This chapter explores the poetics of punishment, contrasting Dante’s contrappasso (countersuffering) with Boccaccio’s beffa (prank). It argues that, for Boccaccio, Dante’s contrappasso illustrates a “hegemonic” conception of justice. In this sovereign system of justice, criminal offenders have to pay back more than an eye for an eye: they owe a debt to the divine “state” above and beyond that owed to the victim. The beffa instead embodies a communitarian form of justice in which victims are fairly compensated. In the art of the beffa, it lacks decorum to take more than an eye for an eye. Boccaccio brilliantly reveals how Dantean violence needs always to be in excess; what is poetic in this form of poetic justice is its license to “outdo” tradition. Boccaccio explores this phenomenon in the haunting tale of the scholar and the widow (8.7), where the scholar punishes a widow who humiliates him by forcing her to endure a series of Dantean punishments. In doing so, he turns private vengeance into sovereign punishment, teaching her a lesson on behalf of all scholars.

The best defense of the traditional 3-place model of desert is offered by Kristján Kristjánsson, who argues that our common concern－when making desert claims－is for an apportionment of overall virtue/viciousness to overall fortune. On his account, deserved treatments, or outcomes, as substitutable: one good/bad outcome serves as well as any other correspondingly good/bad outcome, in satisfying the demands of desert. And he references the idea of poetic justice in defending this conclusion. However, a closer look at the examples he offers, as well as my own examples from Chapter 4, shows my own model of desert to be more plausible. Rather than a concern for "cosmic justice," the core concern behind desert claims is for the shared acknowledgment of someones traits and actions, and how these have affected others within a community. Clues from our language support this conclusion, such as the phrase that a person has gotten "exactly what she deserves"－a phrase we reserve for those times when we think a person has unmistakably been faced with the truth about how she has impacted others.

This chapter provides a survey of poetic reactions to human rights violations in the contemporary world. Theodor Adorno declared in 1949, “There can be no poetry after Auschwitz,” a sentiment symptomatic of the shock that made literature seem inadequate in dealing with the scale of human injustice revealed by the Holocaust. However, the human capacity for wrongdoing remains endemic to our times. Wherever human rights violations have proved irresistible, poets have sought redress through the symbolic action of poetry, giving proof of how we might invert the sentiments of Walter Benjamin’s claim that “There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.” In the teeth of modern barbarism, as this chapter aims to demonstrate, poetry continues to remind humanity of what will keep us humane and human.

This chapter considers how forms of narrative literature, particularly life-writing, serve as technologies in the making of the modern personhood that in turn anchor contemporary human rights. Drawing from Benveniste’s work on the relationship between grammatical personhood and subjectivity, the chapter is structured into “gradations” of personhood, examining their implications on human rights discourse and its subjects. The first-person form common to life-writing, with its centering of the speakerly “I,” operates in the ethical domain of sentiment and empathy; whereas the second-person form of the testimony, with it’s construction of an “I-you,” depends more on a process of interpellation than empathizing. Meanwhile, the third-person form, which may seem less relevant to human rights discourse, provides insight into the ways in which collective bodies, such as corporations, lay claim to human rights. The chapter closes with a reflection on posthumanism and the zero-person or non-human as a potential departure point for probing the limits of the human subject that underlies human rights discourse.