L'identitŕ del diritto: la critical race theory e la costituzione normativa del soggetto

Abstract

The publication of the first anthological introduction in Italian to the Critical Race Theory - the area of philosophy of law in the United States of America that investigates the issue of race in the post-Civil Rights era, triggering linguistic turn input from Continental and post-analytical thinking in the Common Law’s tradition of legal pragmatism - offers the opportunity to make a short philosophical and methodological examination of the nature, the means of production and the conditions of effectiveness of statutory enunciations. The Critical Race Theory holds that an institutional form of racism gradually took shape in American society towards the end of the seventies, adapting and evolving on the mechanisms whereby racial hierarchies succeeded in surviving and reproducing, despite being threatened by an unprecedented campaign of antidiscrimination legislation and case law. The theory goes on to argue that this development constitutes an exemplary illustration of profound tensions at work in the bonds between material layering and logical and formal procedures that make up every regulatory or prescriptive tool, suggesting that this deserves investigation in terms of the many local and contingent profiles that subsume the poietic aptitude of every semiotic gesture in its given genetic descent. Despite being compromised by an uncertain anchorage in metaphysics and a morass of epistemological aporia, the elaboration of the doctrine of CRT should be seen as an inevitable commentary on the various different, open and conflicting results of the (constituent) interface between notions of justice, ascribing identity and formulae of citizenship.