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This chapter presents Graham Harman’s assessment of a vital, highly disputed, frequently perplexing contrast, namely that of the trajectories of political and legal enunciation. With an air of clinical detachment, Harman patiently disentangles the mesh of legal obligations and places this strange, non-referential chain into proximity with the political Circle, drawing on the dichotomy of Power Politics and Truth Politics offered in his recent study of Latour’s political philosophy. According to Harman, politics must precede law because it is the charge of politics to collect groups, which may in turn develop a legal order. Similarly, law relies more or less directly on the existence of political authorities – without politics, in other words, law is mere empty, unenforceable, unreliable words. Concluding with an enticing set of questions about the implications of this arrangement for a Latourian international relations theory, Harman’s chapter skilfully demonstrates the promise and the peril of a comprehensive scheme of modes of existence.

Chapter 6 considers the figure of the human that emerges in Bruno Latour’s An Inquiry into Modes of Existence and his ‘Facing Gaia’ lectures. Latour neither repeats nor discards previous notions of humanity but translates them in a gesture that can be traced all the way back to his doctoral work on the theologian of demythologisation Rudolf Bultmann. In his attempts to elaborate a figure of the human that follows neither the emancipation narrative nor the structure of modernity, Latour (like Serres) develops a multi-modal approach. The human is an amalgam of multiple modes of existence and cannot be isolated within any single mode. Latour also avoids the problems inherent in a host capacity approach by distributing both capacities and substance across human and nonhuman actors in unatomisable collectivities. Whereas the host capacity and host substance approaches seek to understand the human by looking within, Latour insists that the human only becomes comprehensible when we look outside and around. His 2013 Gifford Lectures both develop and challenge themes from the Modes of Existence project, reasserting the centrality of the human now in terms of a non-modern anthropos defined by its limits and its multiple attachments to the world.

Faith Barter renews the conjunction of law and literature through the lens of ‘their shared interest in troubling the definition of the human’. Bartleby, in Melville’s story, traverses the superhuman and the subhuman, rendering him illegible and object-like to his frustrated employer, while the young girl in Coetzee’s novella (who is already, as a native, deemed non-human by the law of the Empire) approaches objecthood by virtue of the indecipherable traces of imperial torture she bears. Barter examines the twin dilemmas in Melville’s and Coetzee’s texts while also placing them into dialogue with the infamous 1857 Scott v. Sandford opinion of the US Supreme Court. She analyses the three texts along a temporal axis, from which emerges a set of dynamic historical oscillations and intertextual patterns of world-building. Suspicious of the ‘complete[] singular[ity]’ of law, conceived as a mode of existence, Barter reframes the relationship of law and literature by passing each through the partial regional ontology of the other, opening up a space for the interrogation of a new hybridity: literature as law. Perhaps all modes of existence are also, simultaneously and necessarily, modes of coexistence.

Between 2000 and 2010, Bruno Latour starts to shape his general theory of “regimes of enunciation” or “truth production.” In addition to science and technology, he considers religion, law and other areas. While his discussion of institutions and materiality remains tied to the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, the general framework is provided by an encounter between exegesis and phenomenology, i.e. between Rudolf Bultmann on the one side and Etienne Souriau as well as Gilbert Simondon on the other.

Taking up the Latourian challenge of offering an alternative empirical account of what it is, precisely, to ‘do’ law, Niels van Dijk, in ‘The Life and Deaths of a Dispute’, mobilises insights gleaned from ethnographic research conducted at a law firm and courts in Belgium to formulate the legal-theoretical concept of matters of dispute. Tracing the gradual transformation of these matters into legal cases and finally judgments and accomplished facts, van Dijk names each step in the biography of a dispute, sharpening our understanding of the nature of legality along the way. Moving from the development of the dispute through a series of contractions, condensations and extensions to its reduction to contentious points and the judicial linearisation of its complicated folds, van Dijk invents a conceptual topology of law that he calls, suggestively, legal pointillism. Rather than a mere ‘aestheticisation’ of law, this represents a philosophical ungrounding, or re-grounding, of all existing jurisprudence and legal epistemology, stimulating a new look at fundamental concepts (thing, cause, effect, ground, point …) that have been locked for too long in the dusty inventories of metaphysics. Van Dijk claims an affinity not only with Leibniz, Whitehead and Deleuze, but with Harman’s object-oriented philosophy as well. Finally, though his indebtedness to Latour’s ethnography of the Council of State is clear on every page, van Dijk marks a number of differences with him on crucial questions, like the nature of the legal totality and the role of tautology in legal reasoning, arguing that, in the end, it would be better to speak of assignation as a mode rather than law.

Cooren here applies his model of ‘ventriloquism’ to law and to the performances of legal speech, which allows him to detect the slight shifts in agency so characteristic of legal argumentation, and which helps reveal the complexity and polyphony of the apparently homophonic judicial utterance. From the Latourian notion of distributed action and the structure of faire faire – a theorem that consistently earns a central place in Latour’s oeuvre, Cooren launches his study by problematising anew canonical givens such as the binaries of passivity/activity and autonomy/heteronomy. We must not forget that ventriloquism involves not only the ventriloquist’s manipulation of the puppet but also the puppet’s manipulation of the ventriloquist, insofar as the latter says things that she, quite frankly, would never say were the puppet not attached to her hand. It is this strange loop of action and passion, autonomy and heteronomy, animation and inanimation, that characterises not only the puppeteer’s performance but also the lawyer’s and the judge’s performances, and, indeed, the structure of communication in general. What, then, does it mean to speak in the name of the law? Without succumbing to the snares of spontaneous hypostatisation, Cooren argues, in contrast to numerous theorists, that the law indeed possesses a sort of agency of its own. A host of legal and non-legal beings (prior judgments, witness testimony, documents of all kinds, emotions like frustration and anger, balances of power, statutes, healthcare reform policies, duplicity, etc.) are figured and mobilised to say certain things in the saying of the law: they are voiced by lawyers and judges, of course, but they also lend their own voices to the latter, shaping the means through which the law may pass.

A decisive philosophical intervention pitched at the level of law’s ontology, Gutwirth’s ‘Providing the Missing Link’ renders the difference between law as an institution or a body of norms and law as a mode of existence or value a crucial point of passage for any future philosophy of law. The first, Gutwirth argues, isn’t really law at all, but a political and organisational phenomenon easily confused with other norms and normative systems, from the rules of sporting groups or trade associations to ethical codes. The second is a far narrower concept keyed to the production of novel solutions under a particular kind of constraint and has nothing to do with the establishment of standards to be followed. Gutwirth’s finely tuned theorisation of law, which resonates with the work of Isabelle Stengers and Gilles Deleuze, sounds a laudable alarum designed to compel legal theorists to disencumber law of the formidable demands of the Rechtsstaat, while holding firmly to the evasive thread of legal enunciation. For Gutwirth, statements in the key of [LAW] require, as an absolute condition, the ‘anticipat[ion of] how and what a judge or court would decide’, and we are all jurists engaged in the practice of law, or at the least, we ‘speak legally’ and not merely ‘about law’, insofar as we projectively reason on the basis of that anticipation. The passage of law depends on this anticipatory structure, from which Gutwirth derives the signal operations of law (qualification, hesitation, imputation and so on), which work in essentially the same way as they did for the Romans. Law alone, he concludes – even after it has been unburdened of the political, economic, moral and other duties recklessly imposed on it – remains ‘the rightful and ultimate provider of stability and security’, as the loops of its unique temporality ensure that a resolution to any controversy can indeed be fashioned, even where every other mode fails.

Here, Laurent de Sutter poses a direct challenge to a principal tenet of Latour’s metaphysics: Latour’s commitment to empiricity, positivity and above all the trace by which alone an actor is grasped in actor-network theory. De Sutter embraces Latour’s argument about the ontological openness or generosity of law – it is the only mode, de Sutter reminds us, capable of seizing any being whatsoever and attaching it to an utterance or an action and thereby registering its agency and, importantly, rendering it compossible with beings of quite other pedigrees. As such, law is the only ‘ontologically neutral’ mode, but there is much more at stake than the harmonics of existential modes, namely the real composition of worlds and, indeed, of what must be defined as the unworldly: ‘all that exists only as non-existing’, ‘all that is present only as absent’, or again, ‘all that has form only as unformed’. These missing masses that Latour occasionally acknowledges, de Sutter argues, escape from the tendrils of the networks that define the real and the knowable, but enjoy something more than a mere negative or emptily theoretical existence. For Latour, plasma is simply the ‘dumping ground’ where he deposits the things that do not awaken his interest, a realm of obscurity that must be set off from the world of which clear and distinct representations are possible. To undo this surprisingly Cartesian tendency in Latour, perhaps, de Sutter suggests, it would be possible to recover plasma as the genus to which Deleuze’s dark precursor would belong. If there is identity, similitude, resemblance, traceability, in short the whole modern system of representation, it is only as a plasmatic excrescent. As a first step along this path, de Sutter makes a pitch for the recovery of what he calls the beings of sensitivity, which may affect other beings profoundly but which themselves leave no measurable trace.

Kyle McGee argues for the enrichment of socio-legal studies by re-evaluating the operation of rules in legal enunciation, particularly in the ‘judicial Umwelt’. Opposing the tendency to black-box legal rules, prevalent in doctrinal as well as critical or socio-legal research, McGee develops a new articulation of the content of law that would not, in his view, countenance the reduction of law to information. In a departure from his more exploratory book on Latour and legal theory, he focuses here on the means of formal legal speech, walking very slowly, ‘intolerably’ slowly, through the weeds of a US trial court’s opinion in a class lawsuit concerning injuries and property damage suffered by residents of a small community allegedly resulting from a chemical company’s pollution of nearby aquifers. Narrating the slow composition of a legal trajectory out of a multitude of non-legal actors and the court’s methodical de-stratification of complicated levels or planes of enunciation, McGee introduces the jurimorph as a semiotic tool for capturing the peculiar translation that must precede entry into the trajectory and which results in a new legal figure – a value-object or, in later stages, after certain trials have been met, an obligation. The litigants propose competing sequences of value-objects, each leading to the endorsement of their respective positions; the court must submit the virtual sequences to tests, and draws out, actualises, only one pathway of obligations leading to the instauration of a principle.

Bruno Latour closes out this volume by taking hold of several threads running through the preceding chapters. In addition to responding to a few of the criticisms that have cropped up, Latour offers remarks on the specific analyses developed in several of the chapters in order to shed light on crucial elements of the AIME project and his view of the legal mode of existence, addressing among other things domains, institutions, normativity, jurimorphs and a few modal crossings stimulated by the work of the book’s contributors. The outlines of a new concept – the red letter of the law – even begin to take shape as Latour moves between and among the compelling and original arguments of the individual chapters.