Matters of Indeterminacy

Law’s complicity with autobiography sustains a concept of the subject rooted in property, sovereignty, and reason, reinforcing a binary life story that privileges representation and exclusion. Conceptual and linguistic transcendence veil the materiality of law, obscuring its onto-epistemological cuts that delineate life from nonlife. Drawing from matterphorics, this chapter interrogates legal personhood, the force of rights, and the genre of autobiography as mechanisms that contract life into fixed, possessable entities. By embracing indeterminacy and relationality, legal thought can move beyond analogical reasoning and formalist divisions to enable participatory normativity. Rethinking legal concepting as a practice of conjunction rather than exclusion allows for emergent, entangled modes of existence to become sense-able and response-able within the legal imaginary.