The Effluvium of Autopoiesis Paper presented at Critical Legal Conference, 2010, Utrecht Justine Grønbæk Pors Doctoral Student Department of Management, Politics and Philosophy Copenhagen Business School “Being alienated from myself, as painful as that may be, provides me with that exquisite distance within which perverse pleasure begins, as well as the possibility of my imagining and thinking, the impetus of my culture” (Kristeva 1991: 13-14) One could say that the following text is concerned with questions of what simultaneously threatens and drives the autopoiesis of social systems. The paper takes its point of departure in the rather basic assumption of Niklas Luhmann’s concept of autopoiesis; that systems create themselves by continuous markings of differences between system and environment, this paper explores possible side effects of such conditions of becoming. Since differences are not lasting, but rather extremely perishable (see Luhmann 2002:123, Stäheli 1998: 59, Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos 2009: 22), excess may be adding up as a necessary left-over from the systems desire to experience identity. The paper seeks to elaborate our understanding of the role of excess in the becoming of a system by discussing how excess occupies a peculiar position both inside and outside the boundaries of the system and how excess seems to present itself to the system both as a horizon of possibilities and as a threat to autopoiesis. Could it be that exactly by representing an ever-present crisis of identity, excess may continue to nag and inspire the system? Briefly described autopoiesis is a name for self-creational character of systems. The concept stresses that all elements that a system consists of are produced by the system itself 1 (Luhmann 2000: 73). 1 The concept of autopoiesis is for Luhmann a way of moving from an interest in structure and structural formation. Luhmann distinguishes between self-organization and autopoiesis and argues that a shift from an interest in self-organization to autopoiesis will dislocate the theoretical interest away from structural formation