Interpellations

5 – 8 December 2013
The Australian National University
Canberra, Australia

The annual conference of the Association invites scholarly and creative research on the theme of interpellations from academics and graduate students working at the crossroads of law, justice, and culture, whether based in legal theory or in disciplines such as literature, art, film, music, history, continental philosophy, anthropology, psychoanalysis, visual culture, or cultural studies. Contributions may take a variety of forms from traditional academic papers to poster presentations, video, or other genres or media. Contributors should provide a title and an abstract of 200 words or less, no later than 31 May 2013, by email sent to coast@law.anu.edu.au. Please include your name and the word Interpellations in the subject line.

KEYNOTE SPEAKERS
Professor WJT Mitchell, Professor of English and Art History at the University of Chicago — editor of Critical Inquiry and author of many books including What Do Pictures Want?; Iconology; Cloning Terror: The War of Images, 9-11 to the Present (Chicago 2011), and Seeing Through Race (Harvard, 2012)
Dr Honni van Rijswijk, Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Law, University of Technology, Sydney—she researches at the intersection of law, literature, and culture, focusing on the justice claims of those whose suffering is rendered invisible through dominant legal and cultural frameworks.
Professor Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, Director of the Westminster International Law & Theory Centre—author of Niklas Luhmann: law, justice, society and Law and the City and winner of Oxford University Press National Law Teacher of the Year Award 2011

Theme:

Interpellate, vb.
1.
to interrupt, from inter- ‘between’ + pellere ‘to drive’
2.
to interrupt the order of the day by demanding an explanation concerning a government action or policy
3.
of an ideology or discourse, to address in order to bring into being or give identity to a subject
4.
to interview with the goal of extracting a confession
The building block of language is not the predicative sentence, the assertion, but the slogan, the mot d’ordre: the violence of interpellation is ... constitutive of language.
Deleuze & Guattari, Mille Plateaux (1980)
In the classic analysis of the subject by Louis Althusser, the police call out to us, ‘Hey, you there,’ and in acknowledging that hail, we are constituted within ideology. The police now say to us, ‘Move along, there’s nothing to see.’ The police interpellate the Western subject not as an individual but as part of traffic, which must move on by that which is not to be seen, the object, or non-subject.
Nicholas Mirzoeff, Invisible Empire (2006)