Coal Seams and Bit Streams: Two Recent Cases On The Conceptual Difficulty Of Being And/Or Having

Speaker: Nathan Moore (Birkbeck, University of London)

This paper takes two recent cases (Bocardo SA v Star Energy UK [2010] UKSC 35; Your Response Ltd v Datateam [2014] EWCA Civ 281) on the difficulty of defining possession as a starting point from which to re-visit, once more, the perennial problem of how to distinguish the rational from the material and, more specifically, subject from object. In so doing, it will not seek to arrive at a ‘new’ or ‘final’ method for defining ‘personhood’ or ‘thing-ness’, nor will it attempt to ‘return’ to some sort of ‘original’ conceptualisation of their difference. Perhaps counter-intuitively, it will argue that subject and object are best left confused. In aid of this, it will call upon a number of sources for support, including the artist Paul Nash and the writer JG Ballard. Its purpose will be to try to gesture towards short circuiting that politico-theological holding known, variously, as the ‘anthropological machine’, the ‘paradigm of immunisation’, the ‘apparatus of capture’, and so on.

Nathan Moore is a Senior Lecturer at Birkbeck School of Law. He studied law at Kent Law School, and undertook a PhD at Birkbeck College. His first book, The Decision, will be published soon by Fordham University Press, as part of their Commonalities series.

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