Towards a Physiological Novel / Wednesday 15 June at 7pm / Speaker: Piyel Halda

# 6. We Blush to Say Many Things which we do not Blush to Write.
Speaker: Piyel Haldar.
Wednesday 15th of June at 7pm.

The oral tradition of common law rests upon the idea that evidence is best relayed to the court orally. Oral testimony is predicated upon a fiction of voluntariness. At the same time advocates of the oral tradition points to the necessity of viewing witness demeanour for signs of veracity or mendacity. The body once divorced from the will of the subject becomes both a cipher and a guarantor of the truth. This paper will follow through a reading of Julien Offray de La Mettrie’s essay ‘Man a Machine’ (1749) in order to assess the mechanistic attributes of the legal subject as a witness.

Piyel Haldar is Senior Lecturer in the School of Law at Birkbeck College, University of London. He has published widely in the UK, Germany, Australia and the U.S. and he is the managing editor of Law and Critique. Piyel Haldar is the author of Law, Orientalism and Postcolonialism: the Jurisdiction of the Lotus Eaters (Routledge, 2007). He is currently working on another book examining the symbolic importance of animals in iconography, the medieval bestiary, legal trials and other didactic forms.

Towards a Physiological Novel. ‘Towards a Physiological Novel’ is a series of 8 bi-weekly talks and screenings initiated by Sidsel Meineche Hansen on the subject of communication and Angst, and the production of noise and nervousness in an electronic era. The talks will operate as a mode of research for a physiological novel that examines how information circulates – how it, in physiological terms, is embodied, and consumed in society. The series will bring together a diverse range of theoreticians, artists and fiction writers whose works’ provide a flexible foundation for dealing with these ideas. The events are free.

Bi-weekly talks on Wednesdays

X Marks the Bökship
210 / 3 Cambridge Heath Road London E2 9NQ
Bethnal Green tube/ Bus 253 / Bus 106
http://bokship.org