ABSTRACT
This book began with a claim that jurisdiction offers legal scholarship a language with which to navigate law and to engage creatively within its medium. In the foregoing chapters, I have attempted to explore some of the textures of this medium, in particular by showing that certain technical elements of jurisprudence (persons, things, actions) afford both a representational and an expressive construction. The aim of this has been in part to show not just that the technicism belonging to the professional-institutional deployment of jurisdiction has been the subject of a relatively discontinued theoretical tradition, but also that the continuation of a ‘metaphysics of law’ in contemporary legal theory-which attempts to speak to the origins and structural limits of law-often tends only to separate us from the jurisdictional techniques and innovations that make up the practical field of jurisprudence. I have argued that it is Deleuze who, perhaps, goes furthest in this direction of recovering the modes of thought belonging to that practical critique of law we call jurisprudence. This critique, above all, is imbued with a humour that, far from philosophically mocking or satirizing our being with law and judgment, our proclivity and aptitude for moral sentiment, in fact encourages it, baits it, even if in a cruel way. Deleuze invites us to return to a jurisprudence composed of humorous intensities, creative juristic innovations, concrete situations. And it is this which sets him apart as a philosopher. He wants to affirm for philosophy a mode of thinking not necessarily reduced to an empty conceptual ‘dialogue’; a respectable discussion about ‘What is Justice?’, for instance, or ‘What is the Good?’ that presupposes an original friendship and goodwill on the part of the thinker. For Deleuze, the discipline of law or jurisprudence does not borrow from philosophy a measure of truth based upon a form of questioning capable of approaching abstract
‘essences’. Rather, it is jurisprudence which, outside of this amicable gesture which disposes thought toward truth, offers philosophy the possibility of still finding its way around in thought as in a minefield.
