Guilty creatures: animality and punitive power in the Río de la Plata

Abstract

This article investigates the link between animality and punitive power in the Río de la Plata by offering a close reading of Eduardo Acevedo Díaz’s “El primer suplicio” (1901). Within Law and Literature-expanded to Literatures+ and the affective turn-it explores how animal figures and metaphors contribute to criminalization and the legitimation of penal violence. Methodologically, it provides a descriptive survey of the story’s animal lexicon (wolf, bull, ape, black lion, raven, worms) and of its narrative voices (narrator, condemned man, troops), focusing on their role in the moral economy of punishment. The study argues that animalization targets both the condemned and his executioners: it degrades while staging moral elevation (pulchra mors), in tension with a patriotic imaginary that glorifies heroic animality. In dialogue with empirical findings on anger and attributions of intent, it shows a rhetorical paradox of punitive discourse: it strips reason to naturalize violence yet preserves intention to ground culpability.