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 designed and acted out by human conduct. This ‘movement’ imports a kind of 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 traverses 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 workshop contributions 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.