{"id":544,"date":"2017-04-16T09:24:24","date_gmt":"2017-04-16T09:24:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/klsllm\/?p=544"},"modified":"2021-08-13T11:45:12","modified_gmt":"2021-08-13T11:45:12","slug":"before-easter-encountering-the-impersonal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/klsllm\/2017\/04\/16\/before-easter-encountering-the-impersonal\/","title":{"rendered":"Before Easter: Encountering the Impersonal"},"content":{"rendered":"

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A POST BY BENJAMIN GOH (LLM STUDENT in LAW AND THE HUMANITIES, 2016-2017)<\/div>\n
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Last Sunday saw the forcible removal of a passenger aboard a United Airlines flight who had refused the airline\u2019s offer to take his seat for one of its employees. Putatively a lawful exercise of the airline\u2019s rights, the violent extraction\u00a0culminated in the (now \u2018viral\u2019) scene of a security officer dragging the man down the aisle\u00a0as if he were an unclaimed cadaver. The dragging of the inert body, later confirmed to be that of a doctor of Vietnamese descent, terrorised the remaining passengers and, belatedly, the remote viewers.<\/p>\n

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In \u2018Two Versions of the Imaginary\u2019 (1951), Maurice Blanchot suggests that the uncanny image of the cadaver terrifies us because of a certain self-resemblance: \u2018the lamented dead person begins to resemble himself<\/i>\u2019 (82). The dead body is not the Ideal\u00a0Imago behind which the \u2018I\u2019 conceals its imperfections, discontinuities, and dependencies. Rather, it is the neutral image of the image that recalls the impersonality of the person: the incessant dying which precedes, haunts, and survives the living. Signifying nothing but the absence of signification, the present absence of the cadaver shatters the fascinating mirror image that purports to guarantee the presence of truth in the world: the\u00a0fantasy of the civilised human with universal rights.<\/p>\n

But as troubling as the encounter with the impersonal might be, this rediscovery of the aperture in the imaginary is also that which draws us out\u00a0of ourselves. The strangeness of the cadaver, in its infinite distance, issues a demand for a response from the living. What does the other want from me?<\/p>\n

Of course, the man was not \u2018really\u2019 dead. But in a very \u2018real\u2019 sense, he was forcibly sunk into his image: the image of his image, the impersonal image, which is the image of death. And he and others are perpetually at risk of death in its manifold forms: a risk that risks being screened by the idealising juridical\u00a0myths (‘dignity’,\u00a0‘equality’,\u00a0‘humanity’) into which we escape, in spite of all the\u00a0exceptional spaces of law. If it is legally possible\u00a0for each of us today to be the cadaver dragged across the aisle, what does\u00a0it\u00a0say about our law and its founding\u00a0myths? Is the juridical language of human rights adequate to advance its claims? Is there no \u2018outside\u2019 in which to locate an alternative language\u00a0to perform one’s responsibility for the other?<\/p>\n

For those who have asked,\u00a0these are some\u00a0of the\u00a0questions the law and humanities pathway has urged me to ask.<\/p>\n

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Key references:<\/div>\n
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1.\u00a0BBC news article and video: http:\/\/www.bbc.co.uk\/news\/world-us-canada-39554421<\/a><\/div>\n
2.\u00a0Maurice Blanchot, \u2018Two Versions of the Imaginary\u2019 in The Gaze of Orpheus and Other Literary Essays<\/i> (Station Hill Press 1981).<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A POST BY BENJAMIN GOH (LLM STUDENT in LAW AND THE HUMANITIES, 2016-2017)   Last Sunday saw the forcible removal of a passenger aboard a … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":40028,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[160997],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/klsllm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/544"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/klsllm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/klsllm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/klsllm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/40028"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/klsllm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=544"}],"version-history":[{"count":24,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/klsllm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/544\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":795,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/klsllm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/544\/revisions\/795"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/klsllm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=544"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/klsllm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=544"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/klsllm\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=544"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}