CORE SEMINAR IN LEGAL THEORY: Romain GRAZIANI, "The Laws and the Numbers" (VUB: 4 C.05, 20 OCT 2025, 12:00-13:30) [HYBRID]

 

(image source: ENS Lyon)

Abstract:

Long associated with Confucian ideology advocating personal example and government by virtue, Chinese political culture was in fact a pioneer in developing impersonal and automatic methods for establishing order in the cosmos, the empire, and everyday life. This fact, largely overlooked until now, yet constantly confirmed by recent archaeological discoveries, invites us to sketch a new general history of the Chinese state. It is important to understand, however, that what we in European societies understand by “laws” and “numbers” only partially corresponds to the instruments developed in China, since numbers there are not reduced to quantities, and laws are uncorrelated with any idea of law. Drawing on traditional and previously unpublished sources relating to mathematics, divination, spiritual exercises, criminal codes, Taoist poetic fiction, and the arts of war, Romain Graziani will discuss the theoretical forms and concrete developments of this Chinese logos. Starting from the “legalistic experience,” he will trace the process of depersonalization of authority that leads to the experience of the total state, and show how this paradigm based on laws and numerical data has permanently reshaped the experience of time, mobility in space, and the vision of sovereign authority in Chinese society. how it has contributed to redefining the concept of work and the relationship of the individual to himself; and finally, how it has made it possible to formulate, at a very early stage, a project for a society structured by information, surveillance, and security technologies. At the extreme end of this trajectory linking the Bronze Age to the digital era, the millennia-old endeavor to “quantify” the world now culminates in the restoration of the ancient cult of the One.

On the author:

Romain Graziani is a sinologist and philosopher. He teaches at the École Normale Supérieure de Lyon (where he is the director of the Chinese studies institute) and the University of Geneva. He is a member of the Institut universitaire de France. He is the author of numerous acclaimed books, including, in English: Fiction and Philosophy: An Introduction to Early Chinese Taoist Thought (Bloomsbury, 2021). 

 Contact Laurent dot Desutter at vub dot be.