1 Introduction

Space and language are two dimension of human experience that are semiotically interlaced. Categorical frames are epitomes of circuits of experience. On the other hand, the Latin etymology of the word ‘term’ (Latin: terminus) perfectly reflects this polysemous and pragmatic interpenetration. Terminus means both ‘word’ and ‘border.’ The spatial projections of language also and inevitably imbue legal discourse, its deontological implications, and the mapping of justice dynamics, from both the semantic and experiential angles. Despite their inherent normativity, neither semantic nor legal categories succeed in reining in the dynamics of space, or rather the promiscuity among the multiple spaces of experience that human conduct unremittingly weaves. This ‘movement’ imports an overcoming of categorical spectra, the consequence of which is a kind of semantic ubiquity/ambiguity of their contexts of reference, so to speak. Such semiotic ‘leaking’ of the alleged categorical containment is at odds with the curtailment of semantic and experiential space that is usually assumed to be normatively coextensive with categorization (whether ‘natural’ or, even more, ‘deontic’). In this vein, the ensuing intermingling of multiple semantic/spatial domains, in turn, unavoidably ends up affecting the alleged ‘corralling power’ of categorization, particularly legal categorization, engendering what might be called ‘clouds’ of injustice and/or axio-semantic inconsistency. It is precisely along these ambiguous and nebulous borders that axiological/linguistic conflicts concerning religious symbols are located, due to the internal/external divide drawn by the imagery of secularization. Something similar occurs in all situations in which the same subject, through their actions, connects, straddles, or goes through different universes of discourse, different linguistic circuits, different semiotic and experiential landscapes. What is lacking, in these cases, is a ‘culture of translation,’ which is also integral to the ability to project a cross-cultural gaze on the dynamics of experience. This is a crucial problem within contemporary culture-scapes, which are also nomo-scapes, and which, partly by virtue of networked communication, escape the symbolic-territorial subdivisions inherited from the geographical imaginary of the past. The corresponding symbolic and legal apparatuses often turn into bans (e.g., when related to race and religion) that inconsistently attempt to curb the semantic and legal relevance of semiotic relational and meaningful threads projected into the past and the ‘elsewhere:’ the same threads that are instead ‘presentified’ by people’s ‘subjectivities on the move’ but always fall under the lens of law in one or another institutional ‘here and now.’

‘Translation,’ in the light of the above, assumes an inner political significance because it proves to be both intrinsically and experientially interspatial. This also because ‘trans-lating,’ etymologically intended as both spatial and discursive transferring, is the source and efficient cause of the pluralism that, travelling on people’s shoulders, populates the circuits of meaning, even within national borders. The forensic moment is, as it were, the point of convergence where these semantic-spatial interpenetrations come to the fore, more often than not in a pathological manner. At the same time, this is the place where asymmetries emerge between space and meaning, legal subjectivity and models of legal and axiological categorization, and so on.

The contributions collected in this special issue, ‘Subjectivities, Religion, Discrimination: Spaces and Lexical Imageries for Ubiquitous Justice’ show how the universalizing aspiration of modernity appears at odds with itself, especially when subjected to an attempt at rethinking from below, ethically and politically emancipated from the ‘pigeonholing time-space semantics’ that are coextensive with global capitalism and its history.

2 First Section: Signs of Legitimation/De-Legitimation and their Spatializing Bearings

The first section addresses the promiscuity of multiple spaces by examining situations in which semiotic “leaking” undermines the categories that allegedly serve to corral power.

In “The Moral Panic over CRT Bans: A Semiotic Play in Three Acts,” Rob Kahn examines the semiotic journey of CRT (critical race theory) during a two-year campaign to ban the practice. At first CRT was a catchall category of white grievance that sought a return to an age of colorblindness with laws directed at the comfort of white students. In the midst of this, Timothy Snyder’s New York Times article comparing the CRT bans to memory laws caused a semiotic rupture which made it impossible to view CRT bans as a way of protecting speech. This led to a new generation of CRT bans, such as House Resolution 1303 (2022), which sought to ban CRT as a Marxist ideology. The labeling of CRT bans as Marxism (and “cultural Marxism”) reflected a shift from white supremacy to white nationalism, in which the focus was no longer white comfort in a multiracial society but whiteness itself, which shows the fluidity of semiotic categories over time.

Moving through the realms of the religious, the digital and the legal, in “Sacred Foe: About the Face of Exemplary Evil” Massimo Leone investigates the role of the abject subject in belief systems. More specifically, the focus is on the corporeal dimension, and in particular on the face, as a symbol of exemplary evil, exploring two crucial figures in the exegetical and representational traditions of the biblical text: Cain’s face at the moment of the sacrifice refused him by the Lord, and the sign that God imposed on Adam and Eve’s firstborn son following Abel’s fratricide. To this purpose, the author analyses both ancient and modern Jewish and Christian exegesis, as well as relevant examples in contemporary narratives, highlighting the multiple and paradoxical ways in which the untranslatable face of the foe emerges as the necessary counterpart of a religious civilization’s inner topology, designating what must be rejected so that religious meaning can be introjected.

Elizabeth Englezos’ essay is titled “Digital-Public Spaces the Spiral of Silence: Hyperliberal illiberalism and the challenge to democracy.” It addresses the relationship between subjectivity and space. More specifically, it analyzes the transformations of subjectivity due to the continuum between digital and physical space produced by the advent of the Web. Making use of a series of cosmological metaphors, the author makes ‘visible’ how the subject, from both political and legal perspectives, is the epitome of the spatio-communicative relations through which its activity is expressed. This relational approach to subjectivity is transposed onto the a-centered and de-territorialized experiential possibilities enabled by the Internet. The increase in potential and opportunities promised by the Web was soon colored-—the essay suggests-—by dark nuances. The exposure of the individuals’ communicative activity to the ‘oceanic’ currents of information flows ended up triggering a rebound effect on the very unfolding of subjectivity. The loss of grip on the existential space corresponding to the physical public sphere has thrown the subject into an arena of immense proportions. Within it, the overwhelming pressure of majority opinions conveyed, and even generated, by the boundless spatiality of the Web produces a paradox. The only way to be an individual and not disappear in the imposition of an almost absolute silence is to accept to be part of that mass, of its streams; or, alternatively, to dive, to the point of blurring, within one of the flow lines capable of making themselves visible within the ‘oceanic scene of information.’ Against this background, according to the author, a dramatic heterogenesis of the ideals of liberalism takes shape. This metamorphosis entails that the more the principles of liberalism are invoked and implemented, the more they produce mass information dynamics. The cumulative effect of individual freedom and its exercise is transformed into the power of digital mass opinion and its conditioning shadow. The network is thus transformed into a weaving of ever tighter meshes that stifle dissenting opinion, diversity, and singularity and prevent being heard. When outsiders try to come to the fore, they are resolutely and promptly silenced, so that they slowly end up self-silencing. In this way, an absurd and almost grotesque hyperliberal illiberalism gradually takes its aberrant shape. In its umbra, populism grows luxuriant and the digital self in its self-liquefying, amidst the streams of the homogenized information ocean, causes an obscuring cloak to fall upon the individual lives that lie, impotent and sidelined, in their communicatively insulated physical space.

The essay titled “Cyberspace Outlaws – Coding the Online World” by Morgan M. Broman, Pamela Finckenberg-Broman and Susan Bird explores the regulation of online gaming spaces, based on the observation of relevant case studies such as Final Fantasy XIV, EVE online and Second Life. An original approach based on the combination of literary review and critical ethnography allows the authors to distinguish different layers of regulation: the set of rules and directions enforced by the public authorities that control online interaction in virtual spaces; the role played by computer coding itself in regulating behaviors through game architecture; and the norms established directly by the players within the game community. A thorough description of the unique features of each of these layers opens the way to the identification of the interconnections between them, also pointing to the increasing overlap between virtual-world rules and real-world laws, and thus resulting in crucial insights for further investigation on the regulation of online behaviors through interwoven rule systems.

The themes of semiotic ‘leaking’ and the limits of categories are also taken up by Clara Chapdelaine-Feliciati in her article “Le silence dans l’espace sémiotique juridique des traités internationaux: ‘cherchez la femme,’” which highlights the marginalization of women in international treaties such as the UN Declaration of Human Rights, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, and the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women. Following Lady Victoria Welby’s theory of the signifier, Chapdelaine-Feliciati shows how phrases such as the rights of man (droits de l’homme) erase the presence of women, which reflects erasure of the lived experience of women reflected in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen and the Napoleonic Code, the privileging of civil and political rights over economic and social rights, and the absence in the CEDAW of any mention of domestic violence. To repair this semiotic gap, most notable in the French language versions of international human rights treaties, Chapdelaine-Feliciati calls for “the rights of man” to be replaced with ‘human rights’ or ‘rights of the person,’ a change that would reflect the practices of many other languages including Italian, Portuguese and Arabic.

3 Second Section: Religious Frontiers of Semio-Spatial Legal Subjectivities

The second section addresses the semio-spatial projections of religious subjectivity with reference to its manifold and plural legal projections.

In “Dis- and Re-Embodiment in Religious Practices: Semiotic, Ethical, and Normative Implications of Robotic Officiants”, Simona Stano explores how technological innovation is changing the way people experience faith and religious practices. More specifically, the paper focuses on the processes of de- and re-embodiment of ‘officiating agents’ in different semiospheres, analysing their implications in terms of meaning-making processes, ethical issues, and normative regulations. A series of relevant case studies are then presented including the Buddhist ‘robot-monk’ Xian’er, the robotic arm adopted in the 2017 Ganpati festival to perform the Hindu Aarti ritual, the robotic Protestant ‘priest’ BlessU-2, and the Sanctified Theomorphic Operator (SanTO) designed for Catholic practitioners. Each case is carefully scrutinized, reflecting not only on material aspects such as privacy and data security issues, but also and especially on the semiotic processes associated with the adoption of robotic officiants, particularly as related to their recognized ontological status and possible role(s) within today’s religious and spiritual systems—where such entities are increasingly present, self-directed and relevant, whether they are encouraged or feared.

In “Neither Matter nor Spirit: The Ambivalent Substance of Digital Legal Personhood and its Theological Antecedents,” Melisa Liana Vazquez uses European ‘Right to Be Forgotten’ jurisprudence as a pathway into a discussion of personhood (legal, digital) and its semiotic ‘leaking’ into public and private space. She argues that current Western regulation in this domain exposes old tensions between Western secular cognitive models of personhood and the creative and lively ways people build their subjecthood today, particularly in consideration of the global infiltration of the digital. The semantic and experiential flow of personhood in this context creates shifting dynamics for shared space which in turn influence the creative development of personhood. Through an exploration of both enactivist and religious ways of conceptualizing personhood (in both this world and the next), Vazquez makes the case that an anthropologically oriented understanding of these worldviews can help uncover possibilities for harmonizing praxis and regulation. Human subjectivity, from this perspective, cannot be limited to the morphological body but should instead be thought of in terms of an ‘ecology of human becoming.’

In “The Religious Sign from a Semiotic Perspective: A Social-Semiotic Interpretation of the Challenges Presented by the Concept of Religious Sign in the Context of French Schools,” Nathalie Hauksson-Tresch deals with the interplay of language and society, focusing on the case of the secular French school system. Drawing on Michael Halliday’s systemic functional linguistics, the author describes the three (meta)functions of religious signs within such a context: the ‘ideational function’ highlights the role played by such signs in people’s representation of the world and interpretation of experience, hanging in the balance between self-assertion and independence, on the one hand, and patriarchal law, on the other hand; the ‘interpersonal function’ looks at how they foster different reactions among different groups—namely the teachers and the peers—in the school community; finally, the ‘textual function’ ties the first two functions together, enabling (or not) effective communication and dialogue. The analysis of these levels allows the text to unravel the complexity of the considered dynamics, also providing more general insights on the sociocultural processes and challenges faced in reconciling diverse religious perspectives within secular educational systems.

The ambiguity that arises from the semiotic leaking of conceptual categories—and the clouds of injustice thereby formed—is present in the distinction between the forum internum (belief) and the forum externum (the manifestation of belief) that Giorgia Baldi takes up in her article, “From Text to Meaning: Unpacking the Semiotic of Article 9 of the European Convention on Human Rights.” The division reflects a Western secular bias; and it is unstable. On the one hand, the assumption that beliefs and actions are separate erases the space of religious habitus in which religious practices (such as wearing religious clothing) are a way of disciplining the body which forms part of an all-encompassing ‘way of life.’ At the same time, the conceptual divide between belief and manifestation is subject to leakage of its own, as when a crucifix is a ‘passive symbol’ but a hijab becomes a threat to ‘the public order.’ This, on one level, is precisely the point. Relying on Kirstie McClure’s idea of ‘worldly harm,’ Baldi shows how the state uses the ambiguity, and the power to state the exception, to police the body in ways that might, at first glance, seem incompatible with the liberal state that claims to protect religious freedom.

4 Third Section: The Contemporary Lopsided Dance of Diverse Subjectivities in Search of Ubiquitous and Intercultural Justice

The third section focuses on asymmetries and imbalances in the treatment of difference—cultural, ethnic, religious, power, communicative, etc.—and the de-spatializing/marginalizing effects they can have. The overall attempt is to find possible solutions for ensuring the ubiquity of justice as a prerequisite for its universality and fairness.

Zakeera Docrat and Russell H. Kaschula address the issue of discrimination from a linguistic perspective. More specifically, in their essay titled “Cultural and Linguistic Prejudices Experienced by African Language Speaking Witnesses and Legal Practitioners at the Hands of Judicial Officers in South African Courtroom Discourse: The Senzo Meyiwa Murder Trial,” they illustrate the implications on the administration of justice in South Africa ensuing the decision taken in 2017 to use only English as the official language in all high courts. The authors focus on the biases that not using other native official languages may have for South Africans who do not speak English as their mother tongue. Biases that can involve the conduct of the trial, testimony, and even evidence gathering. The analysis offered in the text foregrounds how the language barrier can generate a real effect of cultural and political marginalising de-spatialization, which reverberates on the possibility of administering ‘fair justice.’ This is because the language used in trial and, at an earlier stage, in the gathering of evidence, also determines the semantic mapping of the facts on which to articulate the judgement. The consequence of the adoption of a single language may imply, therefore, that the spaces of experience concretely lived by people have no access to the trial discourse and that, in turn, courts construct a ‘world of facts’ semantically (and culturally) marked and conditioned by the English language. The situation becomes even more thorny when litigants do not have adequate knowledge of English. In addition to denouncing the failure to use South Africa’s other official languages, although abstractly provided for by law, the authors propose a two-track solution, so to speak: a) the constant presence of interpreters in the courts; b) the training of judicial and police officials/personnel to use languages other than English as well. To this end, Docrat and Kaschula propose that the study of other languages be an integral part of university law courses. Only in this way, they argue, will it be possible to create an inclusive and plural space of justice, in keeping with the space of coexistence conceived by South African law.

In his “We Attempted to Deliver Your Package’: Forensic Translation in the Fight Against Cross-Border Cybercrime” Rui Sousa-Silva proffers a comprehensive overview of the potential of forensic linguistics. At the heart of the essay is the distinction between legal translation and forensic translation. By pivoting to the extra-textual projections of forensic linguistics Sousa-Silva shows how its use is functional to the countering of criminality that takes advantage of the digital network to expand its activities beyond territorial proximity. He illustrates how forensic linguistics proves to be particularly useful in geographically mapping the channels of propagation of so-called cybercrimes and in identifying their perpetrators by decoding the linguistic tools they use. All of this has broad investigative scope and extraordinarily relevant repercussions in terms of the effectiveness of justice. The inability to develop hermeneutic atlases that can relate criminal behaviors and their trans-local spaces makes the differentiation between national legislations and jurisdictions a major obstacle in the fight against various forms of cyber-crime. Forensic translation, on the contrary, makes it possible to trace the semantic, teleological and spatial continuities of criminal activity where the separation between territorial legal systems instead produces dysfunctional distinctions and inoperability. Sousa-Silva shows how forensic translation can serve as a vehicle for interspatial translation to align the ubiquity of criminal conduct, conveyed by the Web, with the symmetrical need for ubiquitous justice. In this regard, the author develops an interesting examination of legal case frameworks concerning, respectively, trans-linguistic plagiarism detection, sociolinguistic profiling, forensic translation, sociolinguistic profiling, and cybercrime.

Another aspect of the spatial projections of language, and the lopsided dance of cross-cultural justice, comes in the context of migration. As Imranali Panjwani describes in his contribution, “The Importance of Incorporating Religious, Cultural and Linguistic Evidence in UK Immigration Procedures: An Analysis of the Semiotic Codes of Asylum Seekers,” the shared language of asylum and immigration law gives way to a diverse semiotic world where words like ‘marriage’ have different meanings in different cultures—for example, a wedding may require written registration in the United Kingdom but not in Yemen. Indeed, at times phrases, like ‘fear of persecution,’ seem unable to describe lived experience. If an asylum seeker from Nigeria is threatened with a curse, can language—or the law—understand the curse from the perspective of lived experience, as opposed to focusing on whether the curse is ‘real’? While country experts can remedy some of these concerns, they face pressure from judges who sometimes view sensitive accountings of lived experience as expert bias in favor of the applicant. To understand the lived experience of asylum seekers, and to limit claims of bias, judges, representatives, and country experts need to undertake a collective effort to better understand the cross-cultural semiotics of intercultural translation.

In “Illuminated Mirrors and ‘No Rights,’” Gavin Keeney shifts the focus of the lopsided dance of intercultural subjectivities from language to art, using the painter El Greco’s wanderings from Crete, through Renaissance Italy, to the Spain of Philip II as a symbol of the wanderings, poverty, and works of St. Francis of Assisi, who El Greco painted over 120 times. At the same time, the life-world of St. Francis reflects an a-legal universe in which the artist, and the works the artist creates, are freed from the confining categories of law. In contrast to the efforts of Greece, Spain, and Italy to claim El Greco as one of their own, or the Conventuals who abandoned the itineracy and wandering of St. Francis, Keeny places the works of art, such as El Greco’s Opening of the Fifth Seal (1614) in an affective register based on the life story of St. Francis himself. Like the Spirituals who followed the Franciscan ‘form-of-life,’ the next rebellion against capitalism will follow the principle of ‘No Rights,’ a life-world in which “it is absurd and transitively immoral to own or claim to own” that which ‘pre-exists’ authors, merit and commodity status. This world beyond authorship will, of course, punish those who escape the ‘art-academic industrial complex’ with ‘poverty,’ but for St. Francis this is ‘the primary reward.’

The essay titled “Below and Beyond the Signifier: Space as a Living Semiotic Horizon, a Key to Interculturality and a Challenge for Law” by Ishvarananda Cucco provides an interesting interdisciplinary approach to the issue of intercultural translation and its legal implications. The author combines multiple perspectives of analysis, respectively: anthropological, semiotic, epistemological and legal. His investigation starts from a comparison of de Saussure’s semiological theory and Peirce’s semiotics. Cucco emphasizes how Peircean global semiotics allows the legal anthropologist to work on a pre-symbolic signical ground. This allows the researcher to grasp the relations between subject and environment from a broader epistemic angle than that provided by the set of binary language/world correspondences constructed by each culture. This perspectival decentering allows interpreters to access a relational dimension that underlies the dialectic between differences. By virtue of this cognitive shift, they become able to dialogically ‘see’ the continuities existing between distinct categorical frames, even when these belong to different cultural frameworks. Since each category can be regarded as the epitome of pre-experienced subject/environment relations, it implicitly includes a spatial dimension, corresponding precisely to the semanticization of the space of experience summarized in the categorical spectrum. Inter-categorial continuity is thus also spatial continuity. This conclusion makes it possible to use the translation paradigm to generate new paradigms for interpreting cultures and their relations in the mirror of a third semantic horizon generated by the transformative relation inherent in translation. Becoming aware of and accepting the bidirectional transformativity of all acts of authentic translation and avoiding domesticating translational approaches are, according to the author, two sides of the same coin: a such, in line with the prospecting and not merely representational function of categories. This cognitive-semiotic disposition constitutes the necessary ingredient for providing intelligence-based responses to situations of multicultural coexistence, both on a local and global scale. At the same time, they serve to ward off cognitive and, consequently, also axiological blindness to the Other, which inevitably foments conflict. In this regard, Cucco provides the results of an interesting long-distance dialogue with Eduardo Kohn (How Forests Think, 2013) and his anthropological-cognitive theories elaborated after the fieldwork Kohn carried out in Runa, in the Ecuadorian Upper Amazon.