ABSTRACT
This article is an edited version of a conversation animated by Daniel Matthews’ recent monograph Earthbound: The Aesthetics of Sovereignty in the Anthropocene. We discuss the impetus and context for the book, its contribution to an emergent literature on law and the Anthropocene, and its commentary on the continued relevance of humanistic approaches to law and politics. The conversation traverses a range of concerns raised by Earthbound, such as the politics of place, the nature of community, and the priority of obligations in the ‘age of rights’. Exploring Matthews’ rendering of the ‘aesthetic aspect’ of sovereignty, which contours contemporary approaches to our environmental predicament, we consider the limits and possibilities of the sovereign political form in the context of the climate and ecological crises, and discuss how the Anthropocene might challenge existing approaches to law and the humanities. The interview is preceded by a contextualisation of Matthews’ work within the intellectual reorientations and recalibrations prompted by the Anthropocene, and the broader provocation of the ‘inhumanities’.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Matthews (Citation2021). This book was awarded the 2021 Penny Pether Prize by the Law, Literature and the Humanities Association of Australasia.
9 António Guterres United Nations Secretary-General, in remarks following release of the IPCC, Climate Change 2022: Mitigation of Climate Change. Quoted widely, including in the United Nations News, (Citation2021) ‘IPCC Adaptation Report ‘a damning indictment of failed global leadership on climate’ at https://news.un.org/en/story/2022/02/1112852.
18 Matthews (Citation2021), pp 48, 62. The ‘as if’ – the suspension of disbelief – is derived from the second formulation of Kant’s categorical imperative: ‘Act as if the maxim of your action were by your will to turn into a universal law of nature’: Kant (Citation2002), p 38; elaborated in Derrida (Citation1992), p 190.
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Notes on contributors
Daniel Matthews
Daniel Matthews is Associate Professor of Law at the Warwick Law School, University of Warwick. He teaches and publishes in the fields of jurisprudence, political theory, and law and the humanities with a particular focus on theories of sovereignty and political community.
Kathleen Birrell
Kathleen Birrell is a Lecturer in Law at La Trobe University. Her teaching and research traverse legal theory, law and the humanities, climate law, and decolonial theory and praxis, with a particular interest in the implications of new materialism for law.
Tim Lindgren
Tim Lindgren is a PhD Candidate at Melbourne Law School, University of Melbourne. He researches and teaches in international law, and is located within the broader field of law and the humanities. He is particularly concerned with the ‘environment’ in international law, peoples’ tribunals, colonialism and the performance of law in informal spaces.
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