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Abstract
The area of reproductive politics in Italy demonstrates both a process of secularisation and desecularisation. On the one hand the highly conservative Assisted Reproduction Act of 2004 has been challenged in the courts leading to a resecularisation of this area of law. On the other hand the Abortion Act of 1978 has been descularised by the high usage by doctors of the conscientious objection clause of the Act. This article looks at this parallel movement of both secularisation and desecularisation.

In Session 7 (26 February 2003) of The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume II, Jacques Derrida engages again with Maurice Blanchot, two days after the latter's cremation. This intervention also appears as a post-face to Derrida's 2003 edition of Parages, his collection of essays devoted to the work of Blanchot. In this article, I examine Derrida's affinity to the work of Blanchot, as the one whose work 'stood watch over and around what matters to me, for a long time behind me and forever still before me' [The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume II, p. 176]. In doing so I look at the manner in which Derrida engaged with Blanchot in his work and how in examining this engagement another reading of sovereignty emerges, one which is not tethered to liberal models of sovereign will but one which eludes biopolitical ordering and may be seen as a form of disappearance. Through a reading of Derrida's readings of Blanchot's The Madness of the Day I emphasize the link of this alternative sovereignty to both writing and literature in order to demonstrate how a more radical thinking of sovereignty can be discovered in Derrida's thought.

In 2004, the introduction of a restrictive law on assisted reproduction in Italy sees the privileging of a conservative model of family relations and a misogynist view of society by the political elite. This backlash politics excludes many individuals from full reproductive citizenship. In this regard what the Italian case allows us to see is the operation of a biopolitics which both governs and excludes. The 2004 Act excludes gay couples, single people and people who are carriers of genetically inherited conditions from access to assisted reproductive technologies. Such an exclusionary biopolitics has provoked a counter-politics of resistance against the legislation. This article examines the manner in which individuals have contested the legislation's prohibitions, and, in so doing, looks at how this might constitute an example of what Nikolas Rose has termed an ethopolitics. The concept of ethopolitics allows us to visualize the potential of an active counter-politics of resistance for restoring reproductive citizenship to those deprived of it by legislative interventions of this nature.

Employing insights from Italian sexual difference theory on law and rights, this article examines how both the text of the Italian Abortion Law of 1978 and its operation reveal the contradictions within liberal rights discourse on reproductive freedom. The Act itself contains traces of both Roman Catholic and liberal pluralist worldviews and has, since its introduction, been the site of conflict over competing notions of citizenship and legal identity. This article explores the impact of the Act's paradoxical nature on its operation against the background of the complex debates within the different strands of feminist theory in Italy over the question of reproductive freedom.

Law attempts to govern life & death through the appropriation of images that give a fantasy of control over death. The functioning of the thanatopolitical state is underpinned by a perceived control over death & its representation. This means of controlling death is challenged when someone wishes to die in an untimely fashion. Death may be timely when the state engages in the officially sanctioned killing of the death penalty but not when the individual assumes such a power to decide. When an individual goes before the law to obtain a right to die, instead of confronting death, legal institutions evade the issue & instead talk about life, & its sacred & inviolable nature. Yet, in the same move, many exceptions to this sacred quality of life are carved out. One can see an example of this phenomenon in the area of Supreme Court decision making on physician-assisted suicide. In Washington v. Glucksberg, the applicants had died by the time of the Supreme Court's decision. Where did they go? Were they ever really there for the law? The Supreme Court decision attempts to recompose the notion of identic wholeness in the face of bodies associated with death & decay. It is, in other words, an attempt to arrest the process of death by composing a narrative that valorizes life. The case becomes a narrative about the threat to life or, more precisely, a threat to a particular way of life. In other words, the state's interest in preserving life becomes the interest in preserving the life of the state. The state must live on. The question then moves from being one of whether the individual applicant in a case concerning physician-assisted suicide should live or die to one that asks should we the court live or die? 32 References. Adapted from the source document.

The failure of the legal imaginary to reflect sexual difference in the opening decades of the postcolonial Irish state led to what in psychoanalytical terms may be described as the creation of socially abjected groups. Lesbians and gay men were numbered among such groups. The failure of official discourse to contemplate sexual difference as an integral part of Irish national identity was a residue of the Irish colonial experi ence. The association of Ireland with the female in colonial discourse led the Irish revolutionary elite to propagate a myth of hypermasculinity. This strategy had far- reaching consequences for the manner in which matters of sexual difference were to be treated in the postcolonial era. The exclusion of sexually dissident voices from official discourse did not stifle attempts at the levels of literary discourse and pressure group politics to voice alternative desires which were deemed antithetical to the heterosexual Irish state. The growth of alternative narratives of sexual identity led to a gradual transformation of the legal and cultural construction of homosexuality in Ireland. This demonstrates the power of narrative strategies to counter a dominant discourse of blindness to sexual difference and reflects a link between the cultural and legal constructions of sexual identity.

Introduction -- "Becoming-world" / Rosi Braidotti -- Cosmopolitanism in a multipolar world / David Held -- A cosmopolitics of singularities: rights and the thinking of other worlds / Patrick Hanafin -- The metaphysics of cosmopolitanism / Costas Douzinas -- The humanitarian imaginary: reflections on cosmopolitanism and mediation / Lilie Chouliaraki -- The fantasies of cosmopolitanism / Henrietta Moore -- Postcolonialism and cosmopolitanism: towards a worldly understanding of fascism and Europe's colonial crimes / Paul Gilroy -- Estrangement as pedagogy: the cosmopolitan vernacular / Sneja Gunew -- Global cosmopolitanism and nomad citizenship / Eugene Holland -- Destroying cosmopolitanism for the sake of the cosmos / Claire Colebrook

At a time when social and political reality seems to move away from the practice of cosmopolitanism, whilst being in serious need of a new international framework to regulate global interaction, what are the new definitions and practices of cosmopolitanism? Including contributions from leading figures across the humanities and social sciences, After Cosmopolitanism takes up this question as its central challenge. Its core argument is the idea that our globalised condition forms the heart of contemporary cosmopolitan claims, which do not refer to a transcendental ideal, but are rather immanent.

Drawing upon and extending the theoretical insights of Deleuze, Foucault and Agamben, this volume considers the concept of life as it operates in law, politics and contemporary culture. It focuses on key legal cases (such as the Terri Schiavo case in the US), political events (such as the post 9/11 internment camp) and new cultural phenomena