"Il mondo guarda il mondo": Italo Calvino per una critica del soggetto di diritto moderno

Abstract

The anthropocentrism of modern legal thought, grounded in a rational subject separated from nature, has become untenable in the ecological crisis. Situated within the Law and Literature field, this paper argues that Italo Calvino’s works offer a powerful imaginative framework for critiquing the cartesian legal subject. Drawing on material ecocriticism, it analyses La formica argentina, La nuvola di smog, and Palomar, where environmental disruption dissolves the traditional patterns of relations between subject/object and human/nature. Calvino’s narratives construct a relational subject, conceived as a node within a network of material interdependencies. This reconceptualization requires a systemic epistemology and grounds a theory of spatial justice. Law thus appears not as an abstract norm but as a “lawscape”, a relational and situated configuration in which legal meaning takes shape through the reciprocal entanglement of bodies, spaces, and material environments. The paper ultimately proposes an ecology of law, rethinking legal subjectivity beyond anthropocentrism and beyond the mere personification of nature.