https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9919-5992
Abstract
In this Introduction, we present some of the themes currently at the core of law and literature and law and humanities scholarship in Italy. In doing so, we aim at relaunching a peculiar style in Italian law and literature scholarship, by giving value, peculiarly, to its rhetorical and humanistic roots, and especially to what can be traced back to the tradition of Italian thought, across various generations of scholars under the common purpose of depicting forms and modes of the relationship between the dishomogeneous codes of individuality and universality, across diverse methodologies, namely the literary and narrative forms, aesthetics and myth, and the intimate and collective dimensions at the core of psychoanalysis.
Since the beginning of the XXI century, transdisciplinary and critical works on law have been increasing in continental Europe, translating both into new courses, networks and publications. Italy was no exception to such a trend. Drawing on the tradition that was already established in the English-speaking academic world, a network of legal scholars started the construction of the Italian Society for Law and Literature (https://www.lawandliterature.org), which today counts hundreds of members in Italy and abroad. Most of them encountered law and humanities, law and literature and critical legal studies through their research experience in legal theory and philosophy. Given their disciplinary provenance and the relevance of legal subdisciplines in Italian academia, the result is that, if today we were to describe an Italian “school” or tradition in critical approaches to law, we would note that it is often characterized by a focus on basic questions of legal theory, i.e. interpretation, adjudication, and alike.
The present issue aims at reproducing a (non exhaustive) snapshot of the themes, grammars and questions currently at stake in the transdisciplinary realms of law and literature and law and humanities in Italy. It extends towards such task by: (a) synthetizing and framing a net of interconnected associations of questions, represented by and in the semantic fields of law, literature, psychoanalysis and aesthetics; (b) relaunching a peculiar style in Italian law and literature scholarship, by giving value, peculiarly, to its rhetorical and humanistic roots, and especially of what can be traced back to the tradition of Italian thought, (c) indicating how philosophy, in the Italian tradition, is incorporated in arts such as painting, architecture, music and theater, which remain on an invisible background characterizing in an aesthetic sense social, political, and legal life and thought. In this attempt, the issue bridges various generations of scholars under the common purpose of depicting forms and modes of the relationship between the dishomogeneous codes of individuality and universality, across diverse methodologies, namely the literary and narrative forms, aesthetics and myth, and the intimate and collective dimensions at the core of psychoanalysis. Interconnected and associated with each other like dominoes, such forms of investigation question, both differently and analogously, the grounding of the law as a normative language, thus interpellating typically theoretical concerns of the legal scholar, i.e. as abovementioned interpretation, adjudication, and alike.
The papers are presented in a reticular order in which all knots are equally relevant and refer to more than one point of the net, coherently with the typically disordered and yet coherent weave of the Italian humanistic tradition, in which the visual and the linguistic levels of the discourse were equally relevant in producing homogeneity within a structurally dishomogeneous system of thought. Against such background, the issue can be read as a photogram of a field in expansion, where in this expansion the established modes of transdisciplinary scholarship on law proper of the Common law (and of the English speaking world more broadly) intersect with the uncharacteristic and yet pregnant humanist style, intellectually open to all emerging codes which intentionally remain not rigorous.
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Notes on contributors
Angela Condello
Angela Condello is Assistant Professor of Legal Philosophy at the University of Messina and Adjunct Professor at the University of Turin. Her research focuses on legal theory and method, law and humanities, law and gender.
Paolo Heritier
Paolo Heritier is full professor of philosophy of law at the University of Eastern Piedmont and co-director of the journal Theory and critics of social regulation. His publications range from epistemology to legal aesthetics, legal disability studies, humanist rhetorical methodology and the communicative use of new technologies.