Soggettività contestata e cultura dell'esilio

Abstract: Th is contribution aims to investigate the issue of disputed subjectivity in relation to the political and legal culture of exile in the fi rst half of the nineteenth century. Th e attention will be focused on the exile of a particular category of people, that of sovereigns, in order to understand how the loss or denial of sovereignty, on which the rights of legation depend, is dealt with according to the law of nation between the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries. We will also show how the theme tends to escape from the legal space to cross the political one, to fi t into the grey areas where the boundary between legal rule and political practice becomes uncertain, allowing margins of ambiguity and freedom compatible with the possible reversal of the institutional and international causes of exile. Finally, we will show that in European history there are places and territories in which these practices are most easily carried out, precisely because they enjoy a special and extra-juridical status that admit or tolerate the presence of contested subjectivities (so: state of exception), as it happens in the history of the modern age in the case of the free port of Trieste.