Postmodern Global Governance and the Critical Legal Project¹

Abstract

The crisis of the New Deal constitutions and the shift to ‚biopolitical’ forms of global governance in the late 20th century have dramatically disturbed the epistemological groundings and the political locations of contemporary critical legal movements. In epistemological terms, the emergence of the ‚biopolitical’ has rendered transparent the impossibility of the binaries that have thus far sustained critical legal theories. With the divide between ‚inside’ and ‚outside’, ‚base’ and ‚superstructure’, ‚state’ and ‚society’, ‚society’ and ‚law’, no longer operative, critical legal movements have to outgrow their legal realist ‚roots’. Could deconstruction provide here a viable option? Confronted by an order of governance that is now both ‚global’ and ‚imperial’, critical legal movements cannot recover a politics through such ephemeral theories. Rather, the future of critical legal movements must be located in an affirmation and promulgation of radically new constitutional principles which would confront the realities, but also harness the emancipatory potential, of the ‚biopolitical’ horizon [eds.].