Publication details
Passage to Nowhere – Dystopian Constitutionalism and Politics of Liminality
| Title in English | https://en.uit.no/tavla/artikkel/755645/critical_legal_conference_2022 |
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| Authors | |
| Year of publication | 2022 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Description | The structure of dystopian narratives is essentially twofold: ethical and ideological. The ethical dimension of dystopia points out what we should avoid if we do not want to reach a catastrophic future. The ideological dimension adds to the ethics the idea of status quo politics – any attempt to change the current economic and political system will lead to dystopia. Dystopia paradoxically creates here the most naive kind of utopia: the current world is the best of all possible worlds and should be preserved; any attempt to change it leads to dystopia. It creates the appearance that the only alternative to the present is the dystopian one, thus blocking the possibility of thinking through new alternatives. Dystopian thinking is the meta-narrative of the present, in the public, private, cultural and legal spheres. We live in the era of Gramscian interregnum, marked by a sense of anxiety about what is to come. In this liminal space of undecidability, with the help of ideological dystopia, we are both fixated on the preservation of the current neo-liberal order, while at the same time knowing that, thanks to the liminal nature of the present, we cannot stay in this phase forever, while the future is dark. The aim of the following paper is to use the concept of liminality to trace dystopian narratives in constitutionalism and to highlight the problematic points raised by debates about illiberal democracy or democratic backsliding. I argue, in fact, that the dystopian language chosen to describe the rise of right-wing extremism and populism is a language conducive to a perverted utopian necessity of preserving the neo-liberal order. However, if we are able to thoroughly disentangle the relationship between utopia, dystopia and ideology, we will find a vocabulary suitable for both the struggle against right-wing extremism and the critique of neo-liberalism. Combining the program of Lacanian political theory, critique of ideology and political anthropology, I will propose a critical mode that enables analysis of the contemporary legal a constitutional transitions and their relation to dystopia. |