Event Details

Professor Miguel Vatter (Deakin University) presents his latest research.

“Trust and Community with Other Than Human Beings”

Abstract:

One of the most pressing challenges of our times concerns the political and legal recognition of other than human beings. Without addressing this challenge, it is hard to conceive of how we can re-establish new forms of community with the beings and processes that shape the environment on which we depend for life on earth. Religious thought has an ambivalent relation to ecological politics – some have drawn the roots of our current ecological crisis to Judeo-Christian narratives of creation while others have drawn from these same narratives (but especially from alternative narratives drawn from Indigenous knowledges) the basis for ascription of rights to nature and ideas of human obligation, stewardship and trusteeship of nature. In this paper I propose to consider a tradition of thinking about community that derives from Althusius and was recovered by the 20^th century legal and political school of English pluralism to think about the proper relationship between state and churches.

In this paper I intend to apply this approach to community to the problem of posthuman community with other than human beings. The key concept is the idea of a “trust” and of “trusteeship” that has most recently been invoked in the landmark Aotearoa/New Zealand legislation Te Awa Tupua (Whanganui River Claims Settlement) Act 2017. This Act recognizes “an indivisible and living whole, comprising the Whanganui River from the mountains to the sea, incorporating all its physical and metaphysical elements” as a legal person with the capacity to claim the same rights as human citizens. The paper will discuss the theoretical arguments underlying the claim that trust and trusteeship can offer the legal framework within which ideas of community of life, ancestral conceptions of Indigenous law, and the tradition of common law can be recombined in novel ways to address the salient challenge of our times.

Miguel Vatter is Professor of Politics at the Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation, Deakin University, Melbourne and has also held visiting professorships in Germany and China. He has published extensively on political theory, philosophy and theology from Machiavelli to the present, including a recent multi-volume project on Jewish and Christian political theologies. To focus only on his most recent work, Vatter’s Republic of the Living: Biopolitics and the Critique of Civil Society (Fordham UP, 2014) is praised as “a thrilling intervention into thinking about human life” by James Martel; Divine Democracy: Political Theology after Carl Schmitt (Oxford UP, 2021) is praised as “essential reading” by Wendy Brown and Living Law: Jewish Political Theology from Hermann Cohen to Hannah Arendt (Oxford UP 2022) is described as an “erudite and comprehensive work” by Judith Butler. In 2023, Vatter is working on a new project on politics, religion and the planetary turn.