The Pleasure of Punishment (original) (raw)

Based on a reading of contemporary philosophical arguments, this book accounts for how punishment has provided audiences with pleasure in different historical contexts. Watching tragedies, contemplating hell, attending executions, or imagining prisons have generated pleasure, according to contemporary observers, in ancient Greece, in medieval Catholic Europe, in the early-modern absolutist states, and in the post-1968 Western world. The pleasure was often judged morally problematic, and raised questions about which desires were satisfied, and what the enjoyment was like. This book offers a research synthesis that ties together existing work on the pleasure of punishment. It considers how the shared joys of punishment gradually disappeared from the public view at a precise historic conjuncture, and explores whether arguments about the carnivalesque character of cruelty can provide support for the continued existence of penal pleasure. Towards the end of this book, the reader will discover, if willing to go along and follow desire to places which are full of pain and suffering, that deeply entwined with the desire for punishment, there is also the desire for social justice. An accessible and compelling read, this book will appeal to students and scholars of criminology, sociology, philosophy and all those interested in the pleasures of punishment. Contents Acknowledgements vi Introduction: articulating the problematic of desire 1 The disappearance of pleasure? 2 The impossible flight from passion 3 The ambiguous desire for recognition 4 The paradox of tragic pleasure 5 Two paradigms of enjoyment 6 Ressentiment: moral elevation through punishment 7 Obscene enjoyment: between power and prohibition Index This book has a long prehistory and I am grateful to all people who have offered input along the way, starting with David Scott, who, as the editor of the anthology "Why Prison?", encouraged me to think further on the Foucauldian idea of the productivity of power, and thus initially set me on this track. It became a chapter on the pleasure of punishment, specifically focused on the prison and the middle class. When Tom Sutton at Routledge asked me to write a book on the theme a few years ago at a criminology conference, the task first struck me as too daunting. I also needed much more time, more material and a wider scope. My colleagues at the department of criminology at Stockholm university have been a great support; especially thanks to Henrik Tham, Anders Nilsson and Janne Flyghed for useful comments on early drafts. Intelligibility has been the key challenge throughout, and they have reminded me of that. Being granted the RJ Sabbatical 2018, by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond (SAB18-0161:1), to write a research synthesis on the pleasure of punishment, entirely relieved me of teaching obligations for a full year, which I spent re-reading works in the philosophical tradition and making notes. The grant also allowed me to spend the autumn of 2019 as a visiting professor at the Mannheim Centre for Criminology in the London School of Economics, generously invited by Tim Newburn, sharing office space and thoughts with Janet Foster and Alice Sampson. Thanks also to Johann Koehler and Mats Deland for enthusiasm and feedback on the historical. I am especially grateful to Vanessa Barker for innumerable coffee chats at all stages of the project, and for challenging me on the issue why it mattered. Mellika Melouani Melani, my life companion, presented me to the worlds of art and opera, and inspired me to think of desire as unrestrained and as something to be pursued at all costs. newgenprepdf 'the only appropriate word' in German-Lust-was inevitably ambiguous, and designated 'the experience both of a need and of a gratification' (Freud 1953: 135 fn 2). The very word was ambiguous, and so was the corresponding conception. Freud's conception of pleasure covered both desire and satisfaction; on the one hand 'wishing, wanting and desiring' and on the other hand 'enjoyment and satisfaction' (Schuster 2016: 101). In itself, the distinction was not new. It was central to the classic Platonic approach to pleasure. In Gorgias, Plato treated desire as distress and satisfaction as the relief of distress, thereby posing the problem of transformation: how could experiences, ranging from acute pain to a mere sense of unease, transform into the very opposite, the experience of being at ease? Plato's conception of pleasure was modelled after the satisfaction of bodily needs: hunger, thirst and sex. There is a perpetual movement back and forth: desire turns into satisfaction, which recedes into desire, a desire that may turn into renewed satisfaction, or not, and so forth. Freud discovered the tension, or the radical disjunction between desire and enjoyment. Desire and enjoyment were essentially irreconcilable. There can be no simple match, no carefree immersion in everyday life. It has been explicated as forces pulling in different directions; 'desire goes one way, and satisfaction another' (Schuster 2016: 122). I prefer the metaphor of a gap to describe the relationship. Throughout the book, I will talk about the gap between desire and enjoyment. The word 'gap' emphasizes their essential irreconcilability, as well as the necessity to bridge the gap, by actions or interventions, to transform desire into enjoyment. The pleasure of punishment may strike readers as an odd topic. Starting talking about 'the pleasure of punishment', I have noticed in the process of writing this book, often makes people associate it with sadism, or misogyny,