States and corporations as legal figments – or absurd theatre

This chapter takes the disparate bodily natures of God and human characters as a conceptual searchlight for the confrontation of vulnerable, embodied human individuals with body-less corporations and states. Ever since the invention of the state as a supreme legal person and corporations as commercial legal persons, the judicial staging of cases is troubled by the fact that precarious and perishable individual bodies stand opposite actors or characters that will never be visible on the judicial stage, unless in the form of what this chapter proposes to call figments . Those who are capable to hide between the corporate veil or the state veil can never be held as responsible as those who miss such a veil. And even if powerful legal figments are convicted for an abuse of power – say for carelessness, for criminal acts, fraud, deception – the question remains whether the judiciary can hurt them, correct them, or deal with them as forcefully, affectively speaking, as it can embodied individuals. States and corporation can be split or “broken” legally, that is, but not killed. Two cases prove the disparity between so-called natural persons and corporate legal persons: the case of Urgenda against the Dutch state, and of Milieudefensie (“Environmental defence”) against Shell.