This article challenges the long-standing boundary that separates human beings from non-human entities, whether animate or inanimate. In doing so, it engages with the jurisprudential strands that debate the transformative power of law in moving towards a fuller recognition of human relations with non-human entities. To this end, the article first examines the legal theoretical strategies that scholars have so far developed to overcome the dichotomous vision that pits humans against non-humans. It then argues for a new model of understanding (...) property, called cont(r)actualisation, which seeks to reconfigure existing strategies. It makes the case that the legal categories of person and object should be brought together under the overarching heading of ‘legal entity’. Rather than being built around humans as persons/subjects and non-human entities as objects/objects, law should be built around the contingent points of contact between particular entities in a particular web of relations. In this way, the article advances a view that does justice to how these entities contribute to what human beings are and do. (shrink)

This guest column asks how Bruno Latour has contributed to any present and future refiguring of relations between the sciences and the humanities. To answer the question, it traces three select and shifting figures of knowledge by means of which Latour himself has been charting his progress—from the anthropologist, charged with unraveling techno-scientific networks, to the moralist, participating in the parliament of nature, to the diplomat, negotiating the moderns’ many modes of existence. Rather than a neat blueprint for carving up (...) the knowledge space, this essay argues, Latour leaves us with “an ethos of knowledges that verges on a chaos of in-disciplines.” The essay concludes, however, that Latour’s “in-disciplinary” thinking is and will likely continue to be an important resource for explorations into the uncertain, “nonmodern” erritories that Latour has so valuably observed. (shrink)