La 'poesia della verità' nella ricerca della giustizia. Poesia, parresia, esemplarità, giustizia

The point of departure of this essay is a selection of “narratives” of victims of severe crimes. The Author shows some peculiar, recurrent, and quite significant aspects of those narratives, from which an inquiry into criminal law and the criminal justice system is carried out in the light of the teachings that the story-telling of victims can offer to the theory of crime and punishment.\r\nThe Author discovers that, despite the differences in individual experiences, cultures, and severity of offenses, many stories of victims tend to be told in ways that combine poetry, “exemplarity” and “parresia”. In the story-telling of violent and severe victimization, victims seem to resort to a courageous “speaking out” and “truth-telling” (i.e., the notion of parresia, as studied by Michel Foucault) that lean on the linguistic efficacy of metaphors and imagery, as in poetry, to describe the indescribable, and to narrate the unthinkable and unspeakable. This spontaneous “art” of frank, courageous, truth-telling also carries the potential of exemplarity, i.e., the force of example (as analysed by political philosophy, namely by Alessandro Ferrara) where “is and ought merge, and in so doing liberate an energy that sparks our imagination”. The Author argues that the poetical truth-telling of victims seems to have a universalistic “exemplary” validity from which the theory of criminal law could greatly benefit. A more sensitive elaboration of criminal norms by legislative authorities should, therefore, be pursued, by following reality more closely and enriching the juridical language now too stiffly enclosed into abstract concepts. Furthermore, a whole new theory of criminal justice can develop from the “parresiastic” and “exemplary” narratives of victims: a theory of criminal justice where – due process guarantees untouched – victims, offenders and communities are enabled to speak truly and frankly, yet courageously, to each other within “truth games” (as Foucault would have called them) that avoid traditional forms of punishment, and give floor to restorative responses to crime (as it has happened, among others, in the case of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission).