ICON S Conference 17 – 19 June 2016 Humboldt University Berlin

Jannice Käll: Becoming posthuman through
human(ist) rights? The right to be forgotten
and beyond
In 2010, a Spanish citizen lodged a complaint
against a Spanish newspaper with the national Data Protection
Agency and against Google Spain and Google
Inc. His complaint concerned an appearance of what he
claimed to be private information in the Google search
results. He therefore requested that Google Spain or
Google Inc. was required to remove the personal data
related to him so that it no longer were to appear in the
search results. Following the settlement in May 2014, a
debate arose with regards to the entitlement of privacy
as opposed to which interests the public as well as
internet companies should have in internet-based information.
In this paper, I argue that questions regarding
the entanglement between humans and technology that
center on privacy versus freedom of speech miss out
on important implications of how subjectivity is formed
and power reinstituted in a “posthuman” setting. The
posthuman has been suggested as a concept for capturing
emerging bodies beyond the human.
Ukri Soirila: Law of Humanity? Biolegitimacy and
the reconfiguring the global legal subject
In this paper, I approach shifts in legal subjectivity
at the global level through one very particular vision
of what international law is or should be developing
into, namely a vision of a (global) law of humanity. At
the heart of this vision is the aim to replace states
with the human person as the primary subject of
global law. Rather than advocating for a change in
this direction, or aiming to prove that such a shift has
already occurred, however, I focus on the changes
this vision would entail in relations of power, were it to
actualize. In other words, I explore what new forms of
power and subjectivities the vision enables, and what
are the links between the vision and social change.
What I suggest is that while the change pursued at
the theoretical level seems to aim to empowerment
of the human person, the humanity discourse may
in practice be employed mainly by different regimes
and actors in order to re-distribute legitimacy at the
international sphere.
Concurring panels 76