After the law, across the line of unknowing, where tribunals count for nothing, Socrates is silent, and accusation is dissolved into the sun.
Nick Land
Right and the Title to compel, thus indicate the same thing.
Immanuel Kant
Introduction:
For Deleuze, philosophy is primarily concerned with the creation of concepts, which arise in response to a concrete problem. Thus, attending to both a particular thinker and a theoretical framework implies positioning oneself upon those bridges built to unite seemingly irreconcilable spheres and, on their basis, continuing this creative labor. It is in this sense that the work of legal scholar Duncan Kennedy is understood as the historical recreation of those central problems that have driven the three globalizations of law, spanning from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century. Each globalization possesses its own particular properties and potencies, centering on specific problems, concepts, institutions, and domains that differentiate them from their counterparts. For the purposes of this essay, we postulate the possibility of a fourth legal globalization which, while responding to a concrete problematic and generating a distinctive language and speech through which it is addressed—just like its predecessors—differs from them in its detachment from any transcendent element. It becomes its own object of critique, thereby orienting itself toward a single function: the coercive capture of time. Furthermore, we will demonstrate how its primary characteristics include the concept of the human, the role of human rights, technological development, and the evaporation of any transcendent element upon which law grounds itself. To achieve this, we will employ the same theoretical framework utilized by Kennedy in his work, while also drawing upon the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, the central ideas of Nick Land, and Henry Somers-Hall’s thesis regarding the relationship between the Kantian transcendental structure and axiomatics to illustrate the isomorphic relationship existing between these frameworks and the law.
Kennedy’s Three Globalizations of Law
Although at first glance Kennedy’s work might be mistaken for a reduction of law to mere historical, cultural, and political aspects—given that the legal scholar draws from the foundations of critical theory to ground his thesis—the fact remains that Kennedy’s primary objective is to demonstrate that a reduction of law to politics (or its subordination thereto) is simply impossible. In opening his exposition, he notes that what becomes globalized in this process is not properly a political ideology (continually highlighting various examples of how both the left and the right coexisted—and still do—under these forms of legal thought), nor is it a philosophy of law (similarly pointing out the prominence of both positivism and natural law)[1].
For Kennedy, what is globalized in these processes is what he terms legal consciousness, comprised of a language (langue) and a speech (parole)[2]. With respect to the former, Kennedy refers to a vocabulary composed of concepts and argument-types, organizational schemes, and modes of reasoning. As for speech, it encompasses the positive rules of different countries that are applied on the basis of that language. All of this stems from elements such as the intricate relationship that law maintains with otherness (morality, society, politics, etc.), the primary figures embodying the legal phenomenon across its different eras (jurist, legislator, official, judge, etc.), as well as the institutions and activities intimately bound to the juridical.
The legal consciousness that became globalized during the first period (1850–1914) is characterized by an ontological individualism, a staunch distinction between private and public law, and an interpretive commitment to legal formalism. The foundation of this first globalization proves to be the will theory, according to which the role of the State regarding individual rights is to protect them in order to actualize their wills, mostly abstaining from action[3]. Upon this grounding, Kennedy notes that the rule of law was the essential element generated by the will theory to sustain the liberal legal order. In its operation, it enabled the coexistence of politicians from both the left and the right, while simultaneously excluding the organicist forms characteristic of the Ancien Régime, as well as the latent threat of socialism and communism.
Following a materialist thesis, he also emphasizes the opening processes carried out by empires within their colonies, where a diffusion of CLT (Classical Legal Thought) took place. Kennedy further mentions that it was through free trade that special courts were established to apply European law to commercial transactions and public international law, thereby emphasizing freedom of contract[4]. This freedom, coupled with liberal autonomy, breaks away from the old universal rational law (both in its natural rights strand and its Aristotelian-Thomistic branch) through the proliferation of a generic structure wherein the essential feature is the unhindered connection to markets and the contracts that govern emerging relationships.
Building upon this, the second process of globalization (1900–1968) outlined by Kennedy emerges precisely as a direct critique of the first and, simultaneously, as a project of reconfiguration. Among its primary critiques were the overreliance on deduction within legal methodology and the individualistic foundation that underlay substantive law. Where the will was once positioned as an abstraction and a bedrock, it would now be replaced by “the social.” Industrial crises, the emergence of urban poverty belts, financial market collapses, and wars laid bare the inadequacy of individualist law to govern the pluralism that shaped society. In response to these conditions, a vast array of reforms, labor legislations, regulatory frameworks, and the development of institutions oriented toward social ends emerged. One of the clearest examples is the role of the judge, which shifted from taxonomically applying rules as textually embodied to assuming an interpretive role to fill the lacunae and gaps within the legal system, thereby challenging its supposed character as a closed system.
Among the core tenets of these social thinkers are: a) deriving the legal “ought” from the social “is”; b) an instrumental approach to the formulation of norms; c) the creation of law not only by the legislature but also by judges, administrative agencies, etc. (which entails the recognition of gaps within the legal order); and d) anchoring norms to “living law.” The concepts generated and globalized during this era were those of ends, functions, welfare, instrumentalism, organicism, etc.[5]
If the foundation of CLT was the will as a derivative of deductions from individualist premises, “the social” that serves as the basis for the second legal globalization is the pluralism of communities oriented toward the satisfaction of their social needs. This was driven by a recognition of the interdependence between industrial sectors and society, which could otherwise collapse into class conflict or a state of war. While the judge was the central figure of this period, no less significant was the rediscovery of the intermediate realm—that is, that which stands between the State (the macro) and the individual (the micro), populated by communities, institutions, and peoples.
Similarly, the language comprised of categorical frameworks, arguments, concepts, and elements generated by “the social” served to produce positive law from the periphery. The crucial point here, according to Kennedy, is that the immense diversity of regimes and specific national situations allowed this structure to combine with progressive, conservative, and even fascist elements. To this end, he cites the example of the concept of the family, which under progressivism served women’s liberation movements, while simultaneously acting as a fundamental paradigm for nationalist movements[6]. In addition, the critique of “the social” focused primarily on the movement from “is” to “ought,” since contradictions arose and were justified during decision-making by deriving legal rules from social needs or ends. Hans Kelsen stands as one of the foremost critics in this regard.
While deductive and formalist thinking based on a system assumed to be coherent was the key element of CLT, the analysis of social ends and purposes through balancing and proportionality encompassed “the social.” It would seem, then, that the former was tasked with managing a language, while the latter emphasized speech. It is precisely in this manner that the third globalization emerges, incorporating both social concepts and those of CLT. Contemporary legal consciousness is thus that of human rights, analogous to the role of individual rights in CLT and social rights in the second globalization[7].
For Kennedy, this contemporary legal consciousness, unlike its predecessors, has become a universal linguistic unit, functioning simultaneously as positivized elements and natural law. The language it has generated includes concepts such as proportionality, neo-formalism, identity, and judicial supremacy. Thus, the three globalizations discussed would be synthesized as follows:
| Globalization | Primary problem | Legal Consciousness | Foundation |
| Classical Legal Thought (1850–1914) | Law and Morality | People/Nation | Will Theory |
| The Social (1900–1968) | Law and Society | Social Classes/Social Minorities | Interdependence/Pluralism |
| Pragmatic (1945–present) | Law and Politics | Rule of Law | Human Rights |
Table 1. Author ‘s own creation.
While the primary relationships that law maintained have not ceased with the conclusion of their corresponding periods of globalization, what stands out as highly significant is how law is never fully subsumed under any of these forms: neither morality, society, nor politics. Between the juridical and non-juridical spheres, Kennedy positions the concepts and frameworks that shape the legal system as a point of contact between them, acting as a sort of filtering mechanism that keeps out imperfections that might otherwise encroach upon the law. However, at the time of this writing, new global events and developments are unfolding with sufficient potential to warrant the consideration of an ongoing fourth legal globalization. This globalization lacks any established paradigm and exceeds any preconceptions we might hold regarding what constitutes a legal phenomenon. Blockchain networks, the use of drones in warfare, quantum computing, virtual reality, the intensive deployment of artificial intelligence across broad sectors of society, the emergence of autonomous robots, and advanced information-processing tools undergird the appearance of this new process currently underway.
In this article, I will argue that the concepts generated by the globalization processes outlined by Kennedy function in a manner analogous to representations within the Kantian transcendental system and machines in Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus. Having established this, I will demonstrate how this hypothetical ongoing fourth legal globalization accentuates and highlights the law’s orientation toward immanence, driven toward a process of annihilating any transcendent element.
Legitimacy in the Kantian Tribunal
Immanuel Kant’s transcendental project can, for several reasons, be understood as the enactment of a judicial (and perhaps Prussian) system of Reason over Reason, mobilized to conduct a critique of dogmatic metaphysics by establishing the valid limits and uses within which the latter operates. Exposing the deficiencies of both empiricism and rationalist dogmatism, the categories within Kant’s system are posited as the very conditions of possibility for all experience, whereby the empirical manifold is organized in an a priori manner. In the section on the Transcendental Deduction of the Categories in the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant demonstrates the necessity of a priori categories (not arising from experience) to confer objective validity upon them, while also introducing the schematism that mediates between categories and intuitions.
However, what remains undetermined is the very determinability of experience. Transcendental structures are insufficient to bind the two heterogeneous realms of thought and sensibility. Experience cannot be taken as something given (which would amount to a return to pre-critical metaphysics, wherein the subject conformed to the object) upon which categorial forms are subsequently applied; rather, it must be understood as a continuous and uninterrupted process of determination. In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze draws upon differential calculus to explain the generation of Ideas. For him, this field constitutes a highly significant element in explaining the genesis of the impressions of association through a pure relation of variation that supersedes any constituted identity: dy/dx. This relation of determinability—determined by means of differential processes—produces both objects and the very faculties of thought, thereby bypassing the representational model of the Kantian transcendental system, which is predicated on organized identities:
The mathematical symbol dx indeed refers to magnitudes that are entirely undetermined in themselves (possessing neither value nor assignable magnitude) yet are perfectly determined in relation to other magnitudes (themselves likewise undetermined) with which they enter into a “differential relation.” Hence the formula of the differential relation dy/dx. The Deleuzian Idea is not exhausted within the differential relation; rather, it implies a series of differential relations that give rise to singularities (the values of dy/dx). Ideas are not merely mathematical, but also physical, psychic, poetic, linguistic, biological, social, etc.[8]
While the “Copernican revolution” carried out by Kant succeeded in establishing valid limits regarding what reason is capable of addressing (the soul, God, freedom), it nonetheless retains a tortuous and complicated relationship with otherness. Within this framework, the faculties remain anchored to the transcendental unity of apperception as their foundation, just as thought continues to be subordinated to identity, resemblance, and opposition, transcendentally constructing the conditions of a relationship that is already given in advance.
Thus, the Kantian tribunal legislates upon the given, that is: the unity of consciousness, the identity of the object, and the concordance of the faculties (which are themselves presupposed), reproducing stable forms of experience and common sense (the legitimate and the illegitimate). From this, the direct critique of the Kantian model emerges with a prominently legal character: By what right are the categories applied? Furthermore, Kant’s juridical model of legitimation and the representational model of thought turn out to be, essentially, one and the same. While the latter never moves beyond the recognition of already stabilized forms—inquiring into the conditions of possibility for objective knowledge rather than the real genesis of the differences that produce both these forms and the object—the former seeks to address law insofar as it already exists as such, that is, by adopting a previously given identity without being able to account for its genesis.
Henry Somers-Hall addresses the role of the axiomatic as a transcendental notion contained within both the articulation of capitalism offered by Deleuze and Guattari and the transcendental idealism of Kant[9]. Although the axiomatic is a term commonly associated with the field of mathematics (set theory and geometry), it refers to a system of relations between unspecified elements by means of an enumeration of primitive terms and axioms, subsequently postulating their relations in a logical manner. To illustrate this, Somers-Hall offers Peano arithmetic as an example, which was formulated to define natural numbers based on three primitive terms: “zero,” “number,” and “successor of.” The five axioms are:
- Zero is a number.
- The successor of any number is a number.
- Not all numbers have the same successor.
- Zero is not the successor of any number.
- If a property belongs to zero, and if whenever it belongs to a given number it also belongs to its successor, then it belongs to all numbers.
The fact that primitive terms harbor an abstraction is fundamental to the functioning of the axiomatic. In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari point out that Kant’s transcendental idealism forms an axiomatic that can be found within the section on the Transcendental Deduction of the Categories in his Critique of Pure Reason:
The I think must be able to accompany all my representations; for otherwise something would be represented in me that could not be thought at all, which is as much as to say that the representation would either be impossible or else at least would be nothing for me.[10]
Thus, the I think (Ich denke) in the Kantian system operates as an analytical unity that makes the unity of experience possible, preceding it. The object then appears as a correlate to the “I,” as an undetermined possibility corresponding to the concept of the object = x,[11] which is determined by means of the apprehension that accompanies my representations, thereby guaranteeing that transcendental structures apply to all phenomena.
For Somers-Hall, the axiomatics of capitalism present all phenomena as abstract and bound to capital, insofar as capital is posited as the transcendental condition that enables the operation of the axiomatic system (binding). As an example of this process, Somers-Hall mentions the development of descriptive geometry, which brought about a total shift in the working model between architects and artisans, bypassing the singularities of the materials used by the latter to focus instead on the form of extensive planes. Thus, the abstractive process of capitalism operates through two functions:
- The activity in question is reterritorialized upon a new form.
- This new form allows for a homogeneous comparison across a metric space.
For Deleuze and Guattari, the axiomatic is incapable of adequately capturing the nature of non-numerable flows, thereby confronting the limits of representation. What lies outside of representation is Kant’s limit-concept or noumenon, which results from the contradiction of reason when it attempts to extend our categories and judgments toward a total comprehension of the world. The noumenal operates as a representation of that which precisely escapes representation, preventing thought from overreaching and falling into antinomies.
This proximity of the noumenon to the phenomenon is what Deleuze takes to be difference—namely, the structure that constitutes representation while simultaneously differing from it, thereby escaping the axiomatic and remaining a smooth, primary space. Returning to A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari develop the role of nomads and the war machine vis-à-vis the State in their section on nomadology[12]. From this emerges the fundamental question of that section, which is of great significance for the legal realm: How can an organization be achieved that is not modeled after the state apparatus?
Turning back to law, we can observe how it operates axiomatically, organizing its characteristics and functions by means of an external element that is, at the same time, representationally incorporated within it. Kelsen’s basic norm (Grundnorm) and formal democracy, justice or morality in natural law, the social function in critical theory, human rights in neoconstitutionalism, and so forth—all are governed by a primordial law, namely: “This is how law ought to function; when it does not do so, then it is not law.” This makes it difficult to account for change from within the parameters presupposed for its operation, since any departure from the “essential” becomes simply inexplicable, and therefore, illegitimate. Schmitt seems to be the thinker who came closest to this problem in his study of the state of exception as that moment in which the legal order is put at risk, requiring a movement beyond itself to ensure its own existence and functioning. Thus, no matter how much the positivized legal systems of States provide for this atypical situation, its very presence is capable of blowing apart any preconception we assume to be given in advance.
Immanent Law
Now then, the concepts of language (langue) and speech (parole) proposed by Kennedy to illustrate the phenomenon of the globalization of law respond to a completely axiomatic mode of development, wherein what stand out are predicates, concepts, and categories. The transcendental element necessary for its operation has embodied various types, such as justice, the will theory, pluralism, and human rights, which, as previously explained, can enter into a relationship of coexistence. What, then, would be the central element in the fourth globalization we hypothesize? To answer this, I will draw upon Nick Land’s article “After the Law,” in which he not only outlines the two tendencies that have influenced the development of philosophy, but also provides an early grounding for what would later become accelerationism—that is, the collapse into immanence or the evaporation of any transcendent element.
The labor of the philosophy of law operates in a manner analogous to a judicial process, such that “Philosophy and judicial authority find themselves bound together in a discourse upon real legitimation,”[13] wherein cases (or appearances) are judged from a higher-level element of reality. This was exemplified by the figure of God during the legal Middle Ages, the idea of justice in subsequent centuries, and, currently, human rights. For Land, within this process concerning the philosophical-legal complex:
There is nothing peculiarly occult or mysterious about such a tendency since it finds its most highly accelerated phase in our contemporary marketisation of social transactions: the phased transition from traditional Geopolitical authorization or legitimacy to an impersonal, cybernetically automated efficiency[14]
Accelerationism, formulated years later by Land, is thoroughly immanent since it obeys nothing beyond itself, thereby bringing about a collapse of all that is transcendent. In this way, every abstract value of man loses legitimacy, and this is precisely what carries immense relevance for the law, as it finds itself collapsed into a process of conduction where no transcendent dimension exists to judge and regulate it, obeying only itself. Faced with this, any attempt to reinsert a project of human management amounts to nothing more than a return to Plato, Thomas Aquinas, and Hegel for the sake of imposing a quasi-teleological managerialism.
Returning to the aforementioned article, Land juxtaposes two diametrically opposed figures: Socrates and Bataille. With the former, he refers to Plato’s Apology itself, which is traversed by the judicial process that would ultimately dictate the death penalty by hemlock for the Athenian. “The figure of Socrates, as sketched for us by Plato – his advocate – is that of philosophy on trial.,”[15] highlighting the judicial threshold that runs through the history of Western philosophy, wherein the transcendent is invoked to demand justice within this process of human litigation. In this regard, Land notes the following:
Judgment is the subsumption of a case under a principle or law. It is classificatory or categorizing, according to a discursive order which is simultaneously juridical and logical. The very word ‘ category’ is derived from the Greek word κατήγορος or accuser. Judgment is thus an image of thought, and Plato’s entire philosophy can be read as an appeal to a higher court, as an obsessive retrial, as well as a counteraccusation against Socrates’ executioners.[16]
In the same manner that democracy condemns Socrates, Plato passes sentence on democracy by categorizing it within the various political forms, thereby enacting a judgment upon judgment. Likewise, the Athenian’s attitude toward his own death rests upon a confidence in projecting the categories of thought onto the unknown (death). For Land, this demonstrates the attempt to achieve “an anticipatory harmonization with the escape from sensible existence,”[17] wherein the figure of death is directly assimilated to that of the tribunal. This marks the beginning of Western history, in which philosophy delivers the just judgment on death, thereby amending the condemnation of Socrates. Human judgment is replaced by divine judgment, subverting sophism with a higher sophism, and detaching itself from this world “only to bind himself more tightly to another; to ‘the unseen world’ or ‘the next world’,”[18] thereby underscoring a tendency to reject all that is unknown, opting instead for the known.
Regarding Bataille, to whom Land recurs in the vast majority of his writings, he references the text on the trial of Gilles de Rais. Drawing heavily from Nietzsche, Bataille conceives of the law not as a transcendent rule, but as a mandate to preserve something (the temporary arrest of an energy)—that is, to secure the conditions of its existence. The function of law in his work is bound up with the word “discontinuity,” serving as a space of separation from death and loss. According to Bataille himself, Rais’s misfortune was to live through the transition from the feudal and sanctuary stage to the rational one. One of the shifts brought about by this advent was the transformation of warfare, shifting from a form of escape toward expenditure to a rationalization of the reasons and assets required to wage it, thus grounding it in moral and valid justifications.
While with Socrates judgment appears as transcendent and as a supreme law that sits in judgment of human law, in Bataille death is the annihilation of judgment itself, as well as the most imminent of all imminent things. Hence, in his vision of warfare as a locus of explosion, it shatters all law and judgment: “War exceeds judgment, since every judicial apparatus is a petrified war, just as every ‘case’ of war is a domestication politicised”[19].Death, as immanence, suspends justice or law, placing it within a vacillating unknowing that may or may not invalidate its preestablished alternatives.
We thus also notice a structural isomorphism between capital and the Kantian system early on identified by Land, for within both this mode of production and this mode of reason there occurs “movement of deregulation, whose tendency is towards an increasingly radical prioritization of the interrogative impulse”[20]. Thus, what appears in capital as money which is nothing other than the abstract form of exchange independent of the commodity[21]—and in Kant’s system as universal structures within which any object of experience is arranged (space, time, categories, cause-and-effect, etc.), finds its analogue in law through the concepts, frameworks, and modes of reasoning that Kennedy terms language (langue).
Kant’s critique of dogmatic metaphysics is similarly echoed by the processes of capital, which dismantle every high and sacred value cherished by human beings. As Marx famously noted in his manifesto, all that is solid melts into air. Capitalism thus becomes the most effective and virulent vehicle of critique by means of a perpetual movement wherein it generates goods and services no longer for the sake of sale or consumption, but to generate greater profits, which, driven by competition, compel their own reinvestment. If capital has thus become an end in itself, can we expect the same outcome within law? The answer to this question is already contained within Kennedy’s postulates, as his objective vision of the legal phenomenon undermines all the transcendent elements that previously served as a basis for critique (morality, “the social,” and politics), meaning these elements only succeed in generating concepts that conform in advance to the structure of the legal system.
Neoconstitutionalism thus emerges as the mournful cry of a terminally ill patient, attempting once more to establish a connection between law and morality mediated by the presence of open principles that judges must balance. This pronounced judicial prominence seeks nothing less than to wrest the final word from the legislature, thereby assigning a creative role to the judge. While it has been heavily criticized, these critiques amount to nothing more than a project directed against law itself; even Ferrajoli’s garantismo and Atienza’s post-positivism, by maintaining a substantive link to elements endowed with transcendent meaning, fall into this vicious circle against which both law and capitalism are waging a process of emancipation.
If we understand the Austrian school of economics as that which posits the most “pure” capitalism—that is, devoid of restrictions, regulation, and control—and Marxist and Keynesian economics as the attempt to subordinate it, we can trace this very same dynamic within law, where the question remains as its center of gravity: How do we make it reconcilable? How do we halt or regulate it? Turned inward toward its own internal critique, much like capitalism, “pure law” is generally tasked with the regulation of every event occurring in time; that is, its coercive capture. If in Kant the object is x, and in capitalism money is the abstraction that enables the free exchange of commodities, the fundamental basis of this new law would be: Every x that occurs in time can be the object of the law’s arbitrium. By x, we mean every event, person, situation, or entity, this being the supreme concept in an eminently Kantian sense:
The highest concept with which one is accustomed to begin a transcendental philosophy is usually the division between the possible and the impossible. But since every division presupposes a concept that is to be divided, a still higher one must be given, and this is the concept of an object in general (taken problematically, leaving undecided whether it is something or nothing)[22].
Fourth Legal Globalization
Capital must maintain itself in a process of reinvention; this is its necessary condition for self-perpetuation. The state it traverses is the zero-threshold or Body without Organs within the immanent philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari, which refers to the plane of immanence where flows and intensities are contained—it is the matter that fills space (primary production operating as a continuum), as both thinkers note:
The body without organs is the model of death. (…) Zero intensity. The death model appears when the body without organs repels the organs and lays them aside: no mouth, no tongue, no teeth—to the point of self-mutilation, to the point of suicide. [23]
Thus, as Land explains, this dynamic is fundamental to capitalism insofar as “death is not an extrinsic possibility of capital, but an inherent function. The death of capital is less a prophecy than a machine part”[24]. Death is not merely the cessation of judgment, but also the constitutive process through which critique operates, marking a distinction between the conditions of possibility of objects and the objects themselves. From this stems the immense significance that capital places on technological development in terms of efficiency and operability—which I frame as the primary problem confronting law within this new globalization, with a fundamental emphasis on AI.
The fact that the relationship between law and AI is undeniable does not yet manifest the immense transformative potential it contains; what is overlooked is that, for the first time, an element previously unconsidered is being integrated not only into the legal field, but into the philosophical domain as well[25]. The legal concept of the subject or person appears linked in a parallel fashion to the development of AI, a connection evinced by a fundamental question: What must something be capable of doing in order to be an agent? Peter Wolfendale addresses this question in The Revenge of Reason, pointing out that Kant’s transcendental system essentially prefigures the artificial intelligence program[26].
In positing his computational theory of the imagination, Wolfendale frames the Kantian project as the most abstract possible conception of what something must be to count as such, both for objects and for subjects. Thus, supplementing this with Kennedy’s postulates concerning the role of concepts, the fourth legal globalization we have mentioned would be illustrated as follows:
| Globalization | Primary problem | Legal Consciousness | Foundation |
| Classical Legal Thought (1850–1914) | Law and Morality | People/Nation | Will Theory |
| The Social (1900–1968) | Law and Society | Social Classes/Social Minorities | Interdependence/Pluralism |
| Pragmatic (1945–present) | Law and Politics | Rule of Law | Human Rights |
| The Inhuman (2001- present) | Law and Technology | Concept of human | Autonomous Subjects |
Table 2. Author ‘s own creation.
Capitalism, by always tending toward absolute deterritorialization, dismantles and collapses the particular forms and modes of social reproduction, subordinating them to the techno-commercial realm. Hence, for Land, every transcendent criterion has failed to identify its object. Capital is its own object of critique and self-reproduction, detaching itself from any authority, belief, ideology, and community, moving toward “an even more uninhibited commodification of the processes that are tearing down the social field,”[27] elucidating the movement of deterritorialization regarding which, according to Deleuze and Guattari, “we haven’t seen anything yet.”[28] Adhering to these tendencies, law traffics into itself the necessary tools to detach itself from any transcendent element that regulates its most primary and elemental function: the capture of time.
The mere fact of thinking about AI systems as potential autonomous subjects forces us to question humanistic values that were always taken for granted, urging us not to confine ourselves solely to the contemplative realm, but rather to delve into the concrete and real processes for interacting in the world. After all, the fact that our concepts remain open to revision—thereby rejecting any predetermined limit on thought and self-understanding—constitutes one of the primary characteristics of reason, which Kant knew how to identify remarkably well:
It is a merit of reason to find this path within the bounds of possibility, even at the cost of abandoning as useless something that was contained in the end previously adopted without reflection.
Conclusion
Historically, law has been reduced to mere moral, political, or social concerns, and it is precisely in response to this that Kennedy’s thesis offers a rescue of the objectivity of the legal phenomenon. Law thus emerges as a system on par with Kant’s transcendental project and capitalism—that is, as a transcendental or axiomatic structure capable of maintaining a homogeneous and relational space between unspecified elements. Between law and capital, I have demonstrated how their relationship enables a new legal globalization, one that is grounded upon the concept of time (understood in a transcendental sense) to bring about a transformation of what we understand as the subject, human rights, and law itself. Faced with this possibility, as has been rightly noted, we haven’t seen anything yet.
References
Kennedy, D. (2015). Tres globalizaciones del derecho y del pensamiento jurídico, Colombia, Universidad Externado de Colombia.
Kant, I. (1997). Crítica de la razón pura, Madrid, Editorial Alfaguara.
—(1998). Critique of pure reason. (P. Guyer & A. W. Wood, Eds.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Ferreyra, J. (2021). Deleuze: Estudio preliminar, selección y traducción de textos. Galerna Editorial.
Land, N. (2011). Fanged noumena: Collected writings 1987-2007. MIT Press.
—(2021). Teleoplexia: Ensayos sobre aceleracionismo y horror. Barcelona. Holobionte Ediciones.
Somers-Hall, H. (2023). Binding and axiomatics: Deleuze and Guattari’s transcendental account of capitalism. Continental Philosophy Review, 56(4), 619-638.
Kant: Synthesis and time, Lecture 03, 28 March 1978 – Gilles Deleuze: The deleuze seminars. Gilles Deleuze | The Deleuze Seminars. (2024, October 15). https://deleuze.cla.purdue.edu/lecture/lecture-03-6/
Felix, G., & Guattari, D. (1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. Trans. by Massumi, B.)., University of Minnesota, Minneapolis.
— (1972). Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. New York, London: Penguin Classics.
Wolfendale, Peter, The revenge of reason, United Kingdom, Urbanomic Editorial, 2026.
[1] Kennedy, Duncan, Tres globalizaciones del derecho y del pensamiento jurídico, Colombia, Universidad Externado de Colombia, 2015, p. 29.
[2] Kennedy, 2015, p. 30.
[3] Kennedy, 2015, pp. 35-40.
[4] Kennedy, 2015, p. 51.
[5] Kennedy, 2015, p. 60.
[6] Kennedy, 2015, p. 63.
[7] Kennedy, 2015, p. 107.
[8] Ferreyra, Julin, Deleuze. Estudio preliminar, selección y traducción de textos, Buenos Aires, Galerna Editorial, 2021, Kindle edition, position 41 (Author translation).
[9] Somers-Hall, H. (2023). Binding and axiomatics: Deleuze and Guattari’s transcendental account of capitalism. Continental Philosophy Review, 56(4), 619-638.
[10] Kant, Critique of pure reason. Cambridge University Press. p. 246
[11] Kant: Synthesis and time, Lecture 03, 28 March 1978 – Gilles Deleuze: The deleuze seminars. Gilles Deleuze | The Deleuze Seminars. (2024, October 15). https://deleuze.cla.purdue.edu/lecture/lecture-03-6/
[12] Felix, G., & Guattari, D. (1987). “Teatrise on Nomadology: The War Machine“ In A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. Trans. by Massumi, B.)., University of Minnesota, Minneapolis.
[13] Land, N. (2011). Fanged noumena: Collected writings 1987-2007. MIT Press. p. 230.
[14] Land, N. (2011). Fanged noumena: Collected writings 1987-2007. MIT Press. p. 230.
[15] Land, 2011, p. 235.
[16] Land, 2011, pp. 236-237.
[17] Land, 2011, p. 239.
[18] Land, 2011, p. 243.
[19] Land, 2011, p. 250.
[20] Land, 2011, p. 262.
[21] “Its function [money] is to simplify, and thereby expedite, transactions that would otherwise become complicated ad infinitum. It is, therefore, an evident social accelerator.” In: Land, Nick, Teleoplexia: Ensayos sobre aceleracionismo y horror, Barcelona, Holobionte Ediciones, 2021, págs. 31-32, (Author translation).
[22] Kant, 1998, p. 382.
[23] Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1972). Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. New York, London: Penguin Classics. p. 329.
[24] Land, 2011, p. 266.
[25] As such, the philosophy of technology emerged in the mid-twentieth century, with Heidegger’s text “The Question Concerning Technology” serving as its foundational work.
[26] Wolfendale, Peter, The Revenge of Reason, United Kingdom, Urbanomic Editorial, 2026, p.6.
[27] Land, 2011, p. 340.
[28] Deleuze & Guattari, 1972, p. 240.
Hyperspekulation 
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