After Law. Laurent de Sutter

École pratique des hautes études. Section des sciences religieuses. Annuaire 99 (1990–1), pp. 243–246; Jean Rudhardt, Thémis et les Hôrai. Recherches sur les divinités grecques de la justice et de la paix [Thémis and the Horae: Investigations into the Greek Gods of Justice and Peace] (Geneva: Droz, 1999); Pierre Judet de la Combe and Barbara Cassin, ‘Thémis’, Vocabulaire européen des philosophes [European Dictionary of Philosophers], under the direction of Barbara Cassin (Paris: Seuil/Le Robert, 2004) pp. 1291–1296. §9. – On phusis and the Sophists: Felix Heinimann, Nomos und Physis. Herkunft und Bedeutung einer Antithese im griechischen Denken des 5. Jahrhunderts (1945) (Basel: Friedrich Reinhardt, 1965); Mario Untersteiner, The Sophists, trans. Kathleen Freeman (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1954); George B. Kerferd, The Sophistic Movement (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); Jacqueline de Romilly, The Great Sophists in Periclean Athens, trans. Janet Lloyd (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992); Gérard Naddaf, L’Origine et l’évolution du concept grec de phusis [The Origin and Development of the Greek Concept of Phusis] (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen, 1992); Barbara Cassin, L’Effet sophistique [The Sophistic Effect] (Paris: Gallimard, 1995).§10. – On politès: Émile Benveniste, ‘Two Linguistic Models of the City’, in Problems in General Linguistics, trans. Mary Elizabeth Meek (Coral Gables, FA: University of Miami Press, 1971).

INTERLUDE 1

§B. Chaos. Anomia is an-archè: the absence of Law is the absence of foundation, principle or rule, understood as the mode of consistency of everything that is – starting with human cities, those dangerously inclined associations. Without nomos, the very possibility of justifying the way things are is nullified, along with the possibility of this justification enabling the control of what is considered dangerous – the word for which is chaos. Since the invention of the category of Law in Greece, it has always been brandished as a way of avoiding the chaos that would surely ensue in a society left to its own devices – it being understood that, without a master, men are animals. That the absence of Law and order always leads to chaos is among the least well-founded, but simultaneously most deep-rooted, propositions of the legalistic ethos that has governed the West for more than two millennia. Why? Without doubt because only the hypothesis of chaos can, in the struggle for mastery, serve to justify the unjustifiable – can supply a principle or an unquestionable purpose to the category of Law. The hypothesis of chaos is an ace in a game where they are lacking; or rather, it is a joker, an empty card that might replace any of them, from the weakest to the strongest, depending on the interests being perused. As such, the card of chaos is without content or power; it is, literally, a carte blanche; but it is this absence that allows it to plug the holes in the shaky edifice of Western legalism. Rather than a collection of arguments, therefore, it only works through suggestions: ‘it might be that’, ‘the danger would be’, ‘but that might leave the door open to’, and so on. In other words: the hypothesis of chaos is the hypothesis of what these suggestions would give one to believe; it is chaos, in the sense that, when it is employed, all consistencies collapse. The hypothesis of chaos is what induces the necessity for worry, doubt and fear, where previously they appeared only as circumstances allowed – since only their necessity also makes it necessary to control them with nomos.

Note

§B. – On the ‘door open to’ argument: Isabelle Stengers, La Vierge et le Neutrino. Les scientifiques dans la tourmente [The Virgin and the Neutrino: Scientists in Tourment] (Paris: Les Empêcheurs de penser en rond/Seuil, 2006).