ALIEN PHENOMENOLOGY, SELF EXCLUSION AND PROPERTY RIGHTS

Rights, while undoubtedly emancipatory and important in terms of autonomy and manifestation of the self, also contain within them the potential for a dangerous universalism and objectification of the self: they can make the self an object in a way that makes us alien from our own contingent subjectivity, and thus can make us unnecessary alien from, and to, each other. Property rights, given their relationship to exclusion, boundaries, and space, have more potential here than most other rights. By briefly tracing some historical moments relating to the development of morality, spatial enclosure and property rights, this paper makes an argument for an understanding of law as a structural practice itself as much as anything else – in this way, it is not fixed in relation to spatial epistemology and ethics but can continually reshape itself to accommodate justice as a form of reminding ourselves of the distinct, contingent subjectivity of each citizen, a practice of being re-imagined as the ‘heart’ with which every spatial conflict is hopefully approached and satisfactorily reconciled.