Alain Pottage
Biographic Data
| ID | 119804 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Alain Pottage |
| GIVEN NAMES | Alain |
| FAMILY NAME | Pottage |
| SIGNATURE | POTTAGE A |
| AFFILIATIONS | London School of Economics and Political Science |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-4621-3311 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 35 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 125 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 33 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1989 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
Property, Power, Politics: An Interview with Brenna Bhandar, Wendy Brown, and Robert Nichols
This article comprises an interview with Brenna Bhandar, Wendy Brown, and Robert Nichols by Andreas Folkers and Alain Pottage. It seeks to identify the conjuncture that has prompted the contemporary resurgence of questions of property in social theory. It takes critical work on the ‘colonial lives of property’ (Bhandar), neoliberalism (Brown), and colonial dispossession (Nichols) as a vantage point from which to identify the potentials and challe…
Revenge of the machines: Deleuze, Luhmann and the sociality of data
Machines were at work in two of the authorships that defined the postclassical episteme: for Deleuze, the baroque tractional machines of Leibniz and Huygens; for Luhman, the non-trivial machines of von Foerster. These machines were kin. Tractional motion machines evolved into the Differential Engine of Vannevar Bush, which cued up the emergence of servomechanisms, cybernetics and what was colloquially called ‘automation’. What happens when machin…
Planet Electric: Revisiting The Nomos of the Earth
What does Carl Schmitt’s Nomos of the Earth tell us about appropriation on a planetary scale? First, we should notice that the rediscovery of the book within contemporary theory is possible because the figure of nomos is already sociotechnical. Schmitt translated the agency of the electrical grid, which he rendered as ‘technicity’, into a mythologized force of Law. This generated a structural tension within Nomos, between the theory of nomos as c…
The Uncanny Spirit of Capital
In the sphere of corporate and commercial law, the art of representation generates persons, allows one person to substitute for another or to act "as if" they were another, and sustains the artifact of the corporation. We know that these operations or artifacts are "fictitious," but the distinction between real and fictional normalizes or naturalizes a "law-effect" that has happened before that distinction is made, and which consists in the decom…
What Is a Book? Kant and the Law of the Letter
Kant’s essay on the question of literary piracy has so far been read as a foundational text in the history of literary property. When Kant refers to the book as a “mute instrument,” scholars of intellectual property already know how to interpret that formulation because they presume the distinction that the contemporary jurisprudence of intellectual property makes between matter and form and its concomitant assumption that print is just an inert,…
Yan Thomas, Legal Artifices: Ten Essays on Roman Law in the Present Tense
Patenting Personalized Medicine: Molecules, Information, and the Body
The histories of patent law and medical practice in the United States have intersected in various ways over the past 150 years, beginning with the professional campaign against “patent medicines” in the late nineteenth century, and culminating, for now, in attempts to patent the diagnostic procedures discussed in this article. The patenting of diagnostic procedures provokes a set of fundamental questions about the episteme of patent law. These qu…
Chapter 10 Finding Melanesia in Ancient Rome: Mauss’ Anthropology of nexum
An Apocalyptic Patent
Le droit d’après l’anthropologie: Objet et technique en droit romain
La recherche en anthropologie inspirée de Marilyn Strathern surprendra sans doute les juristes formés dans une tradition de type « droit et société » ou « droit en contexte ». Au lieu de considérer le droit comme un instrument des forces sociales ou comme l’expression des processus par lesquels la société opère son maintien et sa reproduction, cette nouvelle manière de réaliser des enquêtes en anthropologie met l’accent, de façon très nette, sur …
Holocene jurisprudence
We are now accustomed to thinking of the Holocene as an epoch that we have left behind. But from what perspective do we close the Holocene and begin describing the Anthropocene? Academic disciplines have their own geology: epistemic or medial strata, sediments or condensations, which condition the apprehension and communication of fresh insight. The phrase 'Holocene jurisprudence' draws attention to a particular epistemic sediment: the figure of …
Lexical properties: Trademarks, dictionaries, and the sense of the generic
The third edition of Webster's International Dictionary, first published in 1961, represented a novel approach to lexicography. It recorded the English language used in everyday life, incorporating colloquial terms that previous grammarians would have considered unfit for any responsible dictionary. Many were scandalized by the new lexicography. Trademark lawyers were not the most prominent of these critics, but the concerns they expressed are si…
Reframing rights: Bioconstitutionalism in the genetic age
Ethics in rehearsal
In this essay we explore a rather spare kind of meeting: a conversation between three people with minimal facilitating equipment. The stakes are high because these are meetings in which the barrister in an asylum or immigration case first meets with a client who is at risk of deportation. We focus on two dimensions of these encounters. First, we identify the aesthetic that configures and animates most asylum cases: the aesthetic of inconsistency.…
Law after Anthropology: Object and Technique in Roman Law
Anthropological scholarship after Marilyn Strathern does something that might surprise lawyers schooled in the tradition of 'law and society', or 'law in context'. Instead of construing law as an instrument of social forces, or as an expression of processes by which society maintains and reproduces itself, a new mode of anthropological enquiry focuses sharply on 'law itself', on what Annelise Riles calls the 'technicalities' of law. How might the…
From theory to inquiry
The cut that makes a part
The contributions to this special issue explore some conjunctions between synthetic biology and intellectual property (IP). For the most part, practitioners of synthetic biology frame these conjunctions instrumentally, in terms of how law might facilitate science: how might one draft a commodity constitution that fosters an ethos of openness, builds community and advances the conceptual agenda of biology, while at the same time, perhaps, allowing…
The Materiality of What
A singularly influential sense of ‘material worlds’ has been developed by actor‐network theories of science and technology, which trace out the kind of social action that emerges from encounters between ‘humans’ and ‘non‐humans’. What happens when this approach to materiality takes on the question of law? One answer is suggested by Bruno Latour's recent ethnography of law making in France's Conseil d'Etat. Interestingly, this study turns out to b…
Law machines: Scale models, forensic materiality and the making of modern patent law
Early US patent law was machine made. Before the Patent Office took on the function of examining patent applications in 1836, questions of novelty and priority were determined in court, within the forum of the infringement action. And at all levels of litigation, from the circuit courts up to the Supreme Court, working models were the media through which doctrine, evidence and argument were made legible, communicated and interpreted. A model coul…
Foucault's Law by Ben Golder and Peter Fitzpatrick: Reviews
Law, Anthropology, and the Constitution of the Social: Making Persons and Things
Fabled Animals
Too Much Ownership: Bio-prospecting in the Age of Synthetic Biology
Law, Anthropology, and the Constitution of the Social: Making Persons and Things (Cambridge Studies in Law and Society)
"Droit et Cultures, special issue 2004, "Images and Uses of Law among Ordinary People
Droit et Cultures, special issue 2004, "Images and Uses of Law among Ordinary People"Edited by Chantal Kourilsky-Augeven (Paris: Société de Législation Comparée
Power as an art of contingency: Luhmann, Deleuze, Foucault
This article recovers the conceptual content of Michel Foucault's model of power as 'action upon actions'. The principal argument is that the innovations of this model are intelligible only against the background of a broader social-theoretical distinction between 'substance' and 'emergence'. The suggestion is that the idea of bio-power, as distinct from sovereignty, becomes clearer, and more productive, if it is seen as a figure of emergence. Mo…
Persons and things: An Ethnographic Analogy
This article explores some parallels between the ethnographies of Marilyn Strathern and Bruno Latour. More precisely, it distinguishes Latour's models of a symmetrical alliance between humans and non-humans from Strathern's conception of an ethnographic analogy,which finds (in the context of Melanesia) a mode of social action that is indifferent to the modern distinction between persons and things. This theoretical inquiry takes as its theme the …
Law after Anthropology: Object and Technique in Roman Law
Anthropological scholarship after Marilyn Strathern does something that might surprise lawyers schooled in the tradition of 'law and society', or 'law in context'. Instead of construing law as an instrument of social forces, or as an expression of processes by which society maintains and reproduces itself, a new mode of anthropological enquiry focuses sharply on 'law itself', on what Annelise Riles calls the 'technicalities' of law. How might the…
The Inscription of Life in Law: Genes, Patents, and Bio‐politics
Holocene jurisprudence
We are now accustomed to thinking of the Holocene as an epoch that we have left behind. But from what perspective do we close the Holocene and begin describing the Anthropocene? Academic disciplines have their own geology: epistemic or medial strata, sediments or condensations, which condition the apprehension and communication of fresh insight. The phrase 'Holocene jurisprudence' draws attention to a particular epistemic sediment: the figure of …
The Materiality of What
A singularly influential sense of ‘material worlds’ has been developed by actor‐network theories of science and technology, which trace out the kind of social action that emerges from encounters between ‘humans’ and ‘non‐humans’. What happens when this approach to materiality takes on the question of law? One answer is suggested by Bruno Latour's recent ethnography of law making in France's Conseil d'Etat. Interestingly, this study turns out to b…
Law machines: Scale models, forensic materiality and the making of modern patent law
Early US patent law was machine made. Before the Patent Office took on the function of examining patent applications in 1836, questions of novelty and priority were determined in court, within the forum of the infringement action. And at all levels of litigation, from the circuit courts up to the Supreme Court, working models were the media through which doctrine, evidence and argument were made legible, communicated and interpreted. A model coul…
The Measure of Land
Patenting Personalized Medicine: Molecules, Information, and the Body
The histories of patent law and medical practice in the United States have intersected in various ways over the past 150 years, beginning with the professional campaign against “patent medicines” in the late nineteenth century, and culminating, for now, in attempts to patent the diagnostic procedures discussed in this article. The patenting of diagnostic procedures provokes a set of fundamental questions about the episteme of patent law. These qu…
Introduction to the theory of the image: Narcissus and the other in the mirror
Recreating difference
An Apocalyptic Patent
Ethics in rehearsal
In this essay we explore a rather spare kind of meeting: a conversation between three people with minimal facilitating equipment. The stakes are high because these are meetings in which the barrister in an asylum or immigration case first meets with a client who is at risk of deportation. We focus on two dimensions of these encounters. First, we identify the aesthetic that configures and animates most asylum cases: the aesthetic of inconsistency.…
From theory to inquiry
What Is a Book? Kant and the Law of the Letter
Kant’s essay on the question of literary piracy has so far been read as a foundational text in the history of literary property. When Kant refers to the book as a “mute instrument,” scholars of intellectual property already know how to interpret that formulation because they presume the distinction that the contemporary jurisprudence of intellectual property makes between matter and form and its concomitant assumption that print is just an inert,…
Foucault's Law by Ben Golder and Peter Fitzpatrick: Reviews
Law Com. 181: Reforming Trusts of Land
Property: Re‐appropriating Hegel
Crime and Culture: The Relevance of the Psychoanalytical
Recreating difference
The Measure of Land
Introduction to the theory of the image: Narcissus and the other in the mirror
The Inscription of Life in Law: Genes, Patents, and Bio‐politics
Proprietary Strategies: The Legal Fabric of Aristocratic Settlements
Power as an art of contingency: Luhmann, Deleuze, Foucault
This article recovers the conceptual content of Michel Foucault's model of power as 'action upon actions'. The principal argument is that the innovations of this model are intelligible only against the background of a broader social-theoretical distinction between 'substance' and 'emergence'. The suggestion is that the idea of bio-power, as distinct from sovereignty, becomes clearer, and more productive, if it is seen as a figure of emergence. Mo…
Persons and things: An Ethnographic Analogy
This article explores some parallels between the ethnographies of Marilyn Strathern and Bruno Latour. More precisely, it distinguishes Latour's models of a symmetrical alliance between humans and non-humans from Strathern's conception of an ethnographic analogy,which finds (in the context of Melanesia) a mode of social action that is indifferent to the modern distinction between persons and things. This theoretical inquiry takes as its theme the …
Law, Anthropology, and the Constitution of the Social: Making Persons and Things (Cambridge Studies in Law and Society)
"Droit et Cultures, special issue 2004, "Images and Uses of Law among Ordinary People
Droit et Cultures, special issue 2004, "Images and Uses of Law among Ordinary People"Edited by Chantal Kourilsky-Augeven (Paris: Société de Législation Comparée
Too Much Ownership: Bio-prospecting in the Age of Synthetic Biology
Fabled Animals
Law, Anthropology, and the Constitution of the Social: Making Persons and Things
Law machines: Scale models, forensic materiality and the making of modern patent law
Early US patent law was machine made. Before the Patent Office took on the function of examining patent applications in 1836, questions of novelty and priority were determined in court, within the forum of the infringement action. And at all levels of litigation, from the circuit courts up to the Supreme Court, working models were the media through which doctrine, evidence and argument were made legible, communicated and interpreted. A model coul…
Foucault's Law by Ben Golder and Peter Fitzpatrick: Reviews
The cut that makes a part
The contributions to this special issue explore some conjunctions between synthetic biology and intellectual property (IP). For the most part, practitioners of synthetic biology frame these conjunctions instrumentally, in terms of how law might facilitate science: how might one draft a commodity constitution that fosters an ethos of openness, builds community and advances the conceptual agenda of biology, while at the same time, perhaps, allowing…
The Materiality of What
A singularly influential sense of ‘material worlds’ has been developed by actor‐network theories of science and technology, which trace out the kind of social action that emerges from encounters between ‘humans’ and ‘non‐humans’. What happens when this approach to materiality takes on the question of law? One answer is suggested by Bruno Latour's recent ethnography of law making in France's Conseil d'Etat. Interestingly, this study turns out to b…
Law after Anthropology: Object and Technique in Roman Law
Anthropological scholarship after Marilyn Strathern does something that might surprise lawyers schooled in the tradition of 'law and society', or 'law in context'. Instead of construing law as an instrument of social forces, or as an expression of processes by which society maintains and reproduces itself, a new mode of anthropological enquiry focuses sharply on 'law itself', on what Annelise Riles calls the 'technicalities' of law. How might the…
From theory to inquiry
Reframing rights: Bioconstitutionalism in the genetic age
Ethics in rehearsal
In this essay we explore a rather spare kind of meeting: a conversation between three people with minimal facilitating equipment. The stakes are high because these are meetings in which the barrister in an asylum or immigration case first meets with a client who is at risk of deportation. We focus on two dimensions of these encounters. First, we identify the aesthetic that configures and animates most asylum cases: the aesthetic of inconsistency.…
Holocene jurisprudence
We are now accustomed to thinking of the Holocene as an epoch that we have left behind. But from what perspective do we close the Holocene and begin describing the Anthropocene? Academic disciplines have their own geology: epistemic or medial strata, sediments or condensations, which condition the apprehension and communication of fresh insight. The phrase 'Holocene jurisprudence' draws attention to a particular epistemic sediment: the figure of …
Lexical properties: Trademarks, dictionaries, and the sense of the generic
The third edition of Webster's International Dictionary, first published in 1961, represented a novel approach to lexicography. It recorded the English language used in everyday life, incorporating colloquial terms that previous grammarians would have considered unfit for any responsible dictionary. Many were scandalized by the new lexicography. Trademark lawyers were not the most prominent of these critics, but the concerns they expressed are si…
Sociology (21 works) · Political science (17 works) · Computer Science (15 works) · Law (15 works) · Philosophy (14 works) · Epistemology (11 works) · Philosophy (11 works) · Citation (8 works) · Law (8 works) · History (7 works)