Laurent de Sutter - After Law

§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 .

§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).

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