Legal Bodies (CFP)

Legal Bodies: Corpus / Persona / Communitas

CFP

15-16-17 May 2014

LUCAS (the Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society) will host a three-day conference on the various ways in which literary and artistic texts have interrogated, historically and/or conceptually, the modes of juridical ‘personhood’.  The guiding assumption behind our conference is that ‘personhood’ is not a (biologically) given property of human beings, but that it is produced, assigned or codified by various discursive regimes, such as those of law, medicine, politics, religion, and education. During the conference we will study how literature, art and culture form domains in which the implications and scope of legal questions of personhood can be thought through or challenged.

The symposium broaches the question of personhood on three different levels, or with regard to three themes: those of the body, of the legally defined individual, and of forms of ‘corporate-ness’ or community (city, monastery, company, corporation, etc.).

For the first theme, questions to be addressed include: From which discourses did notions of bodily integrity emerge, and which social and political phenomena challenged these notions? Can we still think of the body in terms of property? Can we still think of bodies as separate entities, or unified wholes?

As for the second theme, questions include: What literary and rhetorical figures made it possible to think of legal personhood in antiquity, the middle ages and the modern era? How do these relate to modern forms of subjectivity? Can they relate to animal subjectivity, or biotechnological forms of subjectivity?

As for the third theme questions include: How did art and literature represent legal entities such as the medieval city, the seventeenth century trade company or the nineteenth century corporation? What is the conceptual development that can be traced in the history of, for instance, corporate personhood? Are there moments of rupture, where the notion changes radically or fundamentally?

Our explicit purpose is to work diachronically and to use the three themes to establish a cross-disciplinary dialogue.

The conference will be organized in cooperation with NICA (the Netherlands Institute for Cultural Analysis) and was made possible by LUCAS, the Leiden University Fund and NICA.

For more information on LUCAS and NICA, see

http://www.hum.leiden.edu/lucas/

http://www.nica-institute.com/

http://hum.leiden.edu/lucas/news-events/legal-bodies-corpus-persona-communitas.html