Law, Space, Bodies: The Emergence of Spatial Justice

Abstract

This is a text that brings together spatiality and legality in the work of Deleuze and Guattari, thus allowing for a renewed understanding of what is Spatial Law and Spatial Justice to enter the debate. Employing Deleuze and Deleuze and Guattari’s writings, I read diagrammatically a novel by Michel Tournier called Vendredi ("Friday"). The novel is a rewriting of Robinson meets Friday but through a spatial/legal lens. My reading enhances this perspective while extracting a few fundamental practices of law’s spatiality, namely its immanent, posthuman and material qualities. The island is part of the assemblage between the various bodies (human and otherwise) that move from logos to nomos, namely from a rational distribution to nomadic movement. While Robinson succumbs to Friday’s animalistic spatiality, the whole island bows to the emergence of what Deleuze has called "a second island." This is what I take to be the space of emergence of spatial justice, a concept immanent to the law yet only appearing at its very edge.

Keywords: Spatial Law, Spatial Justice, Deleuze, Materiality, Geography, Island, Logos, Nomos, Posthuman, Ecology