Law and the Senses: Un-sensing Time  

Law, understood both in its abstractness and materiality, manifests itself as timeless category that unceasingly (re)invents subjects and objects, and regulates their relations. In this continuous process of divisions and distinctions, bindings and contracts, law is essentially intertwined with the sensations of its surrounding, ad infinitum. Thus, law can be perceived as sensorium that actualises itself – both as a regulatory and knowledge system – with and through the senses, which are also subjected to its functioning. In light of the conference’s topic which attempts to look into the future of the senses, this paper does not take the senses as an immediate object of observation but instead questions their relation to time in order to apprehend a quality that goes beyond their historical or socio-legal framings. More precisely, if for the law to maintain its image as a guarantor of stability it must stop time (Serres 1982), this paper approaches the temporal as an integral element to the ontological and epistemological apprehension of law and the senses – which for various reasons seem to continuously present themselves as pre-given, almost atemporal instances. To this end, it questions whether the future configurations of sensing, and their legal actualisation, inform or simulate temporal numbness