Aggregates and assesses Deleuze's claims about law, decision, judgement and related themes for the first time 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?

About the Author
Laurent de Sutter is Professor of Legal Theory at Vrije Universiteit Brussel. He is the author of more than twenty books translated into a dozen languages. In English, he is the author of Narcocapitalism: Life in the Age of Anaesthesia (Polity, 2017) and After Law (Polity, 2020, French Voices Award, Leopold Rosy Prize of the Belgian Royal Academy). He is the editor of the Theory Redux series at Polity Press and of Perspectives Critiques at Presses Universitaires de France.Nils F. Schott is Lecturer in Philosophy at the Coll ge universitaire de SciencesPo. He has edited or translated some twenty volumes in philosophy and related fields.

Reviews
"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." -Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, The Westminster Law & Theory Lab



Book Information
ISBN 9781399522403
Author Laurent de Sutter
Format Paperback
Page Count 136
Imprint Edinburgh University Press
Publisher Edinburgh University Press