Law as Subjects' Production: A Foucauldian Argument for Class Action

Michele Spanò

doi:10.2202/1934-2640.1353

Drawing on the Foucauldian concept of governmentality it is possible to set up an analysis of the great transformations undergone by the modern and western concept of representation. In a globalized world the politico-juridical vocabulary of modernity seems to be unusable to represent both emergent subjects and their claims. Class action taken as a juridical form is a powerful tool to rethink both the subjects and their claims beyond the horizon of modern politics. My aim is to show a way of politicizing legal procedures so that they can “produce” a subject capable to confront global challenges. In a class action the subject of the action does not pre-exist to the action itself. It is rather the collective interest that produces the subject of the action, which ontologically exists only at the time of the claim, and disappears, or it is transformed, at the end of the action. The transformational effect that occurs within the area ranging from a total absence of subjectivity to the creation of a collective subject equipped of strong though absolutely contingent predicates, makes the class action a real technique of legal subjectivation. The becoming-subject produced by the action does not reside in pre-existing subjective qualities, but it helps to determine them while it unfolds: needs and interests are articulated in a recognizable subjective formation only if they gain the legal threshold of collective claiming. This ontological point of view permits to show the degree of adhesion which class action performs compared to the quality of contemporary forms of life.

Law as Subjects' Production: A Foucauldian Argument for Class Action

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