engleski

Is Man Good or Bad, and Should He be Punished? The Ontologies of Political Subject in Literature Which Concern Penal Policy and Punishment

According to Carl Schmitt, every political theory presupposes a fundamental understanding of political subjects. Different conceptions of politics depend on answering the prior question about the status of human subject: are men good or bad? The same goes for policy making, including the area of penal policy and criminal justice. In this sense, political discourses in fiction produce interesting images of criminal man in the broad range from being entirely socially constructed to being naturally evil. These fictional accounts inform the discussion on penal policy making by providing rich and conflicting images of subject, society and crime: e.g. from fatalistic and apolitical accounts given in Camus’ Stranger or Genet’s Miracle of a Rose to specifically political causes of violence in Orwell’s totalitarian dystopia 1984 ; from the evils of society portrayed in Gorki’s Mother to the evils of nature in Bulgakov’s The Fatal Eggs, Golding’s Lord of the Flies, or Houellebecq’s The Elementary Particles. It may be Dostoyevsky’s contrast of the naïve miracles of phalanstery and the evils of human nature or Huxley’s detailed utopian account of behavioral treatment of the Peter Pans and the Muscle People: literature offers interesting and important narratives for political theory and policy making. Perhaps these accounts do not supplant science but they give convincing and policy relevant images of man, crime and punishment.

ontology; subject; penal policy; punishment; fiction; literature; film

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