What is the relation between prohibition and the permissible opposite? Arbitrariness of the point of demarcation aside, it is that they co-exist in the same breath, in the same body, in the same language, on the same land, on the same conceptual plane of thought. In law, the prohibition is the defining feature characterising the boundary between legality and illegality. In language, the prohibition characterises the limit between sense and nonsense, the grammatically correct and the incorrect. And yet, it continues to be presupposed that nonsense, the incorrect and illegality are radically opposed to that which is thought to separate them. The idea that a legality might one day take the form of an illegality, and vice versa, only figures in the consciousness of those seeking legal reform, campaigning for an inclusion of the illegality in question into the confines of legality. 

Pragmatically speaking, one would expect nothing less from a politics embedded in a principally juridical mode of relating to the world, where, for instance, a key mode of overcoming techno-capital’s insatiable thirst for the annihilation of all forms of the living appears to be the extension of juridical personhood. One need only open our eyes to the suffering of unaccountable violation of rights the world over to realise the insufficiency of this proposition. 

We are stuck in our vision of the world as marked by difference in-between, in-between identities, representations, predicates, taxonomical references, linguistic utterances, the sonority of voices, delirium and reason. Categorising the minutiae of difference that cut across being in relation to an exteriority paradoxically results in the production of the same without the generic. Generic being is singular, composed of kaleidoscopic cartography of all manner of sense and nonsense, illusions and realities, contradictory feelings and confused identities. It is certain that the functionality of a representation for the pragmatic operation of life is essential, the lack of correct documentation carries with it the sentence of impoverishment and banishment. Where the document has come to replace and stand in for the living being a critical distance from one’s identification with such representations, in law, in language, in administration, becomes more essential. A distance capable of ascertaining the boundary between instrumental functionality and the incompleteness, fragility, and uncertain facets of each one of us. A document for everyone, a juridical right for all, that, finally, represents no one.