The Soul of the Damned: Late Modernity and the Criminal Subject (original) (raw)

In the Phenomenology of Spirit Hegel set out to develop a theory of subjectivity to shed light on the relationship between material reality – the physical stuff of everyday life, our fleshly bodies and their place in the world – and the thinking being capable of recognising its existence as such, the ‘geist’ or, in English, the ‘mind’, ‘spirit’ or ‘soul’. Finding the latter rather difficult to pin down, he eventually declared, “the spirit is a bone” by which he meant that the internal life of the mind is inseparable from our materially contingent being-in-the-world. In other words, the things that we think and do, the ideas and beliefs to which we subscribe and the actions to which we commit are contingent on the material and ideational circumstances of our collective life-world just as the quality and sustainability of our social environment depends on us. In this explicitly theoretical paper I want to build on Hegel’s basic idea to critically explore growing interest in the ontology of the criminal subject. The paper will begin with a short analysis of cultural conditions around the increasingly divided nature of British society and the proliferation of inequalities which seem to breezily co-exist with a rampant and rapacious ‘enjoyment society’. In what follows, I will argue that contemporary social ideals, deeply enmeshed within the structures and ideologies of late capitalism, have condemned us to a distinct lack of symbolic prohibitions and dependable socio-economic structures. The resultant sense of radical social isolation, dislocation and imminent threat seems to have contributed to the accretion of criminal subjectivities by restructuring the ways that we think about our being in the world as we try desperately to shore up the ultimate sustaining fantasy of liberal society – the fiction of self-reliant individualism and autonomous subjectivity. In short it will suggest that we are liberalism’s damned subjects condemned to a form a radical agency that has eroded social relations and captured our souls.