In every legal system, consumer law indicates problems that it is supposed to solve: imbalance, unfairness and unconscionability. It raises important questions about a legal system’s pre-existing ability to deal with those problems. In a way, consumer law’s very presence in a legal system judges that system. When considering consumer law as a part of the system, an opposition arises between two kinds of discourse. First, there is a discourse, which constructs consumer law as a legal entity apart from the (...) others, sometimes leftist, founded on a defense of social justice or on market regulation. From this angle, consumer law might easily appear to be subversive. Second, there is a discourse, which results from the effort to accommodate consumer law within the legal tradition’s general private law. Under this discourse, rather than disrupting the core private law, consumer law is integrated into it. A gap may thus be noticeable between the initial intentions that sustain consumer law and the effects it produces. The author’s claim in this paper is that this gap, which generates ambivalence about consumer law, results from western legal systems’ main way of formalizing law in the contemporary era by writing. (shrink)

Dans la Critique de la raison pratique, Kant entreprend une « archéologie » du Soi moral. Cette archéologie peut s’entendre conformément à la définition de Foucault : ne remontant vers aucune origine, comparant des faits de raison, oeuvrant sur un plan d’immanence strictement rationnel, Kant archéologue livre l’idée d’une « histoire de ce qui rend nécessaire une certaine forme de pensée ». Il s’agit de reconstruire les événementialités rationnelles qui séparent et articulent différentes conditions de possibilités d’émergence du Soi moral. (...) Et ces événementialités, portées au jour dans l’écart du présent au passé, dessinent l’horizon d’un possible politique, celui d’une articulation forte entre morale et politique, telle que le « politique moral » déjà l’annonce. Cet article est le premier jalon d’un travail en cours. (shrink)

In this review, I discuss Balibar’s ‘proposition of equaliberty’ with regard to its theoretical status and contribution, its relationship to other contemporary theories of radical democracy as well as to the problematic of bourgeois versus communist emancipation in Marx. The primary interest of this essay is to develop a detailed understanding of Balibar’s analytical schema, which draws a complex picture of our contemporary ‘human condition’, and to place it within his own theoretical development since his contribution toReading Capitalin the 60s. (...) On that basis, it will be possible to assess his contribution to thinking politics with and after Marx and place it more concretely within the generalised radical-democratic turn in post-Marxist theory. (shrink)