Legal Oracularism and Theological Prophetism. Fleshly Silences Across Memories and Traditions

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.