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20 Int'l J. Semiotics L. 1 (2007)

handle is hein.journals/intjsemi20 and id is 1 raw text is: RONNIE LIPPENS and JAMIE MURRAY INTRODUCTION: DELEUZE AND THE SEMIOTICS OF LAW If I had not had done with law I would not be doing jurisprudence. Towards another law. 1. THE THREAD What do machines do? Machines use and process energy, or force, and matter. Out of this process comes something new. Machines produce. They add to the world. They add to life. They produce life. Life emerges in and through that which machines do. Law on the other hand rarely adds anything to the world. Law prohibits, curtails, halts. Law takes the force of energy and matter and re- duces it to its own order, to its own stasis. Law does not produce anything new. Nothing except itself emerges from Law. Law does not add to life. It does not produce life. Law just feeds on life, di- gests it, and metabolizes it into its own order. Life, new life won't emerge from Law. Law blocks off life. It nips life's potential in the bud. There's precious little of life's creativity to be found in Law. Let us be clear: by Law we mean those assemblages that order life through stricture, discipline, command and obedience. It might be possible to imagine a new law, another law. One could imagine a new type of law, and a new kind of lawyer, i.e. a creative and ethi- cally aware artisan of life, a producer of new ways of life (MH, this issue). But we'll get to that new kind of lawyer later. Let us stick with the old kind of oedipal Law for just a while longer. It should come as no surprise that Deleuze and Guattari, in their most Nietz- schean moments, were never great admirers of old, oedipal Law (see also NM and JM, this issue). Deleuze, on a number of occa- sions, explicitly preferred the moving and shifting politics of juris- prudence, and the flows of desire therein. Jurisprudence, and the pragmatics of desire in and through which it takes shape, indeed becomes life, is what interests Deleuze, the lawyer. What interests Deleuze and Guattari in particular, in the pragmatics of jurispru- dence, is the workings of the machines of desire, the desiring machines that operate in them. Indeed, it should not come as too big a surprise either that the image of the machine, or the International Journal for the Semiotics of Law Revue Internationale de Semiotique Juridique (2007) 20: 1-6 DOI 10.1007/si1196-006-9042-9 © Springer 2006

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