1. Michael C. Behrent, “A Seventies Thing: on the limits of Foucault’s neoliberalism course for understanding the present” in Sam Binkley and Jorge Capetillo (eds), A Foucault for the 21st Century: Governmentality, Biopolitics and Discipline in the new Millennium (2009).

2. The idea of law’s infinite responsiveness is profoundly Derridean—thought’s journey from the finitude of experience to a generalized realm beyond finitude. Comparing Derrida’s scheme with Kant’s autonomous subject of reason and pure duty, Claire Colebrook comments: “Without that appeal to an original, if purely formal, subjective ground, Derrida’s deconstruction can never arrive at justice or pure law, but can only regard any positive law as necessarily haunted by the possibility of a justice that resists full conceptualisation and actualisation.” Colebrook, “Legal Theory after Deleuze” in Rosi Braidotti, Claire Colebrook and Patrick Hanafin (eds), Deleuze and Law: Forensic Futures (2009), p. 10.

3. For a somewhat comparable line of analysis of thought and recalcitrance, see Jon Simons, Foucault and the Political, 1995, especially pp. 54—6, 82; see also the introduction of Deleuze and Law, cited above.

4. Marianne Constable does a similar kind of exercise in engaging with the silences of legal texts. See her, Just Silences: the limits and possibilities of modern law (2005). In this context, of interest is her argument that illimitability is actually the sign of eternal deferral and spiraling incompletion of the positivist legal system; either it is eternally replacing custom or it is being already transformed into something else (pp. 30—31).

5. For a Rawlsian modification of Foucault, also see Duncan Ivison, Postcolonial Liberalism (2002), especially, chapter 6: “The Postcolonial State.”

6. Julian Reid, The biopolitics of the war on terror (2006) and Michael Dillon and Julian Reid, The Liberal Way of War: killing to make life live (2009) make a forceful argument along these lines.

Book Review: Foucault’s Law By Ben Golder and Peter Fitzpatrick,London: Routledge-Cavendish,2009. 160 pp. $35.95 (Paper). ISBN 0415424542

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