Foucault’s Perhaps: Madness, Suffering and the Interruption of Legal Personality in Foucault, Supiot and Hegel

Abstract

In his work Homo Juridicus, Alain Supiot considers the construction of legal personality by force and virtue of law as a precondition for human liberty. Michel Foucault views this same construction of legal personality – the construction of the subject through strategies of power, he calls it – as a ‘construction’ of liberty that is considerably less free than it is made out to be by the Enlightenment law reform projects proposed by Cesare Beccaria and other prominent eighteenth century law reformers. Foucault’s scepticism vis-á-vis Beccaria and others evidently also implies a critical stance vis-á-vis contemporary humanist understandings of law such as Supiot’s. This chapter will endeavour to explain what is at stake in the difference between these very different conceptions of legal personality by relating it to the problematics of subjectivity that came to the fore in the thinking of Hegel and the German Idealists.

Citation

Walt, J.v.d. (2022), "Foucault’s Perhaps: Madness, Suffering and the Interruption of Legal Personality in Foucault, Supiot and Hegel", Sarat, A., Pavlich, G. and Mailey, R. (Ed.) Interrupting the Legal Person (Studies in Law, Politics, and Society, Vol. 87A), Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 33-48. https://doi.org/10.1108/S1059-43372022000087A003