Abstract

My objective in this piece is to use the Roman legal fiction of Lex Ruinae, which, simultaneously refers to the law of ruins and ruinous law, to try to understand the relationship between law and what we might call the contemporary poly- / perma-crisis. In this regard, the overall thesis of the piece is that we might understand the legal dimensions of the crisis that seems to be spatially expansive, in the sense that it takes on planetary scale, and temporally extensive, in respect of seeming to stretch out into an endless critical future, through a theory of spasm. Here, the ruinous law of late capitalism seeks to force ever more progress, modernity, and profitability, but prevailing global economic conditions mean that further development is impossible and, in this way, exert a kind of contractive counter-force upon the global system that expresses itself in a tendency towards collapse and ruin. On the basis of this thesis, my argument is that rather than continue to live through the ruinous law of the code of capital, we should engage in what I am calling crisis jurisprudence to think about how we might live in the age of ruins and what a law of ruins might involve. Following a discussion of Lex Ruinae in the context of Roman crisis, and the struggle between Cicero, Caesar, and Antony over the purpose of law, I develop my discussion through an exploration the modern crisis of sovereignty, decision, and power, before showing how the economic version of imperium that has developed over the course of the second half of the 20th and early 21st century has led to the point of global poly- / perma-crisis, where there is nowhere else to go but a world of ruin. Thus, we confront the problem of Lex Ruinae.