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Cont Philos Rev (2009) 42:275278
DOI 10.1007/s11007-009-9106-0
Alexandre Lefebvre, The image of law: Deleuze,
Bergson, Spinoza
Stanford University Press, 2008, 305+xxii pages, ISBN-13: 9780804759854, $27.95 pbk
John Protevi
Published online: 26 May 2009 Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009
This is a wonderfully interesting book for readers of the three philosophers named in its subtitle. I cannot say how it will strike specialists in philosophy of law, but I hope they will read it and comment on it in the appropriate venues. This review will thus hold itself to the rst perspective, namely, the interest of the book for readers of Deleuze, Bergson and Spinoza.
The overall task of the book is two-fold: to criticize the dogmatic image of law and to develop a notion of legal judgment as necessarily creative. The notion of a dogmatic image is drawn from Chap. 3 of Deleuzes Difference and Repetition, which develops a concept of the dogmatic image of thought. This key critical concept of Deleuze targets the unacknowledged presuppositions of thought in most of the Western philosophical tradition: thought is dogmatic when it dwells in the realm of opinion which sees recognition as the essence of thought. In other words, for many philosophers thought is what happens when things are recognized as instances of pre-existing categories. Thus the dogmatic image of law is that cases are recognized as instances of pre-existing rules; in other words, legal judgment is subsumptive. But such a dogmatic image overlooks the necessarily creative aspect of legal judgment, which Lefebvre will develop in his readings of Deleuze, Bergson and Spinoza. Legal judgment most comes into its own when, in response to an encounterthat is, precisely when a case cannot be recognized as falling under a pre-existing ruleit must invent or create the rule that allows us to do justice to the singularity of the case. We can thus see the volatile political stakes of Lefebvres argument: we must tackle head on the freighted notion of the activist judge.
An immediate danger presents itself however: isnt the relation of law and thought one of subsumption? Isnt law just a species of the genus thought? Lest one think his is a mere application of Deleuze, a recognition of law as belonging to the category of...