Taking into account the inclusion of a legal deposition in a fictional text—namely in the short story “Benito Cereno” by Herman Melville—this article explores the link between these two regimes of writing. Using the concepts Jacques Derrida articulates in his text “Force of Law”, the article analyzes how Melville’s poetics deconstructs legal authority and fiction itself, but also how the text deconstructs law, in the name of justice. The latter is to be found in the “à-venir” of the text, foreshadowed by the dissemination of strategies of silence. These stand out as forms of political resistance which we will attempt to delineate in relation to the philosophy of Jacques Rancière.