Avant-Garde Literature and the Ground of Rights

Abstract

With its demonstration of human frailty and finitude, avant-garde literature offers a more rigorous jurisprudence of rights than juridical or legal discourse is capable of offering itself. The paper takes as example the lowering of fault requirements in Canadian criminal law, which weakens common-law protection of the fundamental right to liberty through a fault standard that is “not concerned with what was in the accused’s mind, but with what should have been there.” Avant-garde literature, in opposition, demonstrates—and cannot help but demonstrate, in a mode unique to its discourse—the real limits of seeing and knowing, as shown through a reading of Claude Ollier’s La Mise-en- Scène.