: On juridical theology and the (re)foundations of the West’
The image of the body was long deployed to represent human collectives. In particular, the body was often construed as a hierarchized organism in order to justify social hierarchies. Medieval thinkers conceived of the faithful as a whole in the shape of a mystical body, which defined the Church as a hierarchical structure headed by the pope. This construction was part of the effort for the papal revolution, which strove to rebuild the Church and to affirm its ideological and political hegemony over all Christendom. From the late eleventh century on, the new creative interpretation of the recently recovered Byzantine codes of Roman Law reflected this theoretical horizon. The supposition of the absolute coherence of both Roman and Canon Law was the direct result of the same principle of transcendent order that inspired the papal revolutionaries, so that the construction of legal texts as hierarchical principled structures mirrored the analogous construction of the Church as a hierarchized body. I will argue that the medieval production of juridico-theological tools for constructing the authority of the Church is a watershed in Western thought. Whilst Christian juridical theology was the instrumental backbone of the Papal revolution and its political theology, it also opened a new horizon for Western statements at large. I will contend that medieval Canonists and Romanists invented law as we know it, and that papal revolutionaries invented both politics and revolution as we know them today by attempting to found the polity on principles.
Riccardo Baldissone is a visiting scholar at Kent Law School this academic year, and has also been engaged with the activities of the Centre for Critical Thought. Riccardo is adjunct researcher at the Centre for Human Rights Education, Curtin University, Perth, Western Australia; during the last two years honorary fellow at Birkbeck College, University of London. After reconsidering human rights discourse in the broader context of the modern theoretical framework, Riccardo is constructing genealogical narrations that link the process of constitution of the logic of identity by classical ontology with the medieval emergence of conceptual discourse and the transformations of modern naturalism, in the perspective of the overcoming of the double Western straitjacket of entities and representations.