POSTHUMANISM AND LAW focuses on analysing and creatively engaging with human rights in the constitutional state with particular reference to the radical philosophy of immanence of Deleuze and Guattari. Instead of perceiving philosophy historically, Deleuze and Guattari (1994 2, 108), describe philosophy as the creation of new concepts, where these concepts ‘in itself calls for a future form, for a new earth and people that do not yet exist’. The creation of new concepts aims to open up/unwraps/liberate questions whether a particular concept works, and whether it unlocks the series of possibilities in a given situation. Philosophical concepts therefore have a transformative power, when inserted into actual fields or assemblages, to produce change that goes beyond representational thought and/or dialectical/binary thinking. While Deleuze views philosophy as the creation of new concepts, he regards jurisprudence as the creation of a system of rights that proceeds by singularities, by working out from singularities. Deleuze (On Human Rights) remarks that human rights are meaningless, empty and pure abstractions. He extends his ‘criticism of representational thought as a limitation on possibility and experimentation’ to the notion of human rights which are based on a fixed and closed concept of the human (Lefebvre 2012, p. 51). Along with Guattari he argues that human rights presuppose an abstract subject of rights that cannot be reduced to any singular, existent figures. These rights belong to everyone but to no one in particular. Therefore, these rights ‘say nothing about the immanent modes of existence of people provided with rights’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1994, p. 107). Deleuze and Guattari favours materialism which presuppose an objective world where suffering and exploitation exists and which can be changed by objective interventions. Deleuze thus rejects the idea of a defined and a-historical list of invented human rights and the traditions that advance human rights. He criticises human rights as unresponsiveness to move beyond the formal legal construct of a subject/image in thought. This project draws on the work of Deleuze and Guattari and explores the concepts created by them to creatively engage with the law and human rights in terms of the constitutional state.
