Law in Crisis The Ecstatic Subject of Natural Disaster [Hardcover]

Taking natural disaster as the political and legal norm is uncommon. Taking a person who has become unstable and irrational during a disaster as the starting point for legal analysis is equally uncommon. Nonetheless, inLaw in CrisisRuth Miller makes the unsettling case that the law demands an ecstatic subject and that natural disaster is the endpoint to law. Developing an idiosyncratic but compelling new theory of legal and political existence, Miller challenges existing arguments that, whether valedictory or critical, have posited the rational, bounded self as the normative subject of law.

By bringing a distinctive, accessible reading of contemporary political philosophy to bear on source material in several European and Middle Eastern languages, Miller constructs a cogent analysis of natural disaster and its role in modern subject formation. In the process, she opens up exciting new lines of inquiry in the fields of law, politics, and gender studies.Law in Crisisrepresents a promising new development in the interdisciplinary study of law.

Miller takes us on a fundamentally original and compelling journey as she reexamines the way that legal subjectivity and modern law is conceptualized. Challenging conventional assumptions, she insightfully argues the case that it is subjects who are displaced or unbounded that are the norm of law and politics. This is important, innovative work. Ruth A. Miller is Assistant Professor of Middle Eastern History at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. She is the author ofThe Erotics of Corruption: Law, Scandal, and Political Perversion(2008) andThe Limits of Bodily Integrity: Abortion, Adultery, and Rape Legislation in Comparative Perspective(2007). The book, though exceedingly complex, is also exceptionally well-written. Miller avoids sensationalizing the disasters she discusses, but she doesn't sentimentalize them, either. Her analysis is straightforward, and often presented in a way thalS@