Law Text Culture Volume 23 Legal Materiality Article 14 2019 The Law is Not a Thing: Kafkan (Im)materialism and Imitation Jam James R. Martel San Francisco State University Follow this and additional works at: https://ro.uow.edu.au/ltc Recommended Citation Martel, James R., The Law is Not a Thing: Kafkan (Im)materialism and Imitation Jam, Law Text Culture, 23, 2019, 240-261. Available at:https://ro.uow.edu.au/ltc/vol23/iss1/14 Research Online is the open access institutional repository for the University of Wollongong. For further information contact the UOW Library:
[email protected] The Law is Not a Thing: Kafkan (Im)materialism and Imitation Jam Abstract In this article, I look at the question of how the law continually refounds itself in relationship to the material world by borrowing from that materiality a sense of its own tangibility (which it otherwise does not have) even as it in turn draws material orbits into its object lending them a certain sense of power and nobility (which they otherwise do not have either). This exchange suggests an unexpected vulnerability for the law insofar as it needs the material world to exist at all while the material world does not require an association with the law per se (and arguably is worse off in terms of the exchange it engages with the law insofar as it becomes complicit, at least by association, with law and it various forms of violence). To demonstrate a bit of that vulnerability I look at a US supreme course case 62 Cases of Jam v.