Legal Oracularism and Theological Prophetism. Fleshly Silences Across Memories and Traditions
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Cristina Costantini
Cristina Costantini is Associate Professor of Private Comparative Law at the University of Perugia. She is member of AIDC (Associazione Italiana di Diritto Comparato), AIDEL (Associazione Italiana di Diritto e Letteratura), Selden Society (Faculty of Law, Queen and Westfield College, London), ESSE (The European Society for the Study of English) and AIA (Associazione Italiana di Anglistica). Her main fields of research are the history of English legal system; the construction of legal traditions; the intellectual assessment of the liminal thresholds within Humanities (Law and Literature; Law and Philosophy; Law and Religion). Among her publications: “Representing Law. Narrative Practices, Poetic Devices, Visual Signs and the Aesthetics of the Common Law Mind,” in
Liminal Discourses , eds. Daniela Carpi and Jeanne Gaakeer (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2013): 27–36; “The Keepers of Traditions. The English Common Lawyers and the Presence of Law,”Comparative Law Review (2010): 1–12;La Legge e il Tempio (Roma: Carocci, 2007).
Abstract
This essay aims at providing a critical glance on the legal “fault lines” between voice and silence; utterance and dumbness; disclosure and mystery; discernability and ambiguity. At a theoretical level, the arguments suggested intend to innovate the conventional discourse on legal traditions, focusing on their proper and complex morphosyntax. Specifically, the main purpose is to call forth the haunted ventriloquism which animates and informs legal traditions in order to disfigure the ideological image portrayed for a legitimating project. On this ground what is proposed is an original understanding of the politics of memories, conceived as the inner force, which codifies heterogeneous canons of commemoration. The poles of usual contrapositions (memory/forgetting; remembrance/silencing) are questioned and scrutinized; the multiple facets of the voices of memory and the silence of oblivion are taxonomically typified. The proposed paradigm is consequently applied to the particularities of the English Legal Tradition, emphasizing how the culture of legal revelling dramatized the ambiguities concealed in the speakable word of Law: on the one hand, the internal articulation of these sumptuous festivities, which structurally reflected the osmotic threshold between speech and faintness, utterance and dumbness; on the other, it has been noted that Revels made patent the meaningful silence implied in the proper other face of the conventional appearance of Law, that is in its suspension or in its exception. Conclusive remarks are devoted to analyse the nexus among word, interpretation, and violence in Robert Cover’s thought. In this perspective the essay debates on the silent sacrifice behind the supposed creative act of judicial interpretation and intellectually claims for a counter-resistant act of unveiling heterodoxy.
About the author
Cristina Costantini is Associate Professor of Private Comparative Law at the University of Perugia. She is member of AIDC (Associazione Italiana di Diritto Comparato), AIDEL (Associazione Italiana di Diritto e Letteratura), Selden Society (Faculty of Law, Queen and Westfield College, London), ESSE (The European Society for the Study of English) and AIA (Associazione Italiana di Anglistica). Her main fields of research are the history of English legal system; the construction of legal traditions; the intellectual assessment of the liminal thresholds within Humanities (Law and Literature; Law and Philosophy; Law and Religion). Among her publications: “Representing Law. Narrative Practices, Poetic Devices, Visual Signs and the Aesthetics of the Common Law Mind,” in Liminal Discourses, eds. Daniela Carpi and Jeanne Gaakeer (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2013): 27–36; “The Keepers of Traditions. The English Common Lawyers and the Presence of Law,” Comparative Law Review (2010): 1–12; La Legge e il Tempio (Roma: Carocci, 2007).
©2015 by De Gruyter
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Focus
- Focus: Voices of Power/Power of Voices
- Voices of Spectators and Audience Power
- “There Were No Longer Any Laws”: Voices of Authority, Complicity, and Resistance in Totalitarian Dystopias and Holocaust Imaginings
- Caesar’s Body in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar: Sacralization and De-sacralization of Power
- Legal Oracularism and Theological Prophetism. Fleshly Silences Across Memories and Traditions
- “What Is Royalty Without a Voice?” The Performance of Power in The King’s Speech
- Is There Voice Without Law? On The Road
- Voice, Incarnation and the United States Supreme Court
- Disputes and the Differend: Literary Strategies to Say the Unspeakable
- The Working Class Goes to the Movies: Labour Law and Thatcherism in British Films
- War in Words: The Tricycle Theatre’s Re-voicing of the Bloody Sunday Inquiry
- Research
- Legal Systemology and the Geopolitics of Roman Law: A Response to Stuart Elden’s Critique of Carl Schmitt’s Spatial Ontology
- Speech and Graphomena: The Power of Apuleius’ Words in Court and in Translation
- Book Review
- Mireille Hildebrandt and Jeanne Gaakeer: Human Law and Computer Law: Comparative Perspectives
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Focus
- Focus: Voices of Power/Power of Voices
- Voices of Spectators and Audience Power
- “There Were No Longer Any Laws”: Voices of Authority, Complicity, and Resistance in Totalitarian Dystopias and Holocaust Imaginings
- Caesar’s Body in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar: Sacralization and De-sacralization of Power
- Legal Oracularism and Theological Prophetism. Fleshly Silences Across Memories and Traditions
- “What Is Royalty Without a Voice?” The Performance of Power in The King’s Speech
- Is There Voice Without Law? On The Road
- Voice, Incarnation and the United States Supreme Court
- Disputes and the Differend: Literary Strategies to Say the Unspeakable
- The Working Class Goes to the Movies: Labour Law and Thatcherism in British Films
- War in Words: The Tricycle Theatre’s Re-voicing of the Bloody Sunday Inquiry
- Research
- Legal Systemology and the Geopolitics of Roman Law: A Response to Stuart Elden’s Critique of Carl Schmitt’s Spatial Ontology
- Speech and Graphomena: The Power of Apuleius’ Words in Court and in Translation
- Book Review
- Mireille Hildebrandt and Jeanne Gaakeer: Human Law and Computer Law: Comparative Perspectives
