Volume 7, Issue 2

In the course of the nineteenth century, the new scientific approach to history turned the past into a passive object of knowledge. This approach betrayed a strategy of domination, as it endowed certain interpretations of history with an aura of objectivity, while delegitimizing others as myth. On the contrary, Nietzsche asserted the formative powers of the present, and he argued that the historian had to actively re-create the past and turn it into a meaningful historical narrative. In his view, the meaning of the past depended on the will to transform the present itself. Since the beginning of the twentieth century, other theorists and writers, such as Croce, Péguy, and later Borges, attempted to reconceptualise the relation between the past and the present. Similarly to Nietzsche, they claimed that historians actively re-create and modify the past. This claim was also shared by Benjamin and Foucault, who emphasized the historians' duty to modify the past by seeking to revive subjugated historical knowledges. The aim of this article is to connect the writings of all these authors in a constellation that points to a shared conviction: that history is not objectively given, but constantly re-created and modified in the present.

After 1989, the Polish legal elites have embraced a transformation discourse, presenting modern Polish legal history as a circular journey from Europe to the dystopia of “Communism” and back. As a consequence, links with the state-socialist past have been repressed from the collective consciousness of the legal community and presented as post-Soviet “weeds” in the Polish gardens of justice. However, the repressed weeds return in the form of symptoms – legal survivals, which lawyers tend to ignore or conceal because they subvert the dominant ideological narrative. In this paper, I focus on metanormative survivals of the Socialist Legal Tradition in Poland which can all be brought under the umbrella term of “hyperpositivism.” This concept denotes an extreme version of classical legal positivism, mixed with elements of orthodox Marxism-Leninism, in the form created in the Soviet Union in the 1930s and exported to Central European countries after World War II. Owing to the persistence of legal survivals of Actually Existing Socialism in Polish legal culture, the paper argues for their reappraisal by resorting to a metaphorical reconceptualisation on the basis of selected mappings from the source domain of Lacanian psychoanalysis.

While a genealogical exploration of the dichotomy between the real (legal) and the ideal (justice) may provide us with an understanding of the historical and ideological relationship(s) between the two, a focus on this binary alone acts to conceal the multiplicities inherent in each of these terms. Just as there exist multiple manifestations of legalities/realities, these manifestations correspond to diverse notions of the ideal and justice. These realities and ideals overlap and conflict, and affect each other's creation, transformation or transplantation. A historical glance at Pakistan's current Blasphemy Laws provides us with an insight on how the real/legal emerging from a particular notion of the ideal/justice was mediated and transplanted through colonialism and became the real/legal manifestation of a different kind in a different locality.

The churchyard in Collins's The Woman in White represents an aesthetic metaphor for the Victorian social order and, in its enclosure, it seems to perpetuate its values and cultural tenets. In the course of the plot, however, it gradually transfigures itself into a gothic/fantastic space in which Anne Catherick's voice powerfully resonates and puts the Victorian legal system under discussion, in particular in her identification with madness and in her quality as illegitimate. Collins's sensation fiction thus mirrors the period's political and legal debates and powerfully destabilizes its acknowledged social relations, demonstrating that the role of literature is not only to create culture but to contest it as well.

The ruins that appear in Piranesi's engravings can be seen as the metaphor for a social system which has disappeared but remains visible in its ruins. On these ruins a new system is erected which must take into account past tradition. You never build in a vacuum, even in law, but everything evolves. It is also Burke's idea in Reflections on the Revolution in France , where he criticizes the fact that the French have done away with their past instead of constructing and bringing about reforms from within a well assessed system. The ruins may epitomize the Roman juridical system upon which all subsequent juridical systems have been rooted. The Justinian code has been the basis for all systems, also for the Anglo-Saxon one, even if in the course of time the latter has distanced itself from the Roman system. This symbolic passage from times past to modern times is metaphorized by the Gothic picturesque garden, which plays with a taste for ruins, with the sublime sense of delight, so as to bring about a re-empowerment of a new juridical system.

This article compares two different primal scenes which give rise to human sovereignty: Hobbes's state of nature and Milton's Edenic paradise. The article briefly compares key differences but its main focus is to uncover surprising resonances between Milton and Hobbes. It does so to reveal two under-appreciated aspects of Hobbes's account of sovereignty. The first, drawing on James Martel's reading of Leviathan , is that Hobbes's terrestrial sovereignty is not of itself (and does not lead to) a culmination of human potential, but rather exists within a wider eschatology awaiting the second coming of Christ. The second, drawing on the work of Peter Fitzpatrick, is that Hobbes is ambivalent on the crucial question of whether the founding event is actually transformative (an ambivalence he shares with Milton). The article concludes by departing from Martel's view that Leviathan points towards a non-sovereign politics and argues instead that it contains the seeds of a radical re-conception of sovereignty itself.

Schmitt's definition of sovereignty is also an attempt to read against the grain Western legal and political history. And yet, this highly unorthodox reconstruction not only reveals the boundaries of Western medieval and modern thought, but also hides them again behind new transhistorical principles. I construct Schmitt's ambivalent gesture by turning his short text into a series of quasisymptoms, which hint to his own historical context, as well as to more general features of Western thought. In particular, I propose reading the association of sovereignty with the state of exception as a rationalization of the catastrophe of the First World War, and I suggest an analogy with Freud's post-war invention of the death drive. Though Schmitt rightly emphasizes the contextual determination of past politico-legal conceptualizations, he puts forth a narrative that transcends these very historical determinations. Hence, whilst Schmitt underlines the theological roots of Western juridico-political discourse, he still operates within the decontextualized conceptual space produced by medieval theological speculation, and re-enacted by modern naturalism. From within this claustrophobic theoretical space, even the exception is recaptured as a principle. On the contrary, a genealogical understanding of sovereignty both discloses the latter's metaphysical underpinnings and undermines its foreverness.

This paper aims to construe Gollum's identity according to a new paradigm in light of the most recent studies in bio-politics and bio-law. Reframing Tolkien's narrative economy, at the intersection between metaphysical views and normative visions, it is of particular interest to investigate Smeagol's corporeal metamorphosis associated to its causes and effects. The departure from the old creature and the subsequent transformation into a disgusting and progressively hybridized being is grounded upon an original act of violence, the murderous plan against Deagol, which repeats Cain's homicidal behaviour. The new life after the former sin (both for the ancestor Cain and for his literary heirs, such as Beowulf's Grendel and Tolkien's Gollum) not only corrupts the primary features, but also necessitates or exacts a new identity and a different nomos . Gollum – as his ancestor Cain – is an outcast, banished from his own community, from his natural space and consigned to a Land of wandering. Moving from these arguments, the essay intends to qualify Gollum as a homo sacer , in the specific philosophical meaning given to the archaic figure of Roman Law by Giorgio Agamben. The original intellectual framework, which supports the present analysis inspired by the concrete shape of a literary character, is consequently devoted to investigate the determination of sacredness and the concept of geopolitics; the hermeneutics of the Self and the spatial architecture of ontologies; the geography of identity and the foundation of sovereignty.

Through the methodological perspective of ecolinguistics, this paper criticizes the unecological and anthropocentric features of English in order to reveal the manipulation forces at work within language and create awareness of the relationship between language and the environment. Through examples from United Nations documents, the author underlines how the unecological ideologies entrenched in the structures of English influence cultural and legal approaches to environmental rights, which are always seen from a “human rights” perspective rather than from a “nature rights” perspective.

Lisa Ballantyne's debut novel The Guilty One (2012) “tackles the ambitious, gritty, and emotive subject of child-on-child murder through a consuming psychological lens.” Starting from a cultural analysis that considers post-Bulger England's jurisprudence in relation to children who kill, this paper investigates on how the jury's decision-making process is influenced by factors that intervene in the trial phases. Pre-trial media sensationalism and during-trial child defendant's performance may affect the jury's vision of the case, and may alter the perspective from which the case is looked at. Three main factors will be taken into account: media sensationalism, the defendant's performance at trial, and the possibility of the jury to bypass the letter of the Law in the name of equity, all of which partake in the jury's decision-making process, potentially determining the final verdict.