ABSTRACT
Coward and Ellis claimed that 'Althusser's notion of the materiality of ideology reveals a rather distorted view of materialism' because it 'relies on the so-called "concrete" and empirical. More recent 'new' materialism has gone much further than Althusser did in taking materiality into the realm of the concrete and the empirical, emphasising not only material human relations but also the relations of physical things. This chapter introduces new materialism, and makes some observations about the prospects for a reorientation of legal theory beyond a merely human framework. It focuses on situating the human, including human meaning and human subjectivity, in a material world where all matter, living and non-living, is related, where objects have their own vitality and resistance, and where agency emerges in relation rather than as an existing quality. Part of the difficulty of imagining a materialist legal theory is that law seems so obviously to rely on a differentiation of its subjects and objects.
