ABSTRACT
What is the place of law in Foucault's various and varied accounts of modernity? What does Foucault have to say about law and what importance does he accord it in the social and political order of things? Has he omitted or excluded it illegitimately? Of course, these opening questions themselves betray a certain methodological legalism which Foucault's oft-canvassed theoretical opposition to juridical styles of thought would seek fundamentally to put into question. Rather than problematizing the category of law, these ways of posing the question of Foucault's relationship to law tend arguably to accept the stability and legitimacy of law. They assume the utility of law as a grid of intelligibility for the operation of power and take law as a starting point for analysis rather than as that which is itself in need of problematization. Alternatively, then: Can one even speak of ‘law’ outside of the rationalities and technologies of power operative in a given social formation? In speaking of law (and thus necessarily speaking the law) what does the theorist enable (and, more to the point, occlude)? Must not one rather ask how it came to be, and with what effects, that (a certain form of) law itself furnished the premises of political and social analysis and critique? Who speaks when law speaks, and who and what gets silenced? How might we think law autrement, as Lissa Lincoln asks perceptively in her contribution to this collection?
