Law’s Dark Clarity: Hugo and the ‘Misery’ of Legal Categorizations
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Melisa Liana Vazquez
Melisa Liana Vazquez completed her doctorate in Theory of Legal Systems at the University of Rome, La Sapienza. With a degree in Comparative Literature from Brown University, and a background in several languages and cultures, she is interested in intercultural legal translation as a lens through which to assess and explore creative interdisciplinary solutions to contemporary global conflicts. Her most recent publications include, “How Communication Technologies Remold the Religion/Human Rights Divide Online Synergies for a Global Democratic Space”(
Calumet Intercultural Law and Humanities Review ), 2021), “Digital Personhood, Time, Religion: The Right to Be Forgotten and the Legal Implications of the Soul/Body Debate”(Calumet Intercultural Law and Humanities Review , 2020), “End of Secular City Limits On Law’s Religious Neutrality in the City” (International Journal for the Semiotics of Law , 2020), “Clashing Overpopulation(s): The Religious, the Secular and the Unnatural ‘Conception’ of Human Multitudes with Rights”(Calumet Intercultural Law and Humanities Review , 2019) and her monograph,Secularisms, Religions and Law: a legal-cultural inquiry (2019).
Abstract
Laws punish delinquents after having made them such, and yet this is not inevitable. At work in this phenomenon is a melding of ‘ought’ and ‘is’ in which the law renders criminal behavior perpetually determinative by recognizing only a duty to abide by statutes while simultaneously losing site of the magma of meanings and behaviors that constitute human lives. Using the core of Hugo’s epic Les Misérables as a kind of mirroring illustration, this paper will explore how categorical rigidity and blindness to the changing contours of identity and subjectivity constitute one dark side of the law. Hugo’s work demonstrates the importance of literature as a parallel narrative that can illuminate law’s limitations, specifically, its tendency to conceal through certainty, ignoring the actual possibilities of becoming for the subjects it is charged to rule and protect. I will argue that in Les Misérables we can see an inversion in the order of priority between narrative commitment and social criticism, specifically a meta-legal criticism that has specific insights regarding how law obfuscates the ought/is divide and, in so doing, loses legitimacy and collapses in on itself. Issues of human dignity, social responsibility and the very purpose and legitimacy of law can be constructively addressed through parallel analysis of Hugo’s world of ‘the wretched’ and those the law renders wretched even today.
About the author
Melisa Liana Vazquez completed her doctorate in Theory of Legal Systems at the University of Rome, La Sapienza. With a degree in Comparative Literature from Brown University, and a background in several languages and cultures, she is interested in intercultural legal translation as a lens through which to assess and explore creative interdisciplinary solutions to contemporary global conflicts. Her most recent publications include, “How Communication Technologies Remold the Religion/Human Rights Divide Online Synergies for a Global Democratic Space”(Calumet Intercultural Law and Humanities Review), 2021), “Digital Personhood, Time, Religion: The Right to Be Forgotten and the Legal Implications of the Soul/Body Debate”(Calumet Intercultural Law and Humanities Review, 2020), “End of Secular City Limits On Law’s Religious Neutrality in the City” (International Journal for the Semiotics of Law, 2020), “Clashing Overpopulation(s): The Religious, the Secular and the Unnatural ‘Conception’ of Human Multitudes with Rights”(Calumet Intercultural Law and Humanities Review, 2019) and her monograph, Secularisms, Religions and Law: a legal-cultural inquiry (2019).
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Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Secularization as a Paradigm of ‘Cross-Thought’
- Political Theology from Satan to Legitimacy
- Desacralized Law: Shakespeare and the Tragedy of Sovereignty
- Law, Politics, and Liberal Hope: A Literary and Anthropological Analysis of Secular Society
- An Uncertain Secularisation: Reproductive Rights in Contemporary Italy
- Research
- Spatial Vulnerability at the Spectral Threshold
- Digging Holes and Building Walls: Spatial Imaginations of the Law in Stories by Franz Kafka and Rachel Shihor
- Broken Justice: Justice and Relativism in the Work of Friedrich Dürrenmatt
- Law’s Dark Clarity: Hugo and the ‘Misery’ of Legal Categorizations
- Book Reviews
- Carlo Pelloso: Democracies and Republics Between Past and Future: From the Athenian Agora to e-Democracy, from the Roman Republic to Negative Power
- Björn Quiring: Trials of Nature: The Infinite Law Court of Milton’s Paradise Lost
- Heather James, Ovid and the Liberty of Speech in Shakespeare’s England
Artikel in diesem Heft
- Frontmatter
- Secularization as a Paradigm of ‘Cross-Thought’
- Political Theology from Satan to Legitimacy
- Desacralized Law: Shakespeare and the Tragedy of Sovereignty
- Law, Politics, and Liberal Hope: A Literary and Anthropological Analysis of Secular Society
- An Uncertain Secularisation: Reproductive Rights in Contemporary Italy
- Research
- Spatial Vulnerability at the Spectral Threshold
- Digging Holes and Building Walls: Spatial Imaginations of the Law in Stories by Franz Kafka and Rachel Shihor
- Broken Justice: Justice and Relativism in the Work of Friedrich Dürrenmatt
- Law’s Dark Clarity: Hugo and the ‘Misery’ of Legal Categorizations
- Book Reviews
- Carlo Pelloso: Democracies and Republics Between Past and Future: From the Athenian Agora to e-Democracy, from the Roman Republic to Negative Power
- Björn Quiring: Trials of Nature: The Infinite Law Court of Milton’s Paradise Lost
- Heather James, Ovid and the Liberty of Speech in Shakespeare’s England
