An investigation of rhetoric: from Zola's social vulnerability to the dehumanization of Kafka

Abstract

For lawyers, relating Law with Literature is important. The combination of these two elements makes it possible to erode juridical dogmas, to desacralize and restore the law to its own measure and to the measure of ethics. What literature actually teaches about the abstractly codified structure of law is the lack of general laws in lived experience. It follows that convictions, as well as acquittals, are inevitably imperfect: we are all in some way guilty, but also, from another perspective, we are all innocent. And if the decrees of absolute guilt prove to be inadequate in the works of Proust, Musil and Hofmannsthal, so does the universe of Kafka and Zola. To this first deconstruction of law is added a second, even more radical one, relative no longer to its limits, but to the very essence of law. The normative system cannot classify in its categories a human reality that escapes the pre-established order, but it also borders on criminal violence, although ambiguously it is located on the opposite pole. In this sense, the intersection between law and literature teaches that individual situations are always placed in that social, cultural, historical, economic kaleidoscope that conditions our acts no less than our will.