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On the Lives of Modern State Law
Review products
JudithSurkis, Sex, Law, and Sovereignty in French Algeria (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2019)
SaraPursley, Familiar Futures: Time, Selfhood, and Sovereignty in Iraq (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2019)
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 January 2022
Extract
Modern state law is an expansive force that permeates life and politics. Law's histories—colonial, revolutionary, and postcolonial—tell of its constitutive centrality to the making of colonies and modern states. Its powers intertwine with life itself; they attempt to direct it, shape its most intimate spheres, decide on the constitutive line dividing public from private, and take over the space and time in which life unfolds. These powers settle in the present, eliminate past authorities, and dictate futures. Gendering and constitutive of sexual difference, law's powers endeavor to mold subjects and alter how they orient themselves to others and to the world. But these powers are neither coherent nor finite. They are ripe with contradictions and conflicting desires. They are also incapable of eliminating other authorities, paths, and horizons of living; these do not vanish but remain not only thinkable and articulable but also a resource for the living. Such are some of the overlapping and accumulative interventions of the two books under review: Sara Pursley's Familiar Futures and Judith Surkis's Sex, Law, and Sovereignty in French Algeria. What follows is an attempt to further develop these interventions by thinking with some of the books’ underlying arguments. Familiar Futures is a history of Iraq, beginning with the British colonial-mandate period and concluding with the 1958 Revolution and its immediate aftermath. Sex, Law, and Sovereignty is a history of “French Algeria” that covers a century of French colonization from 1830 to 1930. The books converge on key questions concerning how modern law and the modern state—colonial and postcolonial—articulated sexual difference and governed social and intimate life, including through the rise of personal-status law as a separate domain of law constitutive of the conjugal family. Both books are consequently also preoccupied with the relationship between sex, gender, and sovereignty. And both contain resources for living along paths not charted by the modern state and its juridical apparatus.
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- Copyright © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press
References
1 The two books intervene in a larger field of scholarship on law, colonialism, and Islam. Recent scholarship in the field includes Hussin, Iza, The Politics of Islamic Law: Local Elites, Colonial Authority, and the Making of the Muslim State (Chicago, 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hanley, Will, Identifying with Nationality: Europeans, Ottomans, and Egyptians in Alexandria (New York, 2017)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Stephens, Julia, Governing Islam: Law, Empire, and Secularism in South Asia (Cambridge, 2018)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Yahaya, Nurfadzilah, Fluid Jurisdictions: Colonial Law and Arabs in Southeast Asia (Ithaca, 2020)Google Scholar.
2 For an earlier argument of the conflation of the Muslim question with the question of gender and sexuality in relation to the US war on Afghanistan, see Hirschkind, Charles and Mahmood, Saba, “Feminism, the Taliban, and the Politics of Counter-insurgency,” Anthropological Quarterly 75/2 (2002), 339–54CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
3 For a history of the civilizing powers of the civilian/combatant distinction, its difficulty, and how it played out in the Algerian war of anticolonial liberation, see Kinsella, Helen, The Image before the Weapon: A Critical History of the Distinction between Combatant and Civilian (Ithaca, 2011), esp. Ch. 6, 127–54CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
4 My articulation of the relationship between law and violence as supplemental, and my understanding of the supplement, draws on Jacques Derrida's reading of the logic of supplementarity in the work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. See Derrida, Jacques, Of Grammatology, trans. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty (Baltimore, 1997)Google Scholar.
5 I am referring here to the conventional legal expression “law of the land,” which is equivalent to the latin lex terrae or legem terrae. It signifies the whole body of valid laws, statutory or otherwise, in force at a particular time in a particular jurisdiction or country. Land, here, refers to territory or jurisdiction, not to property.
6 See Halley, Janet, “What Is Family Law? A Genealogy Part II,” Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities 23/2 (2011), 189–293Google Scholar.
7 Shepard, Todd, The Invention of Decolonization: The Algerian War and the Remaking of France (Ithaca, 2008), 5Google Scholar. Shepard dates back this French naming to 1838. To be sure, the name Algeria, or in French Algérie, was not a French invention but was derived from the name of the city of Algiers, which itself was derived from the Arabic word, al-Jaza'ir (“islands,” in English).
8 See Koselleck, Reinhard, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. Tribe, Keith (New York, 2004)Google Scholar. The articulation “future past” corresponds to Koselleck's argument that any given present already holds a “former future.” Future past is a former future that paradoxically enables the experience of the beginning of a new time.
9 Edelman, Lee, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, NC, 2004)Google Scholar.
10 The idea of the incalculability of the future and its openings draws on Derrida's work. See Derrida, Jacques, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Prenowitz, Eric (Chicago, 1995), 33–81Google Scholar. See also Pheng Cheah's reading of Derrida's thinking about time and Cheah's articulation of “the incalculable gift of time.” Cheah, Pheng, What Is a World: On Postcolonial Literature as World Literature (Durham, NC, 2016), 161–87CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
11 For a global historical account of the standardization of time, including in the Middle East, see Ogle, Vanessa, The Global Transformation of Time (Cambridge, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
12 Pursley's account is indebted to Reinhart Koselleck's Futures Past and in particular to the essay “‘Space of Experience’ and ‘Horizon of Expectation’: Two Historical Categories,” which describes the widening gap between experience and expectation in modernity, and therefore, for Pursley, the detaching of the future from the past. See Koselleck, Futures Past, 255–75. But Koselleck's work more recently translated into English also sheds lights on the obstinacy of time, including in modernity. In particular he articulates the idea of sediments, by which he means historical times consisting of “multiple layers that refer to each other in a reciprocal way, though without being wholly dependent upon each other.” See Koselleck, Reinhart, Sediments of Time: On Possible Histories, trans. Franzel, Sean and Hoffmann, Stefan-Ludwig (Stanford, 2018), 3–9Google Scholar.