SOAS Research Online

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Abstract

This chapter examines the prospect of radical re-imagination of the paradigm of law and legality, tout court. It is argued that – in the present-day capitalist mode of economic, cultural and political production – every law and law-making activity is always already neoliberal, i.e. an integral part of the economic, cultural or political logic of late capitalism. Even the few remaining sites of anti-capitalist legality, such as those produced and maintained in certain Latin American states, increasingly find themselves unable to subvert the dominant, globalised logic of neoliberal legality. Therefore, it is proposed that the paradigm of law, as such, be resisted by an epistemic shift toward the sites of the alegal, i.e. the contemporary social phenomena that are lacking a legal sense or that successfully remain outside or beyond the legal/illegal dichotomy. The chapter argues that alegality should be understood as a necessary condition of the future (of) anti-capitalist modes of resistance and counter-production, in which neoliberal spaces and spectres of law are seen through and discursively displaced by the emergent sites of (class, gender, anti-neo-colonial, epistemic, etc.) struggle in late capitalist societies. This proposition is accompanied by a brief analysis of some such existent alegal sites, with a view of sketching out certain methodological requirements of the filed of alegal studies.