Law as Critical Engagement? Moving Beyond the Minimal Self in the Age of Permacrisis.

Legal educators are beginning to wonder about the perma-poly-crisis which Western culture is said to have ended up in. In this contribution an attempt is made to read what we now know as the perma-poly-crisis as the result of a default operative logic that has been driving Western and global culture since the Second World War, i.e. the logic of flight , of which the engine, fuel and outcome can best be described as a form of subjectivity in which what Christopher Lasch once called the ‘minimal self’ takes centre stage. Today Western culture, and to an extent global culture as well, have arrived at a crossroads. Whether or not the Age of Authoritarianism is now encroaching upon us is, at the time of writing, unclear. What can be argued though is that the twilight that characterises our time should be used to imagine new social arrangements that circumvent the lure of authoritarianism. But for that to be possible a new form of subjectivity would be needed, way beyond the ‘minimal self’. There is a role here for legal educators. It is argued that the figure of what Jamie Murray has termed the ‘emergent lawyer’ might perhaps serve as a guiding image.