Verbatim quote · from the corpus

“We may be able to imagine social order taking the form of a single laboratory in which all human beings work as simultaneously subjects and objects of inquiry but even there we would find the equivalent of a nomos, an originary distribution, with allocations of resources and responsibilities, which would only make sense given the possibility of adjudication. Once the juridical is centered in this way as, among other things, the irreducibly human in the increasingly permeable and manipulable boundaries separating humans from nature and technology, a new mode of inquiry presents itself. To understand and represent any event is to represent it as composed of implicitly juridical instances in which complainants and tribunal could be singled out, hypothetically and conceptually. To talk about a war, for example, would be to sort out claims and counter-claims the respective sides do and might make against each other and the kind of tribunal that might sit in judgment. This would be an open-ended and in principle infinite inquiry, as injuries and judgments generate new injuries and judgments and various appeals processes, opening of closed cases, and so on would become the substance of discussion.”

— Adam Katz, Thirdness · Dec 02, 2023 · Bouvard Substack