Drinking the Kool-Aid Red Bull

This chapter establishes the conceptual and analytical framework for the discussions to come, tracing the entanglements of height, fall, and power in both thought and law. It examines how dominant epistemologies shape normativity, embedding transhumanist and technocapitalist imaginaries within the legacies of Enlightenment rationalism, human exceptionalism, and frontierism. Through a matterphorical lens, it interrogates legal thought’s enduring attachment to representationalism, revealing its complicity in material-discursive regimes of power. By unsettling the assumed autonomy of concepts from the forces that shape them, the chapter sets the stage for a critical engagement with law’s role in the production of planetary constraints, stratified mobilities, and the governance of matter itself.