SOAS Research Online

Abstract

How might one think limits of one’s disciplinary world in a productive way, that is, with a view not to end up with yet another, even if more expansive, disciplinary cogito but rather, if you will, an epistemic abyss that opens to more radical imaginings of what lies ahead? Is there an external to law in legal theory? A space, even if but conceptual, that we might designate as alegal? Or, what’s beyond the grasp for social anthropology? A methodological move from humans to things so that one is encouraged to ‘think from things’ with a potential to transform, in turn, the entire discipline into the new field of ‘pragmatology’? Or, can one seize on the long impasse of the so-called empiricist history to suggest, as Saidiya Hartman would have it, the need for critical fabulation? My work to date, for the most part, intersects these three disciplines and so my provocation here is limited to them, although one can of course imagine interrogating just about any cognate socio-humanistic ‘science’ in this mode of critique. At issue is not an exercise in interdisciplinarity, so that where one disciplinary end is found one moves, methodologically, on to another, so as to create a space where disciplines help each other survive. I propose, rather, to pry open the unknowable amidst each separate disciplinary episteme and thus lay bare its existential crisis. And if, perchance, a discipline cannot survive this operation—so be it. Perhaps, after all, its death has been long overdue.