Mafiacraft, New Materialist Legal History, and Modern Unknowing

This essay examines the contributions of Deborah Puccio-Den’s Mafiacraft as a legal history, and highlights the innovations it offers to legal studies, particularly the application of New Materialism to legal analysis. I discuss Puccio-Den’s rejection of a teleological understanding of the emergence of the legal theory of mafia; her New-Materialist account of the process of naming the mafia; the role of performance and visuality as materialist elements in the mafia’s legal history; the materiality of the legal interpretation that established the mafia; and the materiality of legal normativity, which shares much with the mafia itself. I conclude by reflecting on the phenomenon of unknowing in late modernity, that is, the active rejection of knowledge, on which Puccio-Den’s study sheds light.