FRIDAY JULY 19 2024 | INSTORE EVENT
6.00pm for a 6.30pm start | 60 mins
Join us for the launch of The Faustian pact in International Law with Dr Edwin Bikundo. Edwin will be in conversation with Justin Malbon.
ABOUT THE BOOK
This book examines the significance of the Faustian pact in international law.
The work is a fresh ‘take’ not only on critical legal theory or law-and-literature but, rather, a powerful and cutting-edge fusion of the two: a critico-cultural legal study.
The book’s readings of drama, prose fiction and lyric, are always contextualised in terms of law, broadly construed - in terms of doctrine, policy and jurisprudence – that demonstrate not only a deep understanding of, but a bold deconstruction of the claims to a ‘higher good’ of, for example, the international criminal courts, the law of the sea, human rights law, humanitarian law, and contemporary sovereignty.
Further, these readings are tied together by the ‘golden thread’ of critical theory running throughout and turning, in particular, on the work of Agamben, Schmitt, and Kantorowicz, all mobilised to navigate and negotiate the relationship between law and the aesthetic.
The book provides an original and captivating perspective on international law and Giorgio Agamben’s work. The manuscript is profoundly aesthetic-textual in its approach, as exemplified in its deft and insightful close readings of drama (Goethe’s Faust), prose fiction (Melville’s Bartleby and Benito Cereno) and lyric, be it devotional (Laudes Regiae, Handel, ‘The Lord is a Man of War’) or otherwise (Edwin Starr’s ‘War’, Boy George’s ‘War Song’). Attentive to language, plot, theme and characterisation, these readings not only read the texts in question, but they also read them anew, yielding fresh, innovative, and unique cultural legal interpretations.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Dr Edwin Bikundo is a Senior Lecturer at Griffith Law School, Griffith University, Australia. Edwin’s current teaching and research interests lie in International and Comparative Law, Legal Theory, and Law and the Humanities. Edwin is Book Reviews Editor of the Griffith Law Review, Co- Editor of the Routledge Law Book Series: TechNomos: Law, Technology, Culture, and past Secretary of the Law, Literature and Humanities Association of Australasia. Before joining Griffith, Edwin was Postgraduate Fellow at the Julius Stone Institute of Jurisprudence, the Sydney Centre for International Law and the Sydney Institute of Criminology at the Sydney University Law School. Edwin holds a PhD in Law from Sydney Law School, an LLM from Utrecht University (Netherlands) a postgraduate diploma from the Kenya School of Law, and holds undergraduate degrees in Socio-Legal Sciences and Law from the University of Pune (India).
