Introduction

In the previous chapter I argue that to undo colonial misusing and Euro-modern untranslatability of human/bodies, these bodies should be re-understood, at the very least, as ontologically relational. This relationality applies not just to all other human beings, but also to all non-human life and non-life in and of the earth. However, colonial mapping and its cartographies, require, as Said notes, the redefinition and (dis)possession of land and thus depart from Wilde’s notions of Utopia. Thus, in this chapter I take Chapter 3’s argument further by focusing on how the society (space, place, and all they contain) around law’s human has been and is being constituted by the influences of colonial logics and praxes. This examination takes reference from the use of race as an abstractive technology in the making of property from humanity. Therefore, I lean further into an analysis of how racial capitalism, in particular, and Euro-modern law in general are both entangled in the legal ontologies of, not just human body negation, but also contingent appropriation/redefinition of land and space. This process ties the constitution of law’s human to the creation of a universalised Euro-modern legal ontology of land as a means of capital accumulation as well as human veneration reliant on this. My concern here is to explain how that process emerges, with specific emphasis on the legal epistemological interactions between human/beings, land, property, and space. I observe quite deliberately here, that one of the most significant outcomes of the legitimate property-fication of labour, land, and nature through Euro-modern legal epistemologies, is the complicity of legal technologies in continuing the colonial conditions of life that extend beyond the escalating disappearance of testamentary life into the looming endangerment of the planet.