CLT SSLT Seminar with Desmond Manderson on 18 March 2024

The Centre for Legal Theory (CLT) is pleased to have Professor Desmond Manderson as our speaker for the Singapore Symposium for Legal Theory (SSLT) seminar held on 18 March 2024.

In his seminar, “Klimt’s Jurisprudence: Sovereign Violence and the rule of law”, Professor Manderson introduces Gustav Klimt’s lost masterpiece, Jurisprudence, bringing it into a richer dialogue with its  social and legal context. He explored how the painting may be read as a compelling image of what Giorgio Agamben called  homo sacer – a monstrous figure haunting law in the 20th and 21st centuries. Drawing on two of the most  important cultural events to take place in Vienna at the time—the first performance of Aeschylus’ Oresteia 

and the first publication of Sigmund Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams—he proposed to develop three  dimensions of the painting’s relationship between man, law, and sovereignty: law as it is (the social); law as  we imagine it (the philosophical); and law as it might be (the political). The proper name for the highly charged study of their relationship is jurisprudence.

CLT Roundtable
19 March 2024

Speaker: Assistant Professor Benjamin Goh

In his roundtable discussion, Assistant Professor Benjamin retraces the mnemo-political work of a national museum exhibition and a graphic novel through the idioms of cultural memory and cultural techniques. Guided by Aleida Assmann’s and Cornelia Vismann’s theoretical scholarship, he approaches the Singapore History Gallery and Sonny Liew’s The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye (2015) as medialsites of memory whose worldly effects depend on their encounters with embodied viewer-readers. Apprehended in terms of ‘cultural memory techniques’, these specimens of law and literature disclose transactions between the material and the symbolic, the political and the cultural, and the collective and the individual, whose analysis anticipates future memory- and media-oriented studies of the interdiscipline. 

Benjamin Goh is an Assistant Professor of Law in the National University of Singapore. He  works in the field of law and literature, particularly in the history of authorship and  copyright. His present projects surround a monograph entitled The Materiality of  Literature: Rereading Authorship and Copyright with Kant (under contract with Cambridge  University Press) and a series of papers on ‘Planetary Law and Literature: Reading Across,  Against, and Alongside Europe’. At NUS Law, he convenes undergraduate and graduate  seminars in legal theory, law and literature, and law and the humanities.  

More about the SSLT Seminars here: 

https://law.nus.edu.sg/clt/the-singapore-symposium-in-legal-theory/ .

This post event highlight is also available in pdf here.