Illegalisms and law of the commodity society, from Foucault to Marx.

Summary The ownership of immaterial goods, that is to say the right of the authors and their producers to exclude the owners of these goods from the property of the State, is a matter of great importance to the authors. Starting from a critical reading of Foucault, this article returns to one of Marx's first texts, devoted to the theft of dead wood, to analyze the links between the penal regime of the punishment of wood theft and the civil regime of the transformation of property, between the production of illegalisms and the metamorphoses of civil society. He draws from it a synthetic vision of the patrimony considered as an "artificial legal body", before bringing a seizing lighting on the mass incarceration which characterizes our time, where he suggests to see a means of controlling pauperized populations, characterized by an "empty patrimony".