We should think of our age as a time for a wager and bet on the possibility of a civilisatory alternative. To maximise our chances, an alternative thinking of alternatives is required: the epistemologies of the South. In this chapter, I discuss what such an epistemological move entails for a socio-legal theory of law presenting a blueprint for a new possible way of theorising law in society from the perspective of the epistemologies of the South. Under modern domination, two contradictory legal worlds were born: metropolitan law and colonial law. The most remarkable characteristic of Western-centric domination is that this contradiction, however radical, was (and is) invisible. The specific operations of this dualistic liberal legal order made these two systems incommensurable legal realities and, as such, incapable of being contradictory. After historical colonialism ended, abyssal and non-abyssal forms of social exclusion became different sociabilities, structured by different types and styles of social relations and social interaction. The legal inexistence of abyssal exclusion became both the cause and the effect of the massive impunity afforded to exclusionary behaviour which targeted ontologically degraded populations and robbed them of their basic human dignity. The epistemologies of the South conceive of modern science, including legal science, anthropology, and the sociology of law, as important but incomplete bodies of knowledge whose relevance depends on their contribution to denouncing and eliminating the abyssal lines of exclusion and legal non-being. This contribution in turn depends on linking scientific knowledge with other non-scientific legal and non-legal knowledges, which will often involve intercultural translation. Ecologies of legal knowledges will emerge from this linking and, with them, post-abyssal legal thinking.

Modern law is abyssal law, meaning that there is a law of the oppressors and a law of the oppressed. The abyssal line both produces (and is a product of) the incommensurability between the two social orders and the invisibility of this duality. From the point of view of the epistemologies of the South, modern law operates as a juridical barbarism that remains invisible due to the false universality of the legal order of metropolitan sociability (regulation/emancipation). Contemporary theories of justice are as abyssal as the law they found. They rely on fictions that take the absence of the abyssal line to be reality. Their universality is as false as the universality of metropolitan sociability. Post-abyssal law is possible, on condition that the regulation/emancipation and appropriation/violence duality is overcome and, with it, the coexistence of the law of the oppressors and the law of the oppressed. In sum, post-abyssal law is possible once the abyssal line has been eliminated. In keeping with the preceding analysis, this will only be possible if capitalism, colonialism, and patriarchy vanish as modes of domination and are not replaced by other, milder or harsher, modes of domination. This conception refers to a theoretical possibility, but is it a real-life possibility? Can we imagine such a society or the social struggles that would accomplish it? What would this society look like?