Publication: Mafiacraft, New Materialist Legal History, and Modern Unknowing
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Date
2024
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Abstract
This essay examines the contributions of Deborah Puccio-Den’s Mafiacraft as a legal history, and highlights the innovations it offers to legal studies, particularly the application of New Materialism to legal analysis. I discuss Puccio-Den’s rejection of a teleological understanding of the emergence of the legal theory of mafia; her New-Materialist account of the process of naming the mafia; the role of performance and visuality as materialist elements in the mafia’s legal history; the materiality of the legal interpretation that established the mafia; and the materiality of legal normativity, which shares much with the mafia itself. I conclude by reflecting on the phenomenon of unknowing in late modernity, that is, the active rejection of knowledge, on which Puccio-Den’s study sheds light.
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Keywords
Legal history, New Materialism, law and materiality, modernity, legal naming, Naming Blaming Claiming, legal interpretation, normativity
Citation
Anat Rosenberg, "Mafiacraft, New Materialist Legal History, and Modern Unknowing" in: "Etica & Politica / Ethics & Politics (2024) XXVI/3", EUT Edizioni Università di Trieste, Trieste, 2024, pp. 267-276