TABLE OF CONTENTS

PREFACE *

INTRODUCTION *

1 Current profiles of law and literary studies *

2 The law-literature divide *

3 Law, literature and liberal democracy *

4 The three pillars of time *

6 Phenomenology: a brief note on methodology *

7 Outline of key arguments *

1 Law, Literature and the Space of Appearance *

1 Appearance, reality, truth: the birth of history and the beginning of time *

2 Poverty, politics and poetry *

3 The literary exception and the rule of law *

4 Profound poetry and shallow law? *

5 The darkness of the human heart, the hiatus of time *

2 Law, Literature, Event *

1 Law and literature: a constellation of two trajectories *

2 From eutopia to utopia: the transformation of the utopian imagination *

3 U-topos and event *

4 The literary response to the event *

5 The law's response to the event *

6 The pillars of time *

3 REVOLUTIONARIES, RENEGADES AND REFUGEES *

1 When time gives *

2 The visible and the invisible Mandela *

3 The renegade moment *

4 Bram Fischer's madness *

5 Refugee status: when time breaks *

6 The destruction of the world *

7 The end of an era *

8 The poetic descent into the hiatus of time *

9 The refugee, the renegade and the revolutionary *

4 THE LITERAL EXCEPTION *

1 T.S. Eliot, Schmitt and Hamlet *

2 Schmitt, Gadamer and Hamlet *

3. Schmitt and Däubler *

4 Voßkuhle, Kohlhaas, Kleist *

5 Nussbaum, Posner, Holmes, Dickens *

5 THE RULE OF LAW *

1 The Example of Mens rea *

2 Legal hermeneutics *

3 Legal justice *

6 THE LITERARY EXCEPTION *

1 Léo Tolstoy: the lawless event of history *

2 Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Cormac McCarthy: poetry of lawlessness *

3 Faulkner: The convulsion of language and time *

4 Dostoyevsky's idiot and J.M. Coetzee's Dostoyevsky: the inhuman event of poetry *

7 LAW, LITERATURE, TIME *

1 The space of appearance and the crisis of language *

2 Utopia, eutopia and the two trajectories of language *

3 Revolutionaries, renegades and refugees *

4 The "tight spot" between the finite and the infinite *

5 The literal exception *

6 The literary exception *

7 The rule of law *

8 The pillars of time: law, literature, event *

9 Vertical and horizontal gifts of time *

BIBLIOGRAPHY *

INDEX *