Abstract
Three recent publications evidence a growing interest in critical jurisprudence with materiality, technology, affect and atmosphere. These approaches pose fundamental challenges to existing traditions within legal critique, spurning a focus on the ideology of legal reasoning and exploring instead the unique practices through which the law binds subjects through material, affective and atmospheric manipulations. Through either Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos’s ‘lawscape’ or Kyle McGee’s ‘jurimorphs’ these innovative theoretical projects pluralise the ‘forces’ which account for the law’s normativity, disavowing the notion that such forces can be reduced either to a transcendental form (like sovereignty) or to notions of structural or symbolic violence. These approaches address a ‘democratic deficit’ in legal philosophy that has generally excluded the realm of the material in its theorising and allows us to attend to the multiple forms that allow for the passage of law.
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Notes
As Gurtwirth points out, of course some material expression of normativity like a speed bump could become a matter for [LAW] if it has been built defectively and a public authority brings a claim against the builder, for example (McGee 2015, p. 147). In Gutwirth account, these material incarnations of normativity are more plausibly simply matters of ‘organisation’ [ORG] or ‘technology’ [TEC].
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Matthews, D., Veitch, S. The Limits of Critique and the Forces of Law. Law Critique 27, 349–361 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10978-016-9192-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10978-016-9192-1