ABSTRACT
The vast and divergent ways of constructing legalities: Roman, Chagga, medieval Japanese, Soviet, neoliberal, and so forth, offer evidence of the enormous range of desires and fears that may find distinctively legal expression. The cult of immateriality is a cult in so far as it is based on unassailable fundamentalist assumptions. This chapter reviews the law as a complex and dynamic human artefact through the cult of immateriality conditions how homo sapiens configure relations of power amongst themselves and how they engage with and transform the material world, especially those entities who live. Lively Legalities shows how the ontological grid of human/other-than-human combines with the distinctively legal grids of property/sovereignty and private/public so as to situate forms of life within authorized vectors of power. Renouncing the cult of immateriality facilitates a fuller appreciation of the materiality of law itself. Law not only gives expression and support to the cult of immateriality, it is commonly imagined as instantiating its virtues.
