A theatre piece (Maria read by Yoriko Otomo and To Mourn, With No Words to Keep performed by Anastasia Tataryn)

Gordon Square Theatre, Bloomsbury.

Birkbeck, University of London UK

Mindful of Heidegger’s call for interpretation ‘in poiesis’ as a phenomenological method, this workshop was put together in an attempt to think international legal history through alternative forms. We use the Treaty of Westphalia as our point of departure. ‘Lady Landgravine’ was one woman present at the signing of the Westphalian Treaty, involved in negotiations over territory. Historical record identifies her as being Maria Johanna von Helfenstein of Wernberg from Leuchtenberg who stood in for her husband, Maximilian von Leuchtenberg who died in 1646.

Written from the perspective of Maria Landgravine, the poem produces an alternative story of origin (drawing on master tropes of Western metaphysics: cave, the sun and the eye). The style gestures toward the English lyric poetry of the Westphalian period, which dealt extensively with the tensions between church and state, frequently using metaphors of the sun, the voyage, and the body of woman. Papers by Peter Fitzpatrick, Tarik Kochi and Christine Schwöbel look respectively at feminine law, the origins of legality, and discomfort-as-legal-technique.

The second (shorter) reading of the poem is performed alongside movement. Dance moves, as does art, at the “suspension of signification” (Jean-Luc Nancy, Muses) where “reflection and embodiment meet, at which doing and anticipating are intertwined” (Randy Martin, Critical Moves). This form of presentation disrupts the workshop format we are accustomed to. The effect that this performance may have – your responses, your reactions to the texts and themes of revisiting, rewriting, rethinking international law – is what we invite you to explore.