Lecture | Art as an Interface of Law and Justice: Affirmation, Disturbance, Disruption

In his lecture Korsten will expand on what in Art as an interface of law and justice he defined as different kinds of logic operative in systems of law and realms of justice, and the role of art as an interface between the two. With regard to this, questions concern the relation between the idea of art as an interface and the autonomy of art, whether art can be straightforwardly used to achieve a certain goal, and how art can disrupt. These issues provoke again a fourth question, namely how art as an interface relates to time. If law, in its dependence on jurisprudence, relates to the past, justice is ‘always to come’. Here Korsten aims to answer the question of art’s relation to time by considering art’s potentiality to connect law and justice.

Frans-Willem Korsten is professor ‘Literature, Culture, and Law’ at the Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society and professor 'Literature and society' at the Erasmus School of Philosophy. He was responsible for the NWO internationalization program ‘Precarity and Post-Autonomia: The Global Heritage’ and took part in a NWO/FWO funded program: ‘Imagineering Techniques in the Early Modern Period’. He currently takes part in a NWO funded program entitled ‘Playing Politics: Media Platforms, Making Worlds’. He published extensively on the Republican baroque, theatricality and sovereignty (A Dutch Republican Baroque; open access AUP), and the relation between literature, art, politics, justice and law – Art as an Interface of Law and Justice: Affirmation, Disturbance, Disruption (Hart, 2021) and Cultural Interactions: Conflict and Cooperation (AUP, 2022).