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.
Author(s): Magnus Hörnqvist
Series: Routledge Advances In Criminology
Edition: 1
Publisher: Routledge | Taylor & Francis
Year: 2021
Language: English
Commentary: TruePDF
Pages: 181
Tags: Punishment: Moral And Ethical Aspects; Social Justice; Social Control; Power (Social Sciences)
Cover
Half Title
Series Information
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Articulating the problematic of desire
References
1 The disappearance of pleasure?
The disappearance of pleasure from public view
Pleasure becomes problematic
Making pleasure disappear: historicization and conceptual irrelevance
References
2 The impossible flight from passion
Distinguishing punishment from vengeance
The dual role of anger
Punishment as status restoration
References
3 The ambiguous desire for recognition
Thumos: torn between vengeance and competition
The persistence of thumos
The dark side of recognition
References
4 The paradox of tragic pleasure
Attic tragedy: enacting existential dilemmas
Divine justice: watching hell
Early-modern capital punishment: theatres of recognition
References
5 Two paradigms of enjoyment
Between partial relief and absorbed excitement
Early-modern excitement: between the carnivalesque and the sublime
Punishment in the gap between desire and enjoyment
References
6 Ressentiment: Moral elevation through punishment
The build-up of tension: way of life and no way out
The release of tension: the late-modern prison and death penalty
Self-revaluation and world restoration
References
7 Obscene enjoyment: Between power and prohibition
Obscene enjoyment of the other
Nightly punishment – forging a community of spectators
The forward thrust of unrestrained assertion
References
Index
