GENEALOGIA POLITICA DEL SIMBOLISMO GIURIDICO. VENDETTA VS. SANZIONE

This study examines the formation of legal sanction as a symbolic response to violence. It analyses the transition from private retribution to institutional punishment as a ritualised displacement rather than an elimination of primordial conflict. The argument draws instrumentally on Girard, Durkheim, and Benjamin to frame sanction not simply as a normative mechanism but as a cultural form of conflict management. The thesis advanced is that modern law, even in its secular guise, retains a ritual structure oriented towards the containment of violence. In the contemporary context, however, institutional fragility, the emergence of extrajudicial punitive practices, and the widening gap between norm and sanction indicate a crisis of this structure. Justice appears increasingly shaped by new configurations of sacrificial logic. The study concludes that the persistence of law cannot rest solely on procedural rationality. Its symbolic survival requires the capacity to integrate elements that resist juridification: recognition, forgiveness, and the suspension of judgment.