Deleuze's Philosophy of Law
Laurent de Sutter
Translated by Nils F. Schott
- Develops a complete and self-sustaining Deleuzian philosophy of law where others have found only fragmentation
- Examines and uses various interdisciplinary connections, including law and literature, law and political theory, law and metaphysics, law and history of philosophy, and legal history
- Critiques several approaches to the question of Deleuze’s legal thought
- Promises to ignite debate and draw attention to the importance of legal theory for other fields, including social and political philosophy
Gilles Deleuze has provided the most fascinating account of law of the 20th century. Yet it is hidden in a just a few clues dispersed throughout his work and no complete reconstruction of it has ever been produced before. Laurent de Sutter gathers all the elements that compose Deleuze’s philosophy of law and articulates them for the first time in a real system.
The result is the most devastating critique of the very idea of law. But it is also surprising, praising the actual practice of jurisprudence. This is not simply a practice of judgment; it is a practice of radical creation and leads to an intriguing question: what if lawyers were the only true revolutionaries of our time?
Preface to the English Edition
- Reconstruction
- Use
- System
- Tradition
- Coherence
- Language
Introduction
- Philosophy
- Law
- Problem
- Alternative
- Literalness
- Betrayal
1. Critique
- Thesis I
- Taxonomy
- Plato
- Socrates
- Kant I
- Kant II
- Freud
- Sade I
- Sade II
- Ost
- Sacher-Masoch I
- Sacher-Masoch II
- Lacan
- Kant III
- Irony I
- Irony II
- Humour I
- Humour II
- Satire
- Kafka I
- Kafka II
- Kafka III
- Kafka IV
- Kafka V
- Cacciari
- Bartleby I
- Bartleby II
- Bartleby III
- Agamben
- Zourabichvili
- Exfoliation, invagination
- Critique I
- Critique II
- The Law
- Daddy–Mommy
- Young girls
2. Clinic
- Thesis II
- Discipline
- Control
- Crisis
- Clinic
- Axiomatics
- Code
- Problem
- Legalism
- Intervention
- Diagram
- Naturalism I
- Naturalism II
- Subvention
- Tarde
- Composition
- Consensualism
- Convention
- Property
- Institutionalism
- Invention
- Legislation
- Practice
- Logos
- Nomos
- Schmitt
- Law
- Topic
- Association
- Case I
- Case II
- Jurisprudence
- Principles
- Leibniz
- Rome
- Existence
Conclusion
- Personae
- Judgement
- Errors
- Continuations
- Politics
- Deception
Appendices
1. The Young Girls in Deleuze’s Philosophy of Law
- Precursor
- Surface
- Interiority
- Perturbation
- Disturbance
- Tekhnē
- Obscenity
- Phantasm I
- Phantasm II
- Viewer
- Image
- Outside
- Philosophy
- Pornology
- Theorems
2. On Some Interpretations of Deleuze’s Philosophy of Law
- Habit
- Boundas I
- Boundas II
- Politics
- Lefebvre I
- Lefebvre II
- Mussawir I
- Mussawir II
BibliographyIndex
Is this the book Deleuze would have written had he followed his fantasy of doing law instead of philosophy? Perhaps. In any case, the book written by de Sutter is an infinitely inviting book: it is a slow whispering between two thinkers, a communion of minds and words into which we are called to eavesdrop. It is critical (of law, of the world) and clinical (pragmatic, forensic, focussed) at the same time, performatively showing how critique of law is the necessary condition to engage with law. Through bite-size, delectably pithy, nearly twitterable chapters, de Sutter offers some of the deepest and most genre-changing propositions about the law ever encountered, but uttered lightly, with irony and humour, with a levity and flippancy worthy of the law.
