In Matterphorics, Daniela Gandorfer challenges modernist legal theory’s separation of concepts from matter, developing a mode of theory attuned to indeterminacy, relationality, and material entanglement. Gandorfer offers a method for generating legal concepts that respond to ontological complexity rather than reducing the world to fixed categories or representational entities. Through a range of recent case studies ranging from outer space exploration and Red Bull’s high-altitude freefalls to seabed mining, cryonics, and the copyrighting of DNA, she shows how law is unsettled when confronted with technological frontiers and planetary transformations. Instead of treating law as an abstract system, she proposes it as a creative and situated practice—one that must continually reimagine its concepts in response to shifting relations between matter, technology, and thought. In so doing, Gandorfer formulates legal theory as a creative and situated response to planetary and technological transformation.
- Cover
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: How to Begin? A Guide
- Part I: Synaesethics of Thought: Doing Theory Matterphorically
- 1. Thinking-with Matter(s): Unloving Thought, Unfriending Theory
- 2. Metaphor and Nuclear Equations: On the Sunny Side of Theory
- 3. Matterphorics of ?-Human(ism): Theory for Loyal Traitors
- 4. Unreasonable Canons: Laws of Thinking
- 5. Minds Fucking, Making Love: Expansionist Theory
- Part II: Forces of Law: A Matterphorical Case Study on Man Falling
- 6. Drinking the Kool-Aid Red Bull: A Matterphorical Case Study
- 7. I Am Free, Free Falling
- 8. Home of the Mind: I Am Representing, Therefore I Am
- 9. Under Pressure: Falling Deeper for Power
- Part III: Cutting-Edge Theory: (Life) Story Telling
- 10. Matterphorics of Life: An All-Too-Real Story
- 11. When Theory Crashes (Into) Life
- 12. The Right to Narrate (a) Life: Cutting Theories
- 13. Matters of Indeterminacy: Stakes of Concepting
- Epilogue: A Concept Yet to Come: A Decentralized Right to Breathe
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
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