Laurent de Sutter is Professor of Legal Theory at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. His books tirelessly explore the problematic articulation which binds law, rights and transgression. “We have inherited a history in the course of which everything has been done to make law opaque to us. What can we do to regain its emancipation potential, there where it is increasingly erased by the sound of the boots of policemen of the law?” This workshop will be devoted to responding to this question, which at the same time will take the form of an attempt to shed light on what has been obscured, and a sharing of knowledge with those who are there to experience what it means to come up against the law – or to be able to count on it. Rights, law, standard, justice, rule: so many frightening words that need to be rearticulated in such a way that the fear which takes hold of us when they resonate can finally be lifted – and rights can once again become the means of action and creation that they have always been. Because we mustn’t forget: in reality, rights have always existed against the law. Rights have never been anything other than a very specific, very technical and very exotic form of anarchy.
