Verbatim quote · from the corpus

“The law itself is an extension and segmentation of the imperative founding the nomos, as all disputes, which is to say all resentments, concern the divvying up of the original distribution of any community—the ongoing divvying up, we could say. Two people couldn’t have a dispute over property or contract if they didn’t share the assumption that their actual or potential possession of the good or service in question could be taken for granted, and that can only be the case if the original distribution is beyond challenge. So, we’re all still obeying in our own ways whichever conqueror took possession of the territory we live on and divided it among his loyal confederates, who in turn divided their shares... Even more, though, the failure to comply with, or the prolongation of the imperative is the pathway, through the interrogative, to the declarative. The argument against the supersovereignties, then, turns into an argument against fake and self-serving rationales for disobedience in order to open up an understanding of our relation to the imperative as generative of questions and declarative sentences. This, in fact, accounts for the mediation of the juridical and the disciplines, which we might see as spaces where the imperatives of the center get drawn out into “eddies” where they can be slowed down and become generative of hypothetical modes of being—couplings of questions and answers.”

— Adam Katz, The Problem of Obedience, Revisited · Apr 1, 2025 · Bouvard Substack