The volume’s Introduction is divided into four parts. It begins by setting out the analytical framework animating this volume, namely “juristocratic reckoning," which builds on, yet critically modifies and reappropriates, Ran Hirschl’s (2004) notion of “juristocracy” in order to capture a broader process of transformation through which law and legal categories are invested with unusual weight and responsibility beyond their more conventional carrying capacity. Such over-freighting of law typically involves a “dialectics of reckoning,” through which law is first elevated during certain moments in time, which then give way to a second phase, a coming to terms with juristocracy’s failures marked by critique, skepticism, and eventual disenchantment. Within this larger dynamic, certain histories of juristocratic reckoning are imbued with what the Introduction describes as an “iconic indexicality,” in which their supposed historical significance itself enters into the process of juristocratic elevation and then unraveling. Against the backdrop of this conceptual exposition, the Introduction situates Reckoning with Law in Excess in the current conjuncture – an era of crisis and confrontation, characterized by growing debates, within academia and beyond, about the demise of the rule of law. Having located the overall analytical project within different historical, political, and academic contexts, the Introduction then traces the contours of juristocratic reckoning through the diverse and global range of case studies assembled in the volume, including some that are marked by an iconic indexicality and others that are not. It proposes three “taxonomies of reckoning,” which coalesce around concerns with “states of juristocracy,” “alter-legal reckonings,” as well as “juristocracies against the state,” attesting to the persisting centrality – if always contested, variable, and fragmented – of the state form. Last but not least, the Introduction examines the temporality of juristocracy, since viewing the case studies through their various temporalities reinforces the wider point that dialectics of reckoning must be understood through their empirical and historical heterogeneities rather than as exemplars of an abstracted sociolegal category. Revisiting the various case studies, the Introduction shows how the dialectics of juristocratic reckoning are associated with moments, momentums, and mobilizations in the living archives of law that often yield inconclusive or ambiguous results and remain open to multiple interpretations, directions, and futures.

In chapter one, Brian Ó Conchubhair offers an examination of the metadiscourse “Revival” as a concept and the relation between revivalism and periodization. Narratives of revival too often repeat inaccurate narratives of Irish culture, to the point that our understanding of the Irish past, of Irish institutions and landscapes, suffers from unexamined conclusions about the Revival’s social and political efficacy and from images and tropes of Irishness that modern critics inherited from early revivalists. This is particularly apparent in the conception, promoted by some early revivalists, of the West of Ireland as a site of authentic Irishness. Indeed, in the Gaeltachtaí (Irish speaking regions), which have long been idealized as a stronghold of original or pure Irishness, a kind of zombification has taken place, one that in some ways displaces the long tradition of antiquarian and archaeological projects of cultural renewal and restoration.

In her chapter, Heather Laird examines twenty-first century commemorations, such as the bicentennial of the Irish Rebellion of 1798 and the centennial of the Easter Rising of 1916. From the time of the peak era of Revival to the present, a vision of Ireland has emerged that values tradition but that also reckons with the failures of tradition to govern modern lives. The statues and exhibitions that arose in preparation for these celebrations are the visible signs of the very future envisioned in 1798 and 1916. Laird’s examination of twenty-first century commemorations of the Dublin Lockout of 1913 and the commemoration of it in 2013 suggests that revivalism resists this idea of cultural salvage and actively serves a world to come. She discusses two 2013 commemoration projects, Living the Lockout and the 1913 Lockout Tapestry, latter-day manifestations of a persistent revivalist impulse to make the past productive of the future.

Eoin Flannery, in his chapter, examines what happens when the revivalist promise of the future has curdled into something else, an inevitability of history rather than the positing power of the artist. It is one thing to accept a faded ideal as the motivating trope of a latter-day revivalist novel; it is quite another thing to turn away from ideals altogether and to accept, even to embrace, a world defined less by cultural aspirations than financial schemes, debt and “ecosickness.” The refusal to adopt traditional revivalist reference points and temporal frameworks leads writers as diverse as Kevin Berry, Anne Haverty, Éilís Ní Dhuibhne, and Mike McCormack to offer narratives that range from financial degradation to social collapse. One result of this refusal is the effort to foreground language, style, voice, and the vitality and exuberance of storytelling that is a hallmark of revivalist art, an advancing light into a potentially dark future.

In this chapter, Ben Levitas investigates forms of distance and temporal indeterminacy legible in the latter-day revivalist drama of Marina Carr and Brian Friel. In their works, strategies of distance, of “paratheatricality,” seek not to avoid representation but to link it to more authentic experiences for the audience. Both playwrights create a theatre of hope, a theatre for and of the future that testifies to a continuance of the Revival’s main themes and concerns (particularly with respect to time), despite their rejection of the idealism of so many early revivalist works. Friel and Carr achieve a transposition of dramatic life from the stage to the audience – that is to say, from the stage to actual life – which is, in its turn, captured in the dramatic work. Theatrical words are forms of political action insofar as strategies of performative distance and alienation find their place in dramatic productions that support a “grammar of change.”

One of the concerns of postmodern British fiction was the textual and discursive means by which historical events are communicated to the present through story-telling. Much post-millennial fiction still dips into the postmodern toolbox; it is not unusual to read novels with a fragmented and non-linear narrative, for example, but these novels focus instead on the now, while asking what does it mean to be now, to recognise that the past and the present exist simultaneously, and how does this translate into an understanding of temporality. As Lauren Berlant has argued, neoliberal economic policies mobilize instability, and that instability is evident in contemporary fiction’s representations of history, genre and identity. Some novels examined here invoke past and present through an illusion of narrative simultaneity, while others investigate how the powerful can write and rewrite the present and the past and in doing so can disrupt perceptions of temporality.

Chapter 2 frames the book, drawing on structuration theory and ontological security studies to provide its theoretical underpinnings. This chapter begins by exploring the claims of positive influences of different tools found in the transitional justice project on ensuring non-recurrence of conflict. It proposes that while both scholars and practitioners remain unsure of what ‘works’ for a meaningful ‘Never Again’, they remain faithful that something does and that some transitional justice is better than none. The chapter then delineates some common threads based on these multiple promises of non-recurrence to reflect on the characteristics of transitional justice as a structure. Finally, the chapter theoretically complicates the existing position of non-recurrence in transitional justice scholarship by asking questions about temporality, security, and the purpose of transitional justice as a global project. In doing so, it provides a new outlook on the ontological security/transitional justice nexus and discusses where non-recurrence fits within it.

As the providers of care work, women experienced the painful losses of male bodies during the Civil War acutely. This chapter explores the way Elizabeth Stuart Phelps used her works—particularly her successful sentimental novel, The Gates Ajar (1868)—to imagine faith as a way to manage this pain. Yet, Phelps’s popularity stemmed from the way her notion of faith also complicated the orthodox Calvinist belief in a disembodied spirit: an ontology premised on the soul’s difference from, and superiority to, the body. By developing what Phelps calls “spiritual materialism,” she puts the lived experience of embodiment at the very center of belief, not drifting or working between mind-centered and body-centered paradigms, as we have seen, but operating beyond them both at the level of faith. Precisely the way this re-embodied faith moves beyond mind-centered and body-centered ontologies allows Phelps’s sentimental novel itself to move beyond the restrictive gender politics of sentimentalism, “minding the body” to tell a less repressive story of domesticity and reveal a more capacious understanding of female desire.

This chapter sheds light on phenomenological aspects of personality disorders. Although research on personality disorders has increased in the last decades, it remains relatively underexamined compared to other mental health conditions. This discrepancy is even more evident in phenomenological psychopathology. To fill this lacuna, this chapter offers an analysis of the implicit, temporal foundation of self-experience in personality disorders. It is argued that personality disorders can be understood in terms of a temporal inflexibility of the self. Important aspects of lived inflexibility are described across five topoi: repetitiveness of interpersonal patterns, affective rigidity, reification of self-experience, lack of future openness, and the feeling of being stuck.

What does Heidegger mean by “curiosity” and why does he characterize it as a kind of epistemic vice, when most contemporary accounts view it as a virtue? Being and Time disparagingly notes that curiosity “concerns itself with a kind of knowing, but just in order to have known” (BT 217/172); the curious person busies herself with “entertaining ‘incidentals’” (BT 358/310). Building on previous work – wherein I argue that virtues are best understood as tendencies to cope well with existential obstacles to flourishing (McMullin 2019) – I show that curiosity as Heidegger frames it is an epistemically vicious misunderstanding of self and world arising in large part from our tendencies toward impatience, arrogance, and fear. Because Heidegger’s account of curiosity in Being and Time is not well-developed, we will look at nearby texts to get a better understanding of this sometimes-overlooked concept in Heidegger’s corpus.

When writing Being and Time, Heidegger envisaged the project to be more extensive than the text we now have. Only about a third of the material announced in the introduction has been published. Drawing on Heidegger’s retrospective comments, this chapter lays out the philosophical reasons why he abandoned the project. In published writings, Heidegger emphasizes the continuity between Being and Time and later works: the failure of Being and Time was a turn (Kehre) necessary to further advance on the path of thought. Heidegger’s private manuscripts present a more detailed and much more critical picture. In the ‘Running Notes to “Being and Time”’ (GA 82, 3-136), Heidegger rejects several methodological and substantial commitments of the book, including the ambition to answer the question of being and the commitment to temporality as the explanatory paradigm of ontology.

Mark Fisher’s 2009 book Capitalist Realism introduces one of the most widely-discussed theoretical concepts of the past decade whose reach extends across disciplines and indeed beyond academia. But what is the value and utility of Fisher’s concept for studies of literary and novelistic realism? In addition to surveying the concept itself, this chapter gauges the specific possibilities and limitations of the concept, which is often deployed in the service of a broader cultural and sociopolitical diagnosis, for literary and novelistic studies. Critics have invoked Fisher’s concept in analyses ranging from collective politics to accelerationism, from discussions of contemporary culture to interrogations of utopian longing in Europe and North America today. And yet, in spite of – or more accurately due to – the term’s popularity, there exists a disjoint between phrase and substance that becomes particularly evident when we examine the conception of realism that the term and Fisher’s book in general contains. As we will see, in some ways surprisingly, asking “what’s the realism in capitalist realism?” is not as straightforward a question as one might expect.

Continues the discussion of mental capacity with expansion of the debates brought by the romantic perspective. Presents the political demand for radical equality coming from left romanticism with its wild ‘abolitionist’ agenda on the one hand, and a seeding of some new social approaches to capacity assessment on the other. A deeper inquiry into mental capacity and mood disorder using romantic ideas of temporality is presented as additional stimulus for the evolution of mental capacity. Some characteristics of mental capacity fitting it to a ‘superconcept’ are explained, which may guide future interdisciplinary research and teaching.

In 2000, when the Austrian right-wing politician Jorg Haider became part of a national governing coalition, there was trans-European outrange. In 2022 when Giorgia Meloni became prime minister of Italy her neofascist roots were barely mentioned. This contribution asks: What happened in Europe between 2000 and 2022 that led to the “normalization” of right nationalist politics in country after country? This chapter analyzes the trajectory of right politics in Europe as it seeks to identify continuities, commonalities, and contingent events that pushed the right forward. Temporality is the chapter’s organizing principle. The attenuation of thick security is the red thread that runs through it. Explaining the ascendance of the populist nationalist right in terms of a security crisis is a more robust way of thinking of current events than explanations that focus on conceptions of cultural identity or purely economistic explanations . The chapter proceeds in four stages: the longue durée of the European nationalist right; the stabilization period that succeeded the crises of 2015; the effect of the Covid surprise and, lastly, the need for a reinvention of security. Secondary sources, election data, and political speech provide the evidence for the argument advanced.

This chapter approaches Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde from the viewpoint of its temporal dramaturgy. It highlights the opera’s specificity by interpreting it as a tragedy of hearing: a tragedy in which the main characters, Tristan and Isolde, stuck in their melancholy, are bound to the discursive and plot-oriented forms of musical-operatic time, while the redemption they desire – aesthetically presented by Wagner through acoustic means – points musically beyond the opera’s temporal structures. These connections can be traced on the structural level and that of musical dramaturgy and musical form but also on the level of the characters’ psychology.

Rather than occasions for law’s standstill in face of a political decision, emergencies are opportunities for legal, institutional and normative mobilization. The entry lays out the field’s basic areas of concern: the theoretical problem of containment of threats within a particular legal and political order, and the practical problems of definitions, authorizations, jurisdiction and temporality. If indeed the time frames of emergency are long and flexible, multiple and overlapping rather than “exceptional”, then law in emergencies is a constantly shifting space of opportunity in which normatively charged political projects can be manifested. To design legal and constitutional mechanisms that will better respond to threats, we should shift away from theories that perpetuate a static dichotomy between “norm” and “exception”, and study emergency as a dynamic field of legal and normative mobilization.