The gist is that imperialism – rather than being ex
ceptional, aberrational, over and done with – was and remains definitive of occidental political and legal formation. But there is, for legal formation, a twist. Whilst the constituent connection to the imperial can account for a primacy accorded law (in such guises as the rule of law), the terms of that same connection import an unbounded law resistant to imperium.
An instance and an origin of the pervasion of the i
mperial can be found in recent critical engagements with ‘p
eriodization’ in history, especially with the putative tran
sition from a medieval period to a modern along with its transcending of temporality. Propelled by this instance and origin, the story then expands ‘in time’ to absorb the saturation of the occidental polity in the imperial, and it does so in the perhaps unlikely company of Foucault, especially by way of his ‘Society Must be Defended’. Still in the company of Foucault, this imperial trajectory comes to be realized and resisted in and as law
