Fences

Abstract Through its reading of Carl Schmitt's The Nomos of the Earth, Cornelia Vismann's essay, “Starting from Scratch: Concepts of Order in No Man's Land”, describes the “initial scene of the law”: “The primordial scene of the nomos opens with a drawing of a line in the soil. This very act initiates a specific concept of law, which derives order from the notion of space. The plough draws lines – furrows in the field – to mark the space of one's own. As such, as ownership, the demarcating plough touches the juridical sphere …. The primordial act as described here brings together land and law, cultivation and order, space and nomos” (1997: 46–7). Using images of fences in the short stories of Herman Charles Bosman as a point of departure, this paper explores the notion in a few seminal texts (both literary and in the field of legal philosophy) that the fence or boundary – and by extension, the limit of the law – is striking in its poignant reminder of that which it is meant to exclude. This in turn, and with close reference to Peter Fitzpatrick's Modernism and the Grounds of Law, invites us to revisit Carl Schmitt's spatial concept of the nomos in a more nuanced way. The reading of Fitzpatrick's work opens onto further questions about putative boundaries between literature and the law.