Introduction: Deleuze and Law — Forensic Futures

This volume engages with the impact of a thinking of law with Gilles Deleuze. It is an attempt to engage in another mode of doing jurisprudence, which places the emphasis on the material bodies of citizens and their interests rather than the abstract formless subject of law. It is, as Claire Colebrook observes in her essay in this volume, a reconsideration of law and legal theory as a differential jurisprudence. In such a jurisprudence the emphasis would be placed on how the claims of some bodies might transform the relation between what counts as a speaking subject for law and what is silenced. This shift in the way we view the manner in which individual bodies are formed and subjugated by law provides an opening to another thinking of law, which emerges in the essays in this collection. In this regard the collection attempts to perform what one might term a vitalist jurisprudence or one in which the body obtains primacy over what Deleuze and Guattari termed the terror of the signifier.