Chapter 9 asks how we can critically evaluate competition in this kind of society, particularly from within its own terms of reference - that is, as an ‘immanent critique’. The premise that domesticated competition is a work of human artifice implies that it is something we have some control over and can shape. I argue that the pervasive image of the rule-governed game, and ideas such as ‘the level playing field’, encode the basic cultural resources from which any criticism must be constructed. Moreover, competition works best within certain bounded spheres of practice - e.g. business, democracy, science - and its worst distortions are often a result of competition transgressing these boundaries, as when money interferes with politics. I argue that maintaining such separation and balances of power among distinct institutional spheres, arenas of competition, is critical for liberal society.

This chapter sets out to unpack a number of assumptions and principles on which the mainstream transitional justice approach (normal model) is based. It gives particular attention to Pablo de Greiff’s ‘normative conception of transitional justice’, which provides an important backdrop against which my pluralist reading unfolds in the subsequent chapters. Moreover, this chapter places the book’s argument in relation to larger ongoing critical debates within the field.

The preface describes the research methodology and the writing process that led to this book. It begins by explaining how the author collected information from the relevant sources, verified its completeness and accuracy, and analysed it under a unified framework. It then turns to the issue of storytelling style and to the author’s decision to present his findings in the form of a fictionalized account. In so doing, the preface discusses the problem of verifiability of classified information, the issue of trust between the narrator and the audience, and the promises and pitfalls of literary writing when it comes to informing, reporting, or commenting on real life.

This chapter uses a close reading of The Lancet medical journal, and its radical, charismatic editor Thomas Wakley, to delineate the ‘high-water mark’ of Romantic sensibility as an emotional regime. It explores the ways in which Wakley and The Lancet leveraged the emotional politics of contemporary melodrama to critique the alleged nepotism and corruption of the London surgical elites. More especially, it analyses their campaign to expose instances of surgical incompetence at the city’s leading teaching hospitals, demonstrating the ways in which this strategy weaponised the emotions of anger, pity, and sympathy, and considering its implications for the cultural norms of an inchoate profession and for the ultimate stability of the emotional regime of Romantic sensibility.

This introduction offers an extended reading of David Foster Wallace’s 2000 foray into political journalism, “Up, Simba,” which illustrates what will be the central claim of this book: that literary post-postmodernism is best understood as the means by which left-leaning writers negotiate the neoliberal turn — a version of, rather than an alternative to, this new consensus. To make that case, I trace connections between the communitarian logic of the so-called New Sincerity, the form of post-postmodernism most closely associated with Wallace, and the interventions of Bill Clinton and the New Democrats, who rejected key New Deal principles in favor of a "third way" between liberalism and conservativism. This introduction also historicizes "postcritique" and the various "post-ideological" accounts of neoliberal culture, accounts which, in my view, reproduce contemporary liberalism’s ambivalence about the free market and free-market politics, and therefore can be understood as symptomatic of the very changes they seek to interpret.

Since the Ogdoad, the Ennead, and the Source are described as beyond verbal description, how can written language convey anything at all about this ultimate experience of gnōsis? Discussion of oral transmission by means of logos, dissemination of written treatises, and the paradoxes of hermeneutics as understood in terms of Deconstruction (Derrida) and Hermeneutics (Gadamer).

Scholars have heeded Nietzsche’s instruction that we should think of TSZ as a kind of parody, but there has been a great deal of uncertainty about what exactly he means by this. Zavatta helpfully clears up the debate by surveying the genres of literary and musical parody prior to Nietzsche’s time and showing how he appropriated these genres in TSZ so as to invent a new form of philosophical critique.

This fragment’s argument rejects positivism, the leading theoretical framework informing comparative law, and introduces culturalism with a view to enhancing comparatism’s interpretive yield.

This fragment’s argument is that the designation ‘comparative law’, while epistemologically impoverished, must ultimately be retained for pragmatic reasons. Yet, it must be invested with an alternative meaning.

This fragment addresses the epistemic equipment that a comparatist must carry in his tool-box as he embarks upon his foreign-law investigations.

This fragment’s argument refutes leading theoretical assumptions informing comparative law to the effect that comparatism can be objective and access truth, on one hand, and that it must be objective and access truth, on the other. Through a biographical sketch, this argument shows that there cannot be a comparison that is not informed by the comparatist’s predispositions and predilections, themselves having much to do with the cultural world that the comparatist embodies.

This fragment’s argument is to challenge one of comparative law’s most influential assumptions to the effect that there are commonalities across laws (which must ultimately favour unification). The result of flawed reasoning, this postulate is unwarranted. Rather, the comparison of laws must address difference across laws for this is all there is.

This fragment’s argument advocates for the epistemological significance of fieldwork in comparative law.

This fragment’s argument draws on a range of intellectual sources in order to make the case for the value of oppositional or negative thought, the thought that says ‘no’ to orthodox ideas.

This fragment assembles a list of the resources (including inspirational models) that I mobilized in the construction of a radically alternative theoretical model to inform the practice of comparative law.

This fragment’s argument is that comparative law is in thrall to a colonial mindset and must in short order emancipate itself from this epistemic predicament.

This fragment’s argument advocates for comparative law’s indiscipline vis-à-vis legal positivism and claims that insights from other disciplines are crucial to the production of an enhanced interpretive yield in any foreign-law investigation.