Foreword Avital Ronell

      Our relation to the law is not easy to untangle or tame using merely historical narrative. Fortunately, Laurent de Sutter provides us with a scanning apparatus, hermeneutically fine-tuned, by which to measure essential prompts of juridical life. With the care of a relentlessly searching analysis, his text hands us a number of flagged contracts to renegotiate and, where necessary, to repudiate.

      We know that, beginning with Cleisthenes’ fateful intervention, philosophers bristled while they defended the demos, worried about the takeover of a mob primed to go off locked and loaded, lawless and intemperate. After Law offers a sweeping historical account of conceptual overhauls that are responsible for boosting democratic tenacity in the face of so many obstacles and their punctual power failures. Perhaps now more than ever our legal and juridical inheritance presses upon us, urging a review of a speculative jurisprudence that involves an untold history and stealth attack plans.

Timely and incisive, this work repurposes our juridical scaffolding, making allowances for wide-ranging effects of existential fallout in the political realms that affect us today. It faces down the transcendental assumptions that fuel our relation to the law and its legally constellated satellites. Without explicitly calling up psychoanalytic theory, After Law locates the power-pump of social narcissism and forms of drivenness that undergird an abiding relation to the law. We are given to understand that, like Kafka’s man from the country, one’s condition of sheer stuckness ‘before the law’ cannot be abrogated. This predicament holds for a diverse and often incompatible cultural rhetoric of law and governance, a temporal span that involves the subtle implications of finding oneself called before the law only to be snagged after the law’s epoch of authority.

      On civic alert, Professor de Sutter examines the moves that were made historically in order to supplant familial logic with the idea of Law and the implementation of human rights. He trains his analysis on distinctions drawn by the fundamental juridical structures reconfigured under structural mutation, their emergence and inherent instabilities – in some cases, their unapologetic takeover stratagems. The text’s questioning looks at the foundational yet elusive facets of law and aporias of power. Its microanalyses interrogate the workings of Law, constitutions, penal codes, institutions, acts of positing and the co-implicating force of hypothetical judgement that hold them together as well as apart. The account of juridical presuppositions reflects the processes of corresponding historical changes in political vocabularies. So that ‘no tyranny could ever return’, the reigning god or legislator in Greek legal arbitration had to be replaced by the City itself, a repartition involving a new understanding of sharing together with an ever new distribution of civic responsibility. The strife between human nomos and divine nomos, in the limited yet self-replicating instance of ancient Greek philosophy, has had to be renegotiated at crucial junctures in modernity. At one point, the agonistic terms of law-giving powers reappear with the Spaltung (split-off) discussed in Walter Benjamin’s reflections on law and violence in terms of the striking force that differentiates human from divine law. Yet, how do we live with a relation to law whose authority is eroding?

In Freudian terms of social pessimism, it may well be the case that we will never be able to effect a jailbreak from narcissistic lockdown and expunge the vacuity of shameless self-promotion that pervades our times, exercising a reckless disregard for the rule of law and its principled apportionment of equality. We’re neither the only nor the first ones to contend with encroaching morphs in despotism, the chokehold of a lawless political organization. De Sutter’s argument indicates that every social body on record has been tempted by tyrannical excess.

      Ensnarled in familialisms and archaic structures of troubled coexistence, each phase of civilization has registered a will to break free of local bullying tendencies, hoping to dissolve tenacious political strangleholds. The tyrannical impulse exposed by Plato’s legendary analyses and the refinements of Aristotle’s political warning system exemplifies philosophical pushback on autocratic incursions. In the assertive span of Athenian juridical life, Cleisthenes was the first to call up Greek democracy. Not everyone in the history of philosophy was on board with the initial rallying call, and certainly no philosopher proved more ready to march along with a destructive politics than Martin Heidegger in 1934. What does this tell