A Court in the Backlands: a nomadic justice in Brazilian literature

This paper explores a conception of justice through a reading of the Brazilian novel The Devil to Pay in the Backlands, written by João Guimarães Rosa. In this novel, the character of Zé Bebelo is tried by a group of jagunços, which were nomadic bandits that lived in the northeast of Brazil. What is analyzed in this scene is the spectral dimension of undecidability that involves a decision, and how a decision intervenes in a field of forces and reshapes the relationships and antagonisms of a conflict. To do so, I seek to show how this novel operates a counter-actualization of Brazilian history by updating and making act the memory of violence and war that marks life in the peripheral regions of Brazil. Finally, I question how justice can be possible when war is a tendency internal to the functioning of societies? What concept of justice can be possible when faced with this continuous tendency to disjoint the social body? Thus, I propose a concept of justice thought before the unbalance, conflictive and differential relationships lived by the characters of this novel in the uncertain and contingent space of the Brazilian backlands.