Gilles Deleuze has provided the most fascinating account of law of the 20th century. Yet it is hidden in a just a few clues dispersed throughout his work and no complete reconstruction of it has ever been produced before. Laurent de Sutter gathers all the elements that compose Deleuze’s philosophy of law and articulates them for the first time in a real system. The result is the most devastating critique of the very idea of law. But it is also surprising, praising the actual practice of jurisprudence. This is not simply a practice of judgment; it is a practice of radical creation and leads to an intriguing question: what if lawyers were the only true revolutionaries of our time?

Is this the book Deleuze would have written had he followed his fantasy of doing law instead of philosophy? Perhaps. In any case, the book written by de Sutter is an infinitely inviting book: it is a slow whispering between two thinkers, a communion of minds and words into which we are called to eavesdrop. It is critical (of law, of the world) and clinical (pragmatic, forensic, focussed) at the same time, performatively showing how critique of law is the necessary condition to engage with law. Through bite-size, delectably pithy, nearly twitterable chapters, de Sutter offers some of the deepest and most genre-changing propositions about the law ever encountered, but uttered lightly, with irony and humour, with a levity and flippancy worthy of the law. * Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, The Westminster Law & Theory Lab *

Laurent de Sutter is Professor of Legal Theory at Vrije Universiteit Brussel. He is the author of more than twenty books translated into a dozen languages. In English, he is the author of Narcocapitalism: Life in the Age of Anaesthesia (Polity, 2017) and After Law (Polity, 2020, French Voices Award, Leopold Rosy Prize of the Belgian Royal Academy). He is the editor of the Theory Redux series at Polity Press and of Perspectives Critiques at Presses Universitaires de France. Nils F. Schott is an academic translator and editor. With Alexandre Lefebvre, he is the co-editor of three books: Henri Bergson’s lectures on Freedom at the Collège de France (Bloomsbury, 2024); a collection of essays, Interpreting Bergson: Critical Essays (Cambridge University Press, 2019); and a translation of Vladimir Jankélévitch’s Henri Bergson (Duke University Press, 2015). With Hent de Vries, he edited Love and Forgiveness for a More Just World (Columbia University Press, 2015). He has translated more than twenty books in philosophy and related fields, including, for Edinburgh University Press, Deleuze's Philosophy of Law by Laurent de Sutter.