Howe on For a Justice-To-Come: Milo Rau's Utopian Realism

Steven Howe, University of Lucerne, has published For a Justice-to-Come: Milo Rau’s Utopian Realism at 60 Seminar 108 (May 2024). Here is the abstract.

One of the most prolific political theatre makers in Europe today, Milo Rau is known for his commitment to a realist art of possibility—a "Möglichkeitsrealismus," as he defines it, devoted to opening space for envisioning possible alternatives to the status quo. Drawing on Ernst Bloch's writings on utopia, this article argues for an understanding of Rau's artistic practice as a kind of "concrete utopianism" that materially engages the world so as to imagine—and enact—new possibilities for improvement and transformation. Via a reading of Rau's Kongo Tribunal (2015), an attempt is made to show how, by staging the tribunal in the here and now of performance, the artist seeks to disclose the real but not yet realized possibilities available in the present, giving form to an alternative institutionality—and an alternative practice of justice—that is made fully graspable in the imagination and in reality. As a material act of imagining otherwise, the Kongo Tribunal refuses the closure of the present, inviting spectators to step back and recognize the institutionalized forms of law and justice not as fixed but variable—and thus (still) open to change.

A New Book From Philip Allott on Philosophy and Law (Elgar Publishing) @ElgarPublishing

New from Elgar Publishing:

Philip Allott, Professor Emeritus of International Public Law and Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, has published Eutopia: New Philosophy and New Law for a Troubled World.  Here is a description of the book's contents.

The human world is in a mess. The human mind is in a mess. And now the human species is threatening its own survival by its own inventions and by war. For thousands of years, human beings conducted a great debate about the human condition and human possibilities, about philosophy and society and law.

In 1516, Thomas More, in his book Utopia, contributed to the ancient debate, at another time of profound transformation in the human world. In our own time, we have witnessed a collapse in intellectual life, and a collapse in the theory and practice of education. The old debate is, for all practical purposes, dead.

In 2016, Philip Allott’s Eutopia resumes the debate about the role of philosophy and society and law in making a better human future, responding to a human world that More could not have imagined. And he lets us hear the voices of some of those who contributed to the great debate in the past, voices that still resonate today.