Martyrdom and law

Robert Cover (in an essay contained in On Violence: A Reader )) suggests that the very extremity of martyrdom makes it a “proper starting place for understanding the nature of legal interpretation.”

For the martyr, “if there is to be a continuing life, it will not be on the term’s of the tyrant’s law. Law is the projection of an imagined future upon reality. Martyrs require that any future they possess will be on the terms of the law to which they are committed, even in the face of world-destroying pain. Their triumph – which may well be partly imaginary – is the imagined triumph of the normal universe – of Torah, Nomos – over the material world of death and pain. Martyrdom is an extreme form of resistance to domination. As such it reminds us that the normative world-building which constitutes ‘Law’ is never just a mental or spiritual act. A legal world is built only to the extent that there are commitments that place bodies on the line. The torture of the martyr is an extreme and repulsive form of the organized violence of institutions. It reminds us that the interpretive commitments of officials are realized, indeed, in the flesh. As long as that is so, the interpretive commitments of a community which resists official law must also be realized in te flesh, even if it by the flesh of its own adherents” (295).