As part of the Studies Constellation, the Study Directoship’s annual fellowship, art historian and theorist Sven Lütticken leads the seminar The (Legal) Person and the Legal Form: Theoretical, Artistic, and Activist Commitments to foster dialogue and deepen the hypotheses and questions driving his research project.

This project, titled Unacting Personhood, Deforming Legal Abstraction, explores the dominance of real abstractions—such as exchange value and legal form—over our processes of subjectivation, and asks how artistic practices can open up alternative ways of representing or performing the subject and their legal condition in the contemporary world.

The seminar consists of eight sessions, divided into three chapters throughout the academic year. While conceived as non-public spaces for discussion and collective work, these sessions complement, nourish, and amplify the public program of the Studies Constellation.

In this second chapter of the seminar, the inquiry into the aesthetics and politics of legal form continues with three sessions that pick up the discussions held in Chapter I but propose new lines of flight. The first session focuses on international law via the writings of the British author China Miéville, which allows us to reconsider the notion of the legal form –following Evgeny Pashukanis— and, through it, a variety of (people’s) tribunals. While the crucial concept of the legal person –as the right-holder central to the form of law— was debated in Chapter I, the second session focuses on attempts to extend personhood not (just) to corporations, but rather to nonhuman animals or ecosystems. Finally, the third session poses the question: how can groups and networks use officially recognized organizational forms (such as the foundation or the cooperative) and/or use a collective persona (without necessarily a legal “infrastructure” to match) to act and represent themselves?

Agenda

Thursday, January 8, 4:00 - 7:00 PM (CET)
International Law
China Miéville

Monday, January 12, 4:00 - 7:00 PM (CET)
Nonhuman personhood
Paulo Tavares and Ursula Biemann

Thursday, January 15, 4:00 - 7:00 PM (CET)
Organizations and their masks: person and persona
Sven Lütticken

Admission

Free entry, until full capacity is reached, with prior registration via an online form until 15 December 2025. The following must be attached: a motivation letter (maximum 3,000 characters) and a previously completed text or project that dialogues with the proposals to be addressed in one of the seminar sessions (maximum 15,000 characters). Those selected will be notified by 24 December 2025.