Sensing Justice through Contemporary Spanish Cinema: Aesthetics, Politics

Abstract

interest of Capital Letters is the way in which Morisi puts them in conversation in progressively more complex ways as the study develops. Readers are invited to consider not only the dialogue among their stated positions and arguments for or against the death penalty, but also among the more profound ideas about language, art, poetics, and their relationship to the legal and social questions of state killing that underpin the authors’ thinking about the issue. This rich consideration of the authors’ conversation across time brings out nuances that complicate what might at first seem to be a relatively simple dialectical dynamic among them. Morisi’s approach to the analysis of the texts is rather traditional – primarily close reading, drawing on the theoretical work of Agamben, Foucault, Girard, and Ranci ere – but it would be a mistake to see this as a weakness of this volume: these readings are suited to the questions of poetics that Morisi places at the center of her inquiry, and they are elegantly executed and lead to wellfounded and convincing conclusions which, while fundamentally literary, are clearly contextualized in historical socio-political and legal realities. But Capital Letters offers us an additional contribution, beyond the specific realm of Hugo, Baudelaire, Camus, and the two-centuries-long debate that led to the end of capital punishment in France: an invitation to consider the ways in which our ideas about art and literature, and about their creation, roles, and value, influence the life-or-death social and legal questions that societies face in every century.