Legal Aesthesis: Affect, Space and Encounter

Legal aesthetics is traditionally understood as the relation between law and aesthetic objects: texts, images, films or other artistic media. This special issue reinvests ‘legal aesthetics’ with a different sense. Aesthesis draws attention to ‘the conditions of sensory perception’. Legal aesthesis therefore becomes a matter of drawing out the conditions of law’s perceptibility, and the role of law in shaping the conditions of sensory perception. Unlike existing work in law and aesthetics, this approach emphasises the materiality of the encounter with law. The following essays approach everyday encounters with legal relationality – public order, rights/ obligations, sovereignty, contract and urban regulation – in order to draw attention to the spatial and affective staging of law, outlining the conditions under which law renders subjects sensitive or insensitive, affected or unaffected, by various aspects of social life.