Corpus Juris, Habeas corpus, and the 'corporeal turn' in the humanities

摘要

The article identifies a “corporeal turn” in the humanities and locates its implications for the\udpolitics of reading within the postmodern crisis in the legitimacy of traditional humanities\udapproaches to culture. The powerful language of the “corpus” is also found during the same\udperiod in the staging of a confrontation over liberty between British and European legal systems.\udUsing this as a political framework, the article traces the metaphysical resonance of the “corpus”\udto its origins in a theological ecology and examines the contrasting ecology revealed by the\ud“monuments” of the unwritten English law, sustained not by faith but by fiction. Central to belief\udin the justice of the verdicts of this law is the separation of literal fact from legal significance and\udthe allocation of responsibility for their interpretation in the jury trial to different readers. The\udchallenge of the corporeal turn to traditional approaches is the critique of the “close” human\udreader as the determiner of the facts in favour of a “distant” digital reader. Rather than simply\udasserting the superiority of the human reader, however, the essay argues that, despite their\udopposition, the traditional jury and corpus humanities both work institutionally to elide\udfictionality in their critical judgments. Nonetheless, fictionality persists in the possibility that\udthings could be imagined otherwise, be they verdicts of law or laws of cultural history.