Episode 02: Laurent de Sutter

Image Credit: Geraldine Jacques

Reality against the norms

Laurent de Sutter is Professor of Legal Theory at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel and author of over twenty-five books, translated into a dozen languages. De Sutter’s work ranges a restless breadth of topics from icons of pop-culture, aesthetics, drugs and capitalism, pornography and art, often along the (post)-critical question of how the way we categorise and judge things wounds the capacity for freedom and creativity. Law returns again and again as a vector for enclosure, certainty, senselessness and the automatic process of sorting every material and aesthetic experience into a received category that, like magic, supports a continuation of the status quo and repeats the bourgeois values of the powerful. But every magic can be turned for other purposes. De Sutter’s small books act like sudden changes of atmosphere, bringing out hidden resources from theory, history and staying with the trouble of thinking. For a moment, anything can happen.

In this interview, Laurent de Sutter talks about the process of making books and the usual normative way of thinking about law that logically enforces the power of the legislators, judges and lawyers at the sacrifice of the little logistics and operations of law between people where the creativity really happens.

Selected texts by Laurent de Sutter:

After Law (2021, Polity Press)

Hors la loi: Théorie de l'anarchie juridique (2021, Les Liens Qui Libèrent)

Pour en finir avec soi-même (2021, PUF)

Narcocapitalism: Life in the Age of Anaesthesia (2018, Polity Press)

‘On the Magic of Law’ (2017) Law Text Culture 21, 123-142