Art as an Interface of Law and Justice

This book looks at the way in which the 'call for justice' is portrayed through art and presents a wide range of texts from film to theatre to essays and novels to interrogate the law.

'Calls for justice' may have their positive connotations, but throughout history most have caused annoyance. Art is very well suited to deal with such annoyance, or to provoke it. This study shows how art operates as an interface, here, between two spheres: the larger realm of justice and the more specific system of law. This interface has a double potential. It can make law and justice affirm or productively disturb one another.

Approaching issues of injustice that are felt globally, eight chapters focus on original works of art not dealt with before, including Milo Rau's The Congo Tribunal, Elfriede Jelinek's Ulrike Maria Stuart, Valeria Luiselli's Tell Me How It Ends and Nicolas Winding Refn's Only God Forgives. They demonstrate how through art's interface, impasses are addressed, new laws are made imaginable, the span of systems of laws is explored, and the differences in what people consider to be just are brought to light.

The book considers the improvement of law and justice to be a global struggle and, whilst the issues dealt with are culture-specific, it argues that the logics introduced are applicable everywhere.

1. Art as the Interface of Law and Justice: From Annoyance to an Ethics of Affirmation
I. Law – Justice and Art as Interface
II. System, Realm and Two Kinds of Logic: Affirmation and Disturbance
III. 'Thirds': Forces of Disruption and Impasse
IV. In Defence of Law, as a Defence of Justice
V. Art, Annoyance and an Ethics of Affirmation
2. Logic of Fear vs Logic of Desire: Milo Rau's The Congo Tribunal and the Care for Law
I. Absent Rule of Law and the Potential in Art's Interface
II. Law's Genesis, Fear of Law and the Nature of Courts
III. Apathy: The Threat to Law and Justice
IV. Theatre and Drama: Dunamis and the Judicial Mise-en-scene
V. The Care for Law: Jurisannihilatio and Juriscaritas
3. Logic of Tragedy vs Logic of Comedy: Elfriede Jelinek's Ulrike Maria Stuart and Princess-dramas: Death and the Maiden
I. Open or Closed: Tragedy, Comedy, Impasse
II. Culture-text and the Cohabitation of Symbolic Order and Law
III. Mary Stuart and Ulrike Meinhof: Law's Domesticity and Mystery
IV. The Weight of Law's Architectonic: Sovereignty
4. Logic of the Official vs Logic of the Officious: The Force in Form and Forum in Valeria Luiselli's Tell Me How It Ends and Lost Children Archive
I. Officious: Meddlesome, Informal, Obliging, Passionate
II. Data Subjects: Records, Documents and Form
III. Öffentlichkeit, Publicity and Forum
IV. The Destructive Fictitious and the Test of Fiction: Forensic Architecture
5. Logic of Personhood vs Logic of Self: Threat of Packs in Vondel's 'Water-wolf' and the Shift of Commons into Property
I. Personhood, Self, Pack and the Legal Need for Dissection
II. The Art of Mapping: From Centralisation to Ecological Territorialisation
III. Waters as Wolf Packs: Tropes of Infuriation
IV. The Veil of Irresponsibility, New Persons, New Selves
6. Logic of Completion vs Logic of Antinomy: Corruption and Well-being from Marek Hlasko, to Chibundu Onuzo, to the American Suburban Grass Turf and Fritz Haeg
I. Corruption, Law's Completion and Antinomy
II. 'It's Not Me': A Culture of Corruption
III. Functional Corruption and the Proper
IV. Corruption in an Ecological Context: Needs for an Antinomian Response
7. Logic of Violence vs Logic of Empathy: Justice and Law in Chiasmus through George Eliot's Daniel Deronda
I. The Political in Justice: Interests and Just Law
II. Two Modes of Wilfulness and the Chiasmus of Law and Justice
III. Obliviousness and the Grey Area between Law and Justice
IV. Divisive Empathy, Cohesive Violence
8. Logic of Reason vs Logic of Dream: Epistemic Authority, Habeas Corpus, Hallucination – Nicholas Refn's
Only God Forgives
I. Reason, Dream and Disruptive Hallucination
II. Epistemic Authority and Deviant Investigators in Times of Multiple Insurgencies
III. Habeas Corpus: Historical Struggles for a Common Ground
IV. Familiar Orders and Current Unchecked Powers