Criticism Volume 60 | Issue 2 Article 2 Lyric Without Subjects and Law Without Persons: Vagrancy, Police Power, and the Lyrical Tales Sal Nicolazzo University of California, San Diego,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/criticism Recommended Citation Nicolazzo, Sal () "Lyric Without Subjects and Law Without Persons: Vagrancy, Police Power, and the Lyrical Tales," Criticism: Vol. 60 : Iss. 2 , Article 2. Available at: https://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/criticism/vol60/iss2/2 Lyric Without Subjects and Law Without Persons: Vagrancy, Police Power, and the Lyrical Tales Cover Page Footnote I would like to thank the USC Race and Empire Faculty Working Group and the participants of the 2016 UCLA/Columbia Law and Humanities Junior Scholar Workshop for their feedback on earlier drafts of this piece. This project was supported in part by funding from the University of California Presidential Faculty Research Fellowships in the Humanities. This article is available in Criticism: https://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/criticism/vol60/iss2/2 LYRIC WITHOUT SUBJECTS AND LAW WITHOUT PERSONS: VAGRANCY, POLICE POWER, AND THE LYRICAL TALES Sal Nicolazzo In “Anthropomorphism in Lyric and Law,” Barbara Johnson famously writes that “lyric and law might be seen as two very different ways of instating what a ‘person’ is.”1 Revisiting one of the central questions of her earlier essay “Apostrophe, Animation, and Abortion”—how rhetorical figure simultaneously constructs and undoes legal persons—Johnson argues for the importance of lyric to the rhetorical operations of the law, as both law and lyric insist on the simultaneous urgency and undecid- ability of the same question: “What is a person?”2 For Johnson, what lyric and law have in common is that they employ figures (such as anthropo- morphism) that seem to rely on the presupposition of the existence of a human subject yet at the same time undo the coherence of this subject by revealing its reciprocal reliance on figure.