Law’s dark clarity: Hugo and the ‘Misery’ of legal categorizations

Laws punish delinquents after having made them such, and yet this is not inevitable. At work in this phenomenon is a melding of ‘ought’ and ‘is’ in which the law renders criminal behavior perpetually determinative by recognizing only a duty to abide by statutes while simultaneously losing site of the magma of meanings and behaviors that constitute human lives. Using the core of Hugo’s epic Les Misérables as a kind of mirroring illustration, this paper will explore how categorical rigidity and blindness to the changing contours of identity and subjectivity constitute one dark side of the law. Hugo’s work demonstrates the importance of literature as a parallel narrative that can illuminate law’s limita- tions, specifically, its tendency to conceal through certainty, ignoring the actual possibilities of becoming for the subjects it is charged to rule and protect. I will argue that in Les Misérables we can see an inversion in the order of priority between narrative commitment and social criticism, specifically a meta-legal criticism that has specific insights regarding how law obfuscates the ought/is divide and, in so doing, loses legitimacy and collapses in on itself. Issues of human dignity, social responsibility and the very purpose and legitimacy of law can be constructively addressed through parallel analysis of Hugo’s world of ‘the wretched’ and those the law renders wretched even today.