Routledge handbook of law and theory

‘This is a rarity in the handbook form, a work of novelty and inspiration addressing
law in the Anthropocene. Ambitious, argute, and cutting edge, these essays engage
in a material, affective and supra-disciplinary manner with the fluid presences and
synaesthetically apprehended atmospherics of legality.’
Peter Goodrich, Professor of Law and Director of the Program in
Law and Humanities, Cardozo School of Law, New York.
‘This major new collection challenges received notions of what legal theory and
scholarship entail.Working from the field’s “edges”, its orientation to connection, and
new intellectual conversations, foreground the rich, embodied, hopeful and disturbing
practices of our existence, inviting legal and non-legal scholars to rethink what they
know and feel about law.’
Davina Cooper, Research Professor, Dickson Poon
School of Law, King’s College London.



Routledge Handbook
of Law and Theory

This handbook sets out an innovative approach to the theory of law, reconceptualising
it in a material, embodied, socially contextualised and politically radical way. The
book consists of original contributions authored by prominent academics, all of
whom provide a valuable overview of legal theory as a discipline.
The book contains five sections:
•Spatiotemporal
•Sense
•Body
•Text
•Matter
Through this structure, the handbook brings the law into active discussion with

other disciplines, as well as supra-disciplinary debates on the areas of spatiality,
temporality, materiality, corporeality and sensorial studies, capturing the most exciting
developments in current legal theory, and anticipating future research in the area.
The handbook is essential reading for scholars and students of jurisprudence, sociology
of law, critical legal studies, socio-legal theory and interdisciplinary legal studies, as
well as those people from other disciplines interested in the way the law converses
with interdisciplinarity.
Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos is Professor of Law and Theory and
Director of the Westminster Law and Theory Lab at the University of    Westminster, UK.



Routledge Handbook
of Law and Theory

Edited by Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos


First published 2019
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2019 selection and editorial matter, Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos; individual chapters, the
contributors
The right of Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos to be identified as the author of the editorial
material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with
sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by

any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying
and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from
the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used
only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, Andreas, author.
Title: Routledge handbook of law and theory / Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos.
Description: Abingdon, Oxon [UK] ; New York, NY : Routledge, [2018] | Includes bibliographical
references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018001605 | ISBN 9781138956469 (hbk) | ISBN 9781317353003 (web pdf) |
ISBN 9781317352990 (epub) | ISBN 9781317352983 (kindle)
Subjects: LCSH: Law—Philosophy.
Classification: LCC K237 .P45 2018 | DDC 340/.1—dc23
LC record available at />ISBN: 978-1-138-95646-9 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-66573-3 (ebk)
Typeset in Bembo
by Apex CoVantage, LLC


Contents

List of figures and table
Notes on contributors
Introduction: The and of law and theory
Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos

xi

xiii
1

PART I

Spatiotemporal13
  1 Dense struggle: On ghosts, law and the global order
Luis Eslava

15

  2 Spatial abstraction, legal violence and the promise
of appropriation
Chris Butler

49

  3 A prison around your ankle and a border in every street:
Theorising law, space and the subject
Sarah Keenan

71

  4 ‘Praxiographies’ of time: Law, temporalities, and
material worlds
Emily Grabham

91

  5 Continua of (in)justice

Lucy Finchett-Maddock
  6 Movement: An homage to legal drips, wobbles and
perpetual motion
Olivia Barr

109

129
vii


Contents

PART II

Sense151
  7 Disenchanting senses: Law and the taste of the real
Andrea Pavoni

153

  8 Synaesthesia: The mystical sense of law
Nicola Masciandaro

179

  9 Touching you, touching me in law and justice: Toward
a quantum holographic process-informational understanding
Dragan Milovanovic
10 Turbulent legality: Sovereignty, security and the police

Illan rua Wall

203
223

PART III

Body243
11 Sequences on law and the body
Elena Loizidou

245

12 On resisting bodies
Laurent de Sutter

265

13 Insect wars: Bees, bedbugs and biopolitics
Renisa Mawani

279

14 ‘Anthropocene “Time”?’ – A reflection on temporalities
in the ‘New Age of the Human’
Anna Grear
15 Making lawful animals
Yoriko Otomo

297

317

PART IV

Text327
16 Feminist genres of violence and law’s aggressive realism
Honni van Rijswijk
viii

329


Contents

17 From decaffeinated democracy to democracy in the real in
ten (Lacanian) sessions
Maria Aristodemou
18 Why law’s objects do not disappear: On history as remainder
Christopher Tomlins
19 Must the law be a liar? Walter Benjamin on the possibility of
an anarchist form of law
James R. Martel
20 Literary materiality
Alain Pottage

347
365

387
409

PART V

Matter431
21 Legalities and materialities
Emilie Cloatre and Dave Cowan
22 Law’s materiality: Between concrete matters and
abstract forms, or how matter becomes material
Hyo Yoon Kang
23 To have to do with the law: An essay
Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos
24 On new model jurisprudence: The scholar/critic as
(cosmic) artisan
Anne Bottomley and Nathan Moore

433

453
475

497

Index521

ix



Figures and Table

Figures
Group of IDPs in Plaza de Bolívar.
IDPs’ occupation of Parque Tercer Milenio.
Refuge for IDPs offered by the local administration.
Inner rooms of the refuge.
Main entrance of the refuge.
IDPs at Parque Tercer Milenio.
Placard used during a march organised during the IDPs’ protest:
‘The people without housing are asking for their rights.’
Placard used during a march organised during the IDPs’ protest:
1.8
‘Leaders, face the displaced population. Stop hiding away.’
1.9
Placard used during a march organised during the IDPs’ protest:
‘We are displaced [people]. We are not criminals.’
1.10 IDPs protesting in Bogotá’s Plaza de Bolivar.
1.11 March of IDPs on the streets of Bogotá.
1.12 IDPs at Parque Tercer Milenio.
1.13Leaving Parque Tercer Milenio.
1.14 Arriving for the first time at the refuge.
1.15 Main entrance to refuge (North Zone).
1.16 Organisation of the North Zone section of the refuge, according
to one of the maps put up by the administration on different walls
of the facility.
1.17 Aerial photograph of the refuge. Adapted from Google maps.
1.18 One of the two connecting doors between the sections of the
refuge and through which the IDPs saw the ghost coming into
the North Zone.
1.19 Section of the collective toilets.
1.20 IDPs marching in the streets of Bogotá and calling the state to

fulfill its obligations towards its displaced population according
to National Law 387/1997: ‘The displaced population is part of
Colombia. Fulfill Law 387.’
1.1
1.2
1.3
1.4
1.5
1.6
1.7

22
23
23
24
25
26
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36

37
37

38
39

41
xi


Figures and Table

1.21
1.22
8.1
8.2

The IDPs’ refuge.
Vouchers given to IDPs to buy basic staples.
Wheel of the Senses, Longthorpe Tower, Peterborough,
Cambridgeshire, UK, ca. 1320–1340.
Arthur Rimbaud, autograph manuscript of “Voyelles” (detail).

42
43
179
184

Arthur Rimbaud, “Voyelles”

183

Table

8.1

xii


Contributors

Maria Aristodemou is Reader in Law, Literature and Psychoanalysis and Head
of Department at the School of Law, Birkbeck College, University of London. Her
current research explores the intersections between legal and psychoanalytic theory
and practice, particularly in its Lacanian manifestations. She is the author of, among
others, Law & Literature: Journeys From Her to Eternity (Oxford: Oxford University
Press 2000) and Law, Psychoanalysis, Society: Taking the Unconscious Seriously (Oxford:
Routledge 2014), and is a contributor and co-editor of Crime, Fiction and the Law
(Oxford: Routledge, 2016).
Olivia Barr is Senior Lecturer at Melbourne Law School, University of Melbourne.
Olivia writes in jurisprudence, and her cross-disciplinary work engages with geography, anthropology, philosophy and contemporary public art practices. She recently
published A Jurisprudence of Movement: Common Law, Walking, Unsettling Place (Routledge 2016).
Anne Bottomley (Kent Law School) and Nathan Moore (Birkbeck Law School)
have presented and written together frequently, often in presentations and papers
drawing on film, music, architecture and art to explore the potential for a Deleuzean
perspective in legal scholarship. Nathan Moore’s The Decision: Artisans in an Age of
Control (Fordham University Press) is forthcoming.
Chris Butler is Lecturer at the Griffith Law School, Australia. He researches the
political, spatial and aesthetic forms of resistance to legal and institutional modes of
ordering, and his work has appeared in Social and Legal Studies, Law and Critique, Griffith Law Review and Law,Text, Culture. Chris has written widely on the implications of
Henri Lefebvre’s social theory for critical legal scholarship, and his book Henri Lefebvre: Spatial Politics, Everyday Life and the Right to the City (2012) is published by Routledge. More recently, Chris collaborated with Edward Mussawir in editing a collection
of essays entitled Spaces of Justice: Peripheries, Passages, Appropriations (Routledge 2017).
Emilie Cloatre is Reader in Law at Kent Law School. Her research focuses on the
relationship between law and medicine, and is located at the intersection of socio-legal

xiii


Contributors

studies and science and technology studies. She is the author of Pills for the Poorest:
An Exploration of TRIPS and Access to Medication in Sub-Saharan Africa (Palgrave MacMillan) and co-editor of Knowledge,Technology and Law (Routledge). She directed the
AHRC Network Technoscience, Law and Society from 2013 to 2015 (with Martyn
Pickersgill) and currently holds a Wellcome Investigator Award for a project entitled
‘Law, Knowledges and the Making of Modern Healthcare’ (2017–2022).
Dave Cowan is Professor of Law and Policy at the University of Bristol Law School.
He researches housing issues generally from a socio-legal perspective, on which he
has written widely. His most recent work has focused on shared ownership, its history
and construction. He is the editor of the award-winning Palgrave Socio-Legal Series.
Luis Eslava is Senior Lecturer in International Law and Co-Director of the Centre for Critical International Law at Kent Law School. He is also a Senior Fellow
at Melbourne Law School, an International Professor at Universidad Externado de
Colombia, and a core faculty member of the Institute for Global Law and Policy,
Harvard Law School. Bringing together insights from anthropology, history and legal
and social theory, his work focuses on the multiple ways in which international
norms, aspirations and institutional practices, both old and new, come to shape and
become part of our everyday life. He is the author of Local Space, Global Life: The
Everyday Operation of International Law and Development (Cambridge University Press,
2015) and co-editor of Imperialismo y Derecho Internacional (Siglo del Hombre, 2016)
with Liliana Obregón and René Urua, and Bandung, Global History, and International Law: Critical Pasts and Pending Futures (Cambridge University Press, 2017) with
Michael Fakhri and Vasuki Nesiah.
Lucy Finchett-Maddock is Lecturer in Law at the University of Sussex. Her work
predominantly focuses on the intersection of property within law and resistance,
interrogating the spatio-temporality and aesthetics of formal and informal laws, property (squatting and housing), commons and protest. She is the author of the monograph Protest, Property and the Commons: Performances of Law and Resistance (Routledge,
2016). Her work also looks to broader questions around the intersection of art and
law, resistance, legal and illegal understandings of art, property, aesthetics and politics.

She is currently developing an ‘Art/Law Network’, where artists, activists and agitators come together to collaborate for social change.
Emily Grabham is Professor of Law at the University of Kent. Her research interests
include labour law, law and time, and feminist legal theory. She pursues an interdisciplinary approach to legal research, drawing on methods and perspectives from
feminist legal theory, social anthropology, sociology, and science and technology studies. Her publications include a monograph Brewing Legal Times: Things, Form and the
Enactment of Law (2016, University of Toronto Press), a forthcoming edited collection
(Making Law’s Times: Critical Perspectives on Law, Regulation, and Temporality with Siân

xiv


Contributors

Beynon-Jones) and articles in a wide range of peer reviewed journals including Economy & Society, Australian Feminist Studies, Body & Society, Social & Legal Studies, Oxford
Journal of Legal Studies, and Canadian Journal of Law & Society.
Anna Grear is Professor of Law and Theory at Cardiff Law School, in the School of
Law and Politics, Cardiff University, UK, and Founder and Editor in Chief of the Journal
of Human Rights and the Environment. Anna’s research has always grappled, in one way or
another, with the issues central to how law constructs and mediates the world, how law
populates the world with persons, systems, strategies and mechanisms and the patterns
related to law’s injustice. Her work calls on insights from a range of disciplines despite
being firmly located within a combination of critical legal theory and jurisprudence.
Hyo Yoon Kang is Senior Lecturer at Kent Law School, University of Kent. She has
worked and published at the intersection of intellectual property, science and technology studies and history of sciences. Her research interests are in knowledge production, legal techniques, digital technologies and media theories. She read law at the
London School of Economics and the European University Institute and conducted
postdoctoral research at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science. She currently co-organises the AHRC Research Network Grant on ‘Legal Materiality’ with
Sara Kendall and conducts an ERC-sponsored project examining how scientists read
legal texts, such as patent documents.
Sarah Keenan is Senior Lecturer at Birkbeck Law School, London. Her research
engages with property from critical race and feminist perspectives, focusing on the
conceptual and material overlap between ownership and membership. She has previously worked as a solicitor in the community sector in Australia and is involved in

anti-racist activism based in London. She is currently a Leverhulme Fellow working on the project ‘Making Land Liquid: The Temporality of Title Registration’. Her
book Subversive Property: Law and the Production of Spaces of Belonging was published by
Routledge in 2015.
Elena Loizidou is Reader in Law and Political Theory at the University of London,
Birkbeck College, School of Law. She is the author of Judith Butler: Ethics, Law, Politics
(London: Routledge-Glasshouse, 2007) and the editor of Disobedience Theory and Practice (London: Routledge, 2013) and has authored numerous articles and chapters on
feminism, anarchism and the law.
James R. Martel teaches Political Theory in the Department of Political Science at
San Francisco State University. Most recently, he is the author of The Misinterpellated
Subject (Duke University Press, 2017). He is currently working on a book, currently
under review with Amherst College Press, entitled Unburied Bodies: Subversive Corpses
and the Authority of the Dead. He works on issues of legal philosophy, political theory,
post-colonial studies, comparative literature and anarchist studies.

xv


Contributors

Nicola Masciandaro is Professor of English at Brooklyn College, CUNY, and a specialist in medieval literature. He is the editor of the journal Glossator (Open Humanities Press) and co-author of The Voice of the Hammer (Notre Dame, 2007), Dark Nights
of the Universe (NAME Publications, 2013), Sufficient Unto the Day (Schism, 2014),
Floating Tomb (Mimesis, 2015), and SACER (Schism, 2017).
Renisa Mawani is Professor of Sociology and recurring Chair of the Law and Society Program at the University of British Columbia. She works in the fields of critical
theory and colonial legal history and has published widely on law, colonialism and
legal geography. In 2015–2016, she received the Killam Prize for Graduate Instruction, received a Dean of Arts Faculty Research Award and was a Wall Scholar at the
Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies.
Dragan Milovanovic received his PhD from SUNY at Albany. He is Brommel Distinguished Research Professor at Northeastern Illinois University. He has published
extensively in postmodern criminology, law and transformative justice. His current
work advocates a paradigm change in the social sciences toward a quantum holography ontology.
Yoriko Otomo (PhD, LLB/BA (Hons) University of Melbourne) is a writer, critic

and artist. The author of Unconditional Life: The Postwar International Law Settlement
(Oxford University Press, 2016), Yoriko has co-edited key publications in human–
animal studies (Making Milk:The Past, Present and Future of Our Primary Food, Bloomsbury 2017; Law and the Question of the Animal: A Critical Jurisprudence, Routledge 2012)
and is a Board Member of Minding Animals International. She was previously a
tenured senior lecturer at SOAS Law School (University of London) where she is
currently a research associate.
Andrea Pavoni is a post-doctoral fellow at DINAMIA’CET, Centre for Socioeconomic and Territorial Studies, at the University Institute of Lisbon, Portugal. He
completed his PhD at the University of Westminster, London, in 2013. He is a fellow
at the Westminster Law and Theory Lab, co-editor of the ‘Law and the Senses’ series
(University of Westminster Press), and associate editor at the journal Lo Squaderno,
Explorations in Space and Society.
Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos is Professor of Law & Theory at the University of Westminster, and founder and Director of the Westminster Law & Theory
Lab. Andreas also pursues an art practice under the name of picpoet and has published
one artist’s book and one fiction book. Edited volumes include Law and the City
(2007), Law and Ecology (2012), and with Victoria Brooks Research Methods in Environmental Law: A Handbook (2017). He has also published the monographs Absent
Environments (2007), Niklas Luhmann: Law, Justice, Society (2010), and Spatial Justice:
Body, Lawscape, Atmosphere (2014).

xvi


Contributors

Alain Pottage is Professor of Law at the London School of Economics.
Honni van Rijswijk is Senior Lecturer at UTS Law School, Sydney. Honni has
published on law in the writings of Alexis Wright, suffering in Virginia Woolf and
feminist aesthetics in Sarah Kane and is working on a monograph that focuses on the
figure of the girl.
Laurent de Sutter is Professor of Legal Theory at Vrije Universiteit Brussel. He
is the author of a dozen books dedicated to the relationship between law, images

and transgression, translated into various languages. They include, recently, Théorie du
kamikaze (Paris: Puf, 2016), ‘Quand l’inspecteur s’emmêle’ de Blake Edwards (Crisnée:
Yellow Now, 2016), Poétique de la police (Aix-en-Provence, Rouge Profond, 2017)
and Narcocapitalism (Cambridge: Polity, 2017). He is the editor of the ‘Perspectives
Critiques’ series at Presses Universitaires de France and the ‘Theory Redux’ series at
Polity Press, and is one of the general editors of Law & Literature.
Christopher Tomlins is Elizabeth Josselyn Boalt Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley. His most recent book is Searching for Contemporary Legal
Thought (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017), co-edited
with Justin Desautels-Stein.
Illan rua Wall is a political and legal theorist who works on questions of crowds, protest, riots, disorder and revolt. He is an Associate Professor at the University of Warwick, School of Law, holding a PhD from Birkbeck College, University of London.
His first monograph, Human Rights and Constituent Power (Routledge), was published
in 2012. He is on the editorial board of the journal Law and Critique, a founding
editor of the blog criticallegalthinking.com and the new open access publisher Counterpress. He will launch a new podcast series entitled Orders in Decay in 2018.

xvii



Introduction
The and of law and theory
Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos*

Why this volume
The Routledge Handbook of Law and Theory attempts to reconceptualise legal theory in a
material, socially contextualised, affectively engaged and politically radical way. Its main
purpose is to offer a new collective approach to the theory of law, unbound by the grand
legal abstractions of pure textuality, strict normativity, universalised judgement, abstract
political thinking, theoretically poor doctrinal or empirical work, and decontextualised
philosophical inquiry. This volume distinguishes itself from positivist legal theory, most
strands of traditional philosophy of law (e.g., Coyle, 2017; Golding and Edmundson,

2004), but also from most forms of by now more or less normalised sociolegal or critical
legal theory. This is because the volume represents an attempt to escape the often superficial veneer of interdisciplinarity in legal theory, and seriously situate legal thinking in the
open plane of other disciplines as well as non-disciplines (namely, boundaries between
disciplines, conceptual advancements that belong to many disciplines at the same time
and ethical calls for not settling in a discipline), determined by such new parameters as
the post/nonhuman, the anthropocenic, the material, the ontological, the ecological
and so on. To this effect, the volume engages with supradisciplinary debates on the areas
of spatiality, temporality, materiality, corporeality and sensorial studies, anticipating and
perhaps even shaping in this way future developments of current legal theory.
This collection does not emerge in a vacuum. There is a plethora of accounts of law
that engage seriously with the above considerations. These accounts have been variously originating in gender studies (e.g., Cooper, 2013; Drakopoulou, 2009; Motha,
2007), law and space (e.g., Blomley, 2003; Delaney, 2010; Mulcahy, 2010; Dahlberg,
2012), law and time (Douglas, 2011; Lefebvre, 2008; Valverde, 2014), law and the
(racialised/queer/marginalised/controlled) body (Hirvonen, 2012; Manderson, 2015;
Cooper et al., 2008; Bhandar, 2012; Hanafin, 2007; Bainham et al., 2002), law and
1


Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos

the senses (Bently and Flynn, 1996; Mandic et al., 2013), animal studies (Braverman, 2012; Otomo and Mussawir, 2013), art and law (Goodrich, 2014; Ben-Dor,
2011; Bruncevic, 2017; Hirvonen, 2012; Young, 2013; Leiboff, 2007), law and the
postcolonial (Haldar, 2007; Bhandar, 2014; Fitzpatrick, 2008), governmentality and
issues of limits of resistance (Lindahl, 2013; Douzinas, 2012; Guardiola-Rivera, 2008;
Zartaloudis, 2015; Leung, 2013), and law and broadly critical economics and development (Alessandrini, 2013; Macmillan, 2009; Bedford, 2010). There has also been
an increased engagement with authors such as Deleuze, Foucault, Butler, Braidotti,
Latour, Luhmann, Bennett, Malabou and several others who, although not originating
in law, have managed to find their way in contemporary legal thinking. Of interest is
the fact that a considerable amount of these studies successfully balance rigorous theoretical engagement and grounded, contextualised work.This is not always easy when
serious interdisciplinary work is undertaken. The demands are high on both law and

whatever other discipline(s) is involved; and while it is understood that one returns
to the law and its discipline when one undertakes interdisciplinary legal research, the
texts produced might be too demanding, theoretical and abstract, or too concrete
and technical for the more settled legal readership. It is not uncommon for theoretically inclined legal research to move too deep into terminological and conceptual
abstraction of, say, anthropology, art or literary studies; or for empirically inclined legal
research to delve too wholeheartedly into the technicalities of, say, the pharmaceutical industry, principles of architecture, or neurology. For the above reasons, a guiding
criterion for the kind of pieces commissioned for this volume is the balance of the
theoretical and the broadly understood applied.
Another equally important guiding criterion, intimately connected to the exigencies of balanced interdisciplinary work, is that the work included here precipitates a
collapse of the long-accepted distinction between critical legal studies on the one
hand and sociolegal studies on the other.1 It is the position of this volume (and its
editor) that the above distinction (and others along the lines of ‘high theory’ versus
grounded thought, concreteness versus abstraction, utopia versus pragmatism and so
on) has outlived its usefulness and even relevance. Sadly, these distinctions are still
weaponised in order to perpetuate obscurely motivated scholarly classifications and
turf-preservations. One of the unfortunate consequences of this polarisation is the
marginalisation (or at best the begrudging acceptance) of a burgeoning number of
scholars in the last decade or so, who have resisted such hardlines and who have produced work that theorises practice and applies theory, if not in equal measure, at least
without falling into an old-fashioned binary.2
There is little doubt that several theoretical research publications pay scant attention to how theory is translated into practice, and how, more broadly, theory can make
a difference; likewise, a considerable amount of applied research is barely interested
in the benefits that more extensive theorisation brings in terms of diagonal, creative
and unhinged thinking. A return, however, to the distinction between critical and
sociolegal would not be useful. Likewise, it is perhaps time to understand that the
pertinent categorisation can no longer be ‘high’ (and therefore, what? unconnected?
theological? immaterial?) and ‘low’ (dirty? too applied? too low-brow?) theory. There
2


The and of law and theory

is good legal thinking that is aware of its potential effect on reality and works on this
in order to give direction to its theoretical development. And then, there is not so
good legal thinking that remains unconnected to reality and deliberately ignores its
own transformative potential. Unless broadly understood as contextualisation, affective engagement and personal involvement, neither empirical studies nor mere theoretical work have a monopoly on reality.
One of the main purposes of this volume is to leave these distinctions behind, and
offer instead a new bridging mode of legal theoretical thinking: what the title of the
book refers to as ‘law and theory’.

Turning points
The context in which this volume emerges is a broader sense of urgency for a new
legal theoretical approach. This is testified by the recent abundance of publications
that aim to do precisely that (see, e.g., Stone et al., 2012; Banakar and Travers, 2013;
Del Mar and Goodrich, 2014; Christodoulidis et al., forthcoming) and attest to a turning point in legal theory, a point of fumbling amongst various novel developments
both in law and in the wider spectrum of knowledge. Even the more conservative
attempts to restore, retain and reinforce the traditional boundaries of the discipline,
with the usual recourse to definitions (e.g., what is law/regulation/normativity) and
categorisations (e.g., doctrinal/sociolegal/theoretical research), are no longer impervious to at least some of the forays made by more adventurous theoretical enquiries.
Thus, feminist legal studies, deconstruction and systems theory, to mention just a few
examples, even if not yet part of the canon, tend to put an appearance in most legal
theory books that aim to offer a survey (often for educational reasons) of the currents
of legal thought. Needless to say, they are usually squeezed into the final chapter of the
book, often for completion’s sake than for their perceived actual relevance.
Such books would probably fail to recognise some of the chapters in this volume
as belonging to the area of ‘philosophy of law’ or even the broader term ‘legal theory’. It is a compliment of sorts, then, to think of this volume as a collection of ‘last
chapters’, lines that trail off an otherwise solid structure, threads that have been left
unstitched. It shows that the contributors to the volume keep up with the times that
demand alternative, minoritarian thinking (a process of theorising that Bottomley
and Moore in this volume find that is “working always in-between the materiality
of becoming”); they are in contact with what really matters in law and beyond law;

and they act in full awareness of their limited possibility to suggest supposedly solid
solutions. In that sense, the contributions here, despite the frequent political utopianism, supradisciplinary material, methodological adventurousness and free-thinking
legalities, are much more realistic and in touch with the world at large than are most
accounts of traditional philosophy of law and quite a few of the more standard sociolegal and critical theoretical endeavours.
This is because this volume is traversed by a perhaps uncomfortable understanding: to pretend that, at this stage of planetary turning, the law and its theory can offer
anything different, more solid or definitive than a space of openness and receptivity of
3


Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos

thought, is delusional at best and dishonest at worst. At risk of sounding apocalyptic,
I would enumerate the following three factors that contribute to this planetary turning: the epoch of the Anthropocene; the renewed attention on nonhuman agents and
the consequent reimagining of the human; and the current global politics of intense
material instability. We are in trouble if any legal scholar is still asking ‘what’s this
got to do with law?’ – a seemingly innocent yet haunting question that has clipped
many a daring wing that might have been trying to think of other laws and other
societies. It is time, therefore, to acknowledge what the world has to do with the law,
and the law with the world. The geological epoch of the Anthropocene, which recognises human presence and anthropogenic change as geologically measurable, can
be defined legally as enhanced human responsibility towards the earth (Kotzé, 2017;
Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, 2017). This has obviously more than just an ecological dimension: it is, properly speaking, a geophilosophical opening that understands
legal responsibility (and human responsibility for that matter, denuded from human
suprematism and metaphysical privilege) as part of an intricate continuum between
human and nonhuman, organic and inorganic, personal and political. This requires of
the law a reconceptualisation, not only of the nonhuman (including the inorganic)
agent and its capacity for legal action, but also a reconceptualisation of the human in
ways previously unthinkable for the legal science of consciousness and legal capacity.
Rather than considering these emergent agencies as merely exacerbating the current
and ongoing global political, financial, religious, social and environmental instability
(an instability that has become too stable to talk about crisis anymore), legal theory

is now called to think imaginatively on how to include them as tools against the
instability. In other words, how to use strategically such abstractions (or at least things
that were so far considered abstractions for law, such as objects, animals, insects, senses,
atmospheres, quanta and so on) in order to resist the ongoing instability and its potential lethal planetary results.
In this sense, this volume pushes the boundaries of legal theoretical thinking
towards an even more intimate connection between the law and the world at large,
and tries to conceive of the legal in its interfolding, not only with the political as it
has been happening overwhelmingly in most of the more radical legal theoretical collections, but also with the corporeal, the spatiotemporal, the material and immaterial,
and the ontological.

Law and theory
The decision to call this volume Law and Theory, and not Legal Theory, Theory of
Law, Philosophy of Law, Jurisprudence, Law and Humanities, and so on, has been
determined by three factors. The first is the humble realisation that we are not there
yet: we, as legal scholars, have not managed to link successfully law and other disciplines in a way that would allow not only law to be guided by the findings of other
disciplines (this is more or less achieved), but significantly, to also allow law and its
theory to spread outside its disciplinary boundaries and be read, thought and actively
used by other disciplines. The non-legal academics who read and actively engage
4


The and of law and theory

with legal theory are certainly a growing number, largely because of the indefatigable
efforts of such publishers as Routledge’s Glasshouse.Yet, they are still not on par with
say, non-geographers who read geography, non-philosophers who read philosophy
or even non-economists who read economics. Without serious elaboration, law is
regularly substituted in the non-legal literature by a generic idea of rights, democracy
or behavioural patterns – but even they come under the explicit umbrella of politics
rather than law. This of course occurs for good reasons: political theory has traditionally been a natural bedfellow for legal theory. But this blurring is no longer productive. Non-legal theory misses out on a vast amount of nuances, ways of thinking and

avenues of acting, if law is constantly supplanted by politics. Issues such as democracy,
human rights, popular resistance or revolution, while as important today as earlier,
need to be combined with a material, emplaced and embodied, yet equally theorised,
understanding of the law, if we want law to be making the difference that it is capable
of, especially with regards to other disciplines.
In short, law has not yet carved a suitably open supradisciplinary space for itself in
which to move freely and become the object of debate by other disciplines. For this
realisation, Law and Theory invites other disciplines by opening up to them. Thus, the
second reason for the choice of title is that the theory used here is not legal theory.
It might become legal theory, and in some cases has been well integrated in existing
legal theory; yet so far it retains a freshness, an angularity and perhaps even certain
estranging traits that still have the capacity of throwing us out of kilter. Rather than
enclosing the theory within law, Law and Theory retains the parallelism between law
on the one hand, and (legal/non-legal) theory on the other, encouraging in this way
productive friction and creative mispairings.
Finally, the third reason is this astonishingly simple word and, and the vast openings
that offers. Derrida’s writing on this is instructive: “and at the beginning, there is the
and” (Derrida, 2004: 21, my translation). This beginning (that never properly begins)
tells us that the starting and augurs the end of origin: there has never been an origin to
the word, to the law, to this very sentence. Nothing is ‘the’ origin since there is always
something that precedes the initial and.We might as well be done with our (peculiarly
legal) obsession for origin. Allowing the and to begin and further to connect makes
no promises other than an attempt to put together two or more things that might not
fit together. Derrida refers to and as both association and dissociation, conjunction
and collection. When talking of Foucault’s and that appears on the title of the latter’s
book Les Mots et les Choses,3 Derrida plays with us by saying that
between the words and the things, there cannot be a conjunction or a homogenous collection, no enumeration or simple addition etc. The words and the
things neither add up nor follow each other in the same series. . . . Except . . .
if we consider, which is not altogether illegitimate, that the words are and the
words and the things.

(2004: 22, my translation)
Or, in the case of this volume, that the law is and the law and the theory.
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Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos

To this, I feel the need to add something that comes from a seemingly very different source: Deleuze’s stuttering, full of glottal stops and tremolos, allows the language
itself to stutter:
the disjunctions become included or inclusive, and the connections, reflexive. . . .
Every word is divided, but into itself; and every word is combined, but with
itself. It is as if the entire language started to roll from right to left, and to pitch
backward and forward: the two stutterings.
(Deleuze, 1997: 110)
This is clearly not the place for an analysis of the connection between Deleuzian
stuttering and Derridean and, but I would like to keep one thing from all this: that the
and of this volume’s title encourages us to think at the same time of a parallelism and
a continuum between law and theory. Parallelism in the sense that the two are not the
same, and that space is needed for both to develop their ambit away from the other;
and continuum because just as the law is and the law and the theory, in the same way
the theory is and the law and the theory. And since the and at the beginning disrobes
us of any illusion of origin, we need to start at the only place we can: “Creative stuttering is what makes language grow from the middle, like grass” (Deleuze, 1997: 111).
Let’s grow from the middle then, right in the middle of law and theory, at the locus
of this little and word.
There is little point in denying that this volume is also a personal project – and not
just because of the choice of title, but that too: when some years ago I had to choose
my own professorial title (which was accepted, after some institutional haggling
mainly attributed to uncertainty – “are you sure you do not mean professor of legal
theory?”), I felt attracted to this stuttering of the and, and the difficulty that caused
to some people (academics or not) to remember it. But it often generated questions,

which I was only too happy to think along with the people who were asking, trying
to understand, even I, what this choice of title meant. In a way, the same wondering
mood also permeates this volume. The fact that it has been personally commissioned
by Routledge has given me somewhat shameless license to experiment with the
contributions, the topics and even the arrangement of the parts. My editorial touch
has been mostly light, since the ideas proffered by the authors were so strong that my
role was reduced to that of a feverishly enthusiastic reader. It is my conviction that
the contributors in this collection have produced work that holds a radiant promise
for the future of law and theory.

Parts and chapters
The division of the volume in parts is largely arbitrary, since most of the chapters deal
with most or indeed all the areas. It would be absurd to expect that the spatiotemporal, the body, sense, text and matter will not be intimately connected and crosspollinated when it comes to a new material, emplaced, embodied understanding of
law and theory. What I tried to do, however, with this division and order is to tease
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