Présentation de l’éditeur

Following the 100th anniversary of Pashukanis’ General Theory of Law and Marxism (1924), this volume aims to breathe new life into the main category of Pashukanian legacy, the concept of legal form.

This book offers new, deeper and more general, ways in which the concept of legal form can be used to push forward Marxist – post-Marxist or hauntingly Marxist – legal theory. Accordingly, this book does not pledge allegiance to reconstructing and reconsidering the official interpretative legacy of the legal form. Instead, it mobilises the revolutionary conceptual potentialities that this term contains. When investigated thoroughly, and in many dimensions, the legal form becomes a privileged vantage point not only into the greatest law-related riddles of Marxism (such as the relation between economy and the state or withering away of statal apparatuses), but the whole of modernity as the epoch determined by – if not overlapping with – capitalism. This book aims to think with the legal form rather than explain this concept. In so doing, it offers a panoply of theoretical perspectives that address legal subjectivity, abstraction, autonomy of the law and, last but not least, withering away of the law. 

This contemporary interrogation of the relevance of the concept of legal form will be of considerable interest to scholars and students of legal and political theory.

Sommaire

Chapter 1. Subjectification through Normativity: Legal Form as a Modern Device

Przemyslaw Tacik

Chapter 2. The Politics of Abstraction. Property, Subjectivity, Legal Form

Rosie Woodhouse

Chapter 3. A Journey to the Center of the Legal Form: Kelsen’s Ought as the Missing Piece to the Master-Signifier of the Legal Form

Peter Čuroš

Chapter 4. Pashukanis avec Lacan : Towards the Fantasy of Legal Form

Dennis Wassouf

Chapter 5. On the Relative Autonomy of the Modern Form of Law: From Marx and Engels to Althusser

Eduardo A. Chia

Chapter 6. Struggle to See the Law: Legal Form Beyond the Object Totality

Hedvig Lärka

Chapter 7. From Critique of Abstraction to Speculative Legal Form

Hugo Lundberg

Chapter 8. Legal Form and the Anarchist Critique of the Law

Christos Marneros

Chapter 9. Law Beyond the Legal Form

Tormod Johansen

Chapter 10. The Withering Away of the Legal Form: Revisiting Past Debates for Future Movements

Dimitrios Kivotidis