Las ficciones del delito. Análisis teórico de la ficcionalización del delincuente y del delito.

This thesis argues that a fictional component is constitutive of the practices of institutionalized legal systems. Law relies on a symbolic apparatus that produces effects of law, whose “editing” shares logics with the literary system. To demonstrate this, it analyzes a Río de la Plata corpus (1879–1949)—from Juan Moreira to Emma Zunz, including El matadero, Facundo, Martín Fierro, El primer suplicio, Buenos Aires tenebroso, La ciudad de los locos, and El juguete rabioso—that forges figures of the offender and of crime capable of shaping penal power and obedience. The theoretical framework brings together Critical Legal Theory in Argentina (Marí), Benjamin, Foucault, and Derrida, in dialogue with Kelsen, Hart, Dworkin, and Alexy; the approach is Law as Literature. The results show that fictions such as “civilization/barbarism” and the archetype of the “man-tiger” migrate from the literary field to the juridical one, structuring police criteria, offense classifications, and justifications of force; once the state is consolidated, crime operates as a cultural boundary that reorders the community through its penal governance. The contribution relocates legal theory within an aesthetic and material perspective on the norm, decentering the methodological purity of positivism and proposing a theory of obedience as an effect of socially legitimized fictions.