Volume 15, Issue 2 - Focus: Great Powers with No Responsibility?

Sir Edward Coke, Jacobean Lord Chief Justice, is commonly regarded as being one of the great jurists in English legal history. In considerable part, for reason of his vigorous defence of the courts of common law against the seeming intrusions of royal prerogative, his running dispute with King James I is renowned, not least as a precursor to the civil wars which would later engulf James’s son, King Charles I. The purpose of this essay is revisit Coke and, more closely still, some of his most famous judgments, in order to trace the origins of the principle of ‘legality’. It will close in whimsical tones, by wondering what Coke might have thought of ‘legal’ regime put in place in the UK during the coronavirus pandemic.

One of the most significant connections between power and responsibility occurs in relation to the past. The post-revolutionary political powers of the new nations in the nineteenth century reinterpreted or, less politely formulated, invented their past to fit the process of nation building and only then take responsibility for future development of the nations. And they were not alone: pre-nineteenth century periods and the 20th and 21st centuries abound with examples. In our personal lives, self-empowerment often depends on the capacity to take responsibility for one’s past, including all its happy and traumatic moments. In a court room the forensic evidence of past events alone gives the judges the power to decide the fate of the defendant. In neither of the cases power and responsibility can work together without activating individual and collective memory and without finding a language to express responsibility as a manifestation of political, formal and personal power in a process of political legitimization, legal affirmation of justice and personal identity formation. With literary examples from South Africa this article discusses power and responsibility in their relation to a troubled political, legal and personal past.

My work here focuses on translation and migration, with specific reference to the field of visual arts, exploiting the kind of approach suggested by Loredana Polezzi – and mostly applied to linguistic translation – in her “Translation and Migration”. My contention is that, though apparently mimetic and universally understandable, images are culture-bound and they need being translated when crossing a border. The process of translation becomes more and more complex when the represented object/events/person is framed within a much-debated and politically overloaded issue. Focusing on a definite time (today) and a specific space (the Mediterranean Sea), I select some artistic projects by both Western and non-Western artists, pursuing a twofold objective. I want to show how the selected works raise the issue of responsibility and I want to reflect on the “language” they use to “translate” an untranslatable experience into an understandable message.

The essay considers Hermann Melville’s character Bartleby as an example of irresponsible power, since, in the story, the scrivener changes deeply his lawyer employer’s way of thinking and living, without giving any single answer to the many questions which the narrator keeps asking him about his apparently absurd behavior. The article offers some reflections about the difficulties that legal rules, as well as other set of rules (moral, ethics) meet when they are called to face irresponsible powers, and about the need to keep asking questions, though knowing that they will meet no final answers (thus accepting the irrationality of life, and coping with it).

The paper identifies a continuity between the legal issue of the letter and spirit (or ratio) of the law and the invention of perspective as a symbolic form. The idea of perspective in Piero della Francesca’s Annunciation and the concept of “Italian perspective” in Arasse’s work are based on the aesthetic normativity of the painting in relation to the normative form of the norm, moving from the analysis of the invisible/visible nexus in legal theory. The notion of thirdness thus mediates between law as text and normativity as image, leading to the aesthetic enactment that conceives Italian playhouse as a form of theater, cinema, trial and university, as a symbolic form of knowledge and culture in the West. The simultaneously normative and aesthetic power of the gaze thus emerges as the removed from legal theory, until the problem of self-driving vehicles brings the issue back to the center of contemporary debate. The transition from frontal gaze to 360° vision suggests the theme of immersion as a new symbolic for the man–robot society.

The essay aims to illustrate the ways in which Italian literature deals with transitions (constitutional or political). After having clarified the methodological approach, the author identifies and describes in the national literature some historical phases, analysing the trends emerging from the reading of famous novels. In conclusion, some observations are drawn, in which it is highlighted that in the national literature there is a profound awareness of the importance of informal institutional transformations and of the central role of social, moral and economic factors.

Comics are an extremely popular, though sometimes underestimated, medium. Yet they are able to convey the image of reality in a potentially infinite variety of genres and styles. Their explicitly fictional approach sends simple and direct messages to the reader, allowing him or her to move into a dimension where original rules, free of superstructures and compromises, apply. In fact, the cultural, political and social interaction between object and subject, which comics inevitably represent, eventually involves the theme of the rule and its relationship with society. The encounter between the comic and the legal often takes place in an almost inevitable and unplanned way and determines a synergy capable of producing original results not only from a narrative point of view. The inherently visual embodiment of the rule ends up enhancing the plot, and the rule’s many expressive potentialities. For this reason, the unusual association between comics and law has also earned the growing and curious attention of the world of the legal profession and may acquire, in the not-too-distant future, a further and absolutely unpredictable possibility of use as an atypical learning tool.

In a historical period characterised by political and social occurrences of immigration crises, Shakespeare’s and early modern dramatic attention to aliens and foreigners invite us to re-read the anguish of Shakespeare’s alien and to investigate the ways in which, in the specific case of Othello , the Moor’s experience prefigures subsequent migrations and the contemporary immigrants’ struggle for integration. Caryl Phillips’ creative re-appropriation of Shakespeare’s Othello in The Nature of Blood (1998) gives voice to the psychological anguish of a migrant in the guise of an unnamed Othello-like black general newly arrived in Venice. In a never-ending dialogue between present and past, Phillips articulates a complex reflection on the immigrants’ desire to be granted recognition as a legitimised individual with a social identity, while problematising the idea of home and the sense of belonging, here understood as the subjective feeling of identification with a city/nation. With such a complex redefinition in mind, my reading conceptualises Othello (alias the migrant) as an ethnopsychiatric “symptom”, in a psychopathology of migration and exile which exposes the meanings and practices of belonging produced and supported by host societies.

Bram Stoker’s Dracula presents an investigation of identity from multiple perspectives: the political stance of the Victorian fin de siècle intersects with questions of identity and their liminal articulation through narrative control. The count becomes a “thick” synecdoche for the East and his arrival to England symbolises a reverse political and cultural colonisation that leads to a new image of the individual, revealing the innermost recesses of Western culture.