The Law of Things : The Return of the Precritical

The Law of Things examines how law operates not only through words but through things, systematically conferring upon the world, the State, the people, sex, race, nature, and culture a thingly materiality treated as outside language, representation, and perception.

The Law of Things examines how law operates not only through words but through things, systematically conferring upon the world, the State, the people, sex, race, nature, and culture a thingly materiality treated as outside language, representation, and perception. It argues that law, in thingifying what it encounters, makes use of a precritical and authoritarian epistemology that forecloses contestation across legal and political life. Drawing on intellectual history, critical theory, poststructuralism, linguistics, and Science & Technology Studies, the book offers a wholly original framework for understanding how thingness functions as a mode of governance. It reveals the discursive mechanics by which law renders its objects aconstructed and self-evident, producing zones of uncriticability that silence the speaking observer and narrow the space of critique. Chapter by chapter, it defines thingification as a distinct epistemic operation, traces its lineage through the history of thought, diagnoses its contemporary resurgence, maps seven domains in which law endows what it encounters with thingness, exposes the fascist grammar that shadows such epistemologies, and develops a counter-posture (countermateriality) that upholds a minimal materiality necessary for law to remain a tool of interruption and resistance. The book thus does not merely lament the return of precritical thinking. It also defends the constructivist conditions under which critique itself can survive. This book speaks to legal scholars, legal philosophers, intellectual historians, and critical theorists, as well as anyone engaged with contemporary debates in epistemology, discourse studies, and political thought.