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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.