Sciascia Leonardo — The Day of the Owl [392]

In Sicily, thought Captain Bellodi, the crime passionnel is not the result of genuine passion, a passion of the heart, but of a sort of intellectual passion, an almost juridical concern for forms; juridical in the sense of the abstractions to which law is reduced at various levels of our legal system until they reach that formal transparency in which ‘merit’, that is, the human element, no longer counts. Once this is eliminated, law simply reflects itself. — Sciascia Leonardo, The Day of the Owl, 392

Note

Sciascia’s thesis about Sicilian formalism as a distortion of law — passion reduced to juridical concern for forms, law reflecting only itself once ‘merit’ is stripped. This directly feeds the reader’s network-closure reading: law as the enemy because it has been hollowed into pure procedure.