With Laurent de Sutter, philosopher and professor of legal theory at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. 

This event is co-organized by the U-turnS and the Sciences Po Law and Tech Research Group. For our research group, this is part of an ongoing commitment to forge new directions in thinking about law and technology. At a time when inherited frameworks risk exhaustion, and critique itself has lost traction—often looping back into the very logics it seeks to resist— Laurent de Sutter’s superweakness paradigm offers a generative site for experimentation. By moving beyond established patterns and the circularity of critique, this event accompanies the research group’s ambition to explore and amplify experiments, unexpected approaches, and to provoke reflections surrounding technolegal systems outside the gravitational pull of progress, solutionism and inherited routines.

About the event

On the occasion of its translation into English, Professor Laurent de Sutter will present his recent book, Superweak: Thinking in the 21st Century (trans. by Robert Hughes). The opus echoes widespread anxieties within critical legal studies, whose discussion will provide an opportunity to consider the current upheavals in critical thinking and the urgent need to go beyond critique in the face of contemporary crisis. Its abstract reads as follows:

“We have become superheroes. Nothing can resist us anymore – persons, ideas, facts, realities, beings. We have become superheroes because we have seized on a tool that subjects everything to the scrutiny of our judgement: critique.  Since its first formulation at the end of the sixteenth century, the project of critique spread from one sphere to another until it became almost universal: everyone was transformed into someone whose capacity to judge, approve and discard equals that of others. If modernity is defined as the journey we have taken to move away from the myths and dogmas of the past, then critique, with its emphasis on reason and the autonomy of judgement, has been the lynchpin of modernity.

But today the critical project is showing signs of exhaustion.  We are beginning to realize that being right is useless, now that everyone can lay claim to the same power as we can.  The democratization of reason, proceeding alongside the development of critique through modernity, has produced a stalemate: for every judgement that we pronounce, there is another opposing one – with grounds as solid as ours, and the same right to exert itself. Rather than elevating us above the world, critique has plunged us into a downward spiral of claim and counter-claim. 

The age of critique is now over, argues Laurent de Sutter, and in its place we need to develop a postcritical form of thinking, one that could be called ‘superweakness’, a form of thinking whose main tenet is not based on judgement, grounds, reasons or explanation but on our ability to experiment with and explore what is stronger than us.”