This article discusses the way in which substantive criminal law is generally taught in United States law schools and argues that more room should be given in these courses to familiarize students with the horrendous nature of much of our criminal law system—in particular the terrible conditions faced by most prison inmates after conviction.

More than just a jail, Rikers has become a site of shifting discourse on punishment and justice in the United States. In the book Life and Death in Rikers Island, Homer Venters argues that the systematic failures of jails to provide appropriate safety and care constitute human rights violations and public health risks. The former chief medical officer and commissioner of correctional health services for the NYC Health and Hospitals system, Venters offers critical insight on the Rikers jail system. “Because (...) jails are chaotic and concealed from outside view,” he asserts, “we only become aware of them when very bad outcomes occur, such as deaths.” Life and Death's success lies in how it blends Venters's experiences on the ground as a health care professional with the empirical data he's been able to collect and analyze over the tenure of his career. According to Venters, all suicides, homicides, and accidental deaths in jail are jail attributable, as they reflect system‐wide failures in safety. (shrink)

This study aims to grasp the two distinct artworks one is from the literary field: Penal Colony, written by F. Kafka and the other one is from painting: The Large Glass, designed by M. Duchamp. This text tries to unravel the similarities betwe- en these artworks in terms of two main significations around “The Officer” from Penal Colony and “The Bachelors” from The Large Glass. Because of their vital role on the re-production of status-quo, this text (...) asserts that there is a similarity between them in the name of being part of the dispositions of body and desire. First of all, the text focuses on Penal Colony, especially on “The Officer” in or- der to observe his obsession towards the order that ruled by former and the late officer of colony. Deleuze & Guattari conceptualize it as “abstract-machines” and it refers to a contingent state of being which is produced as an obligatory entity. Besides, The Officers’ application via a “labeling machine” on inmates creates a framewok of a dispositif in Foucauldian terminology. Secondly, it is emphasized that The Bachelors from the Large Glass for his context, due to its reference for the concept of desire and a metaphorical connotation for desire as “cocoa”. The Large Glass is also turn around the dispositif in a different way: love. It is stated that criticizing the love to nowhere which belongs to The Bachelors and it can be found that there is an abstract-machine again in back of this practice and it converts The Bachelors’ energeia to make an apparatus possible and operative. (shrink)

In 1977 a German literary scholar, Astrid Lange-Kirchheim, published an article announcing an astonishing discovery: credible evidence exists to suggest that Kafka's famous disturbing short story, `In the Penal Colony', published in 1919 but first written in 1914, echoes and reworks, in several of its key images and turns of phrase, elements of an essay published in 1910 in the German literary magazine, Die neue Rundschau, bearing the title `Der Beamte' (`The Civil Servant', or `The Official' or `The (...) Functionary') by Alfred Weber, younger brother of Max Weber. Most Kafka scholars today accept Lange-Kirchheim's findings and recognize the importance of `Der Beamte' as at least one crucial reference point for Kafka's writing. Yet little wider awareness of the connection seems to exist among historians of sociology and other scholars of the history of the human sciences. This article comprises a summary of Lange-Kirchheim's analysis together with a complete annotated translation of `Der Beamte' by Alfred Weber in English. (shrink)

Sterba argues that God would be ethically bound to implement a set of exceptionless evil prevention requirements. However, he argues that the world as we know it is not as it would be if God were applying them. Sterba concludes that God does not exist. In this paper, I offer a penal colony theodicy that will show how the world as we know it is entirely compatible with God’s implementation of such evil prevention requirements.

This article offers a close reading of Kafka’s In the Penal Colony, exploring the text as a radical reflection on the nature of modernity in general, and Jewish modernity in particular. The article posits that In the Penal Colony is a meditation on the relation between suffering, transgression and law. For Kafka, where modernity is understood as the incapacity of linking suffering and transgression (sin), the old order is one where the relationship between suffering and transgression (...) is understood as fundamental, and functions as a principle of readability of reality. For the ancients, it is this readability that endows the law with meaning and validity. By integrating parts of Foucault’s thesis’ on modernity as elaborated in Discipline and Punish with this analysis of In the Penal Colony, this article situates Kafka’s text in the context of his literature in general, positing that it is the key text to understanding his oeuvre. In addition, this article offers an original reflection on one of the hidden themes of Kafka’s work: the crisis of the modern Jew. (shrink)

ZusammenfassungNoch nie ist genauer bedacht worden, auf welche »Fehler« Kafka in seiner Strafkolonie-Erzählung aufmerksam geworden ist. Geht man der Frage nach, erkennt man, dass ein »unverwischbarer« Widerspruch die gesamte Handlung durchzieht: Einerseits ist das Hinrichtungsverfahren in der Strafkolonie allgemein bekannt, andererseits dürfen die Verurteilten nichts darüber wissen, wenn es seinen Zweck erfüllen soll. Woher kommen dann die vielen ahnungslosen Delinquenten, die der Offizier mit seinem »Apparat« hinrichtet? Diese im Text nie berührte Unklarheit hat weitere Widersprüche zur Folge und lässt überdies (...) erkennen, dass man sich auch auf den Reisenden als Beurteiler nicht verlassen kann. Eine befriedigende Auflösung der Unstimmigkeiten findet sich nicht. Es gibt da tatsächlich einen »Wurm, der selbst das Volle der Geschichte hohl macht«, wie Kafka selbst festgestellt hat.Serious consideration has never been given to the »mistakes« which aroused Kafka’s attention in his narrative, The Penal Colony. An exact investigation indicates that an »indelible« contradiction permeates the entire plot: On the one hand, the special kind of execution is generally known throughout the penal colony; on the other hand, the condemned are not supposed to know of it so that it can serve its purpose. So where do the many unknowledgeable delinquents come from, to be executed by the officer with his »apparatus«? This ambiguity, which is never touched upon in the text, results in further contradictions and also shows that one cannot rely upon the traveler as an evaluator. There is no satisfactory solution of the inconsistencies: it is really a »worm« in the story »which hollows out the substance of it«, as Kafka himself determined. (shrink)

Kafka’s works very often work as parables in which the lesson has been lost; or at least is ingeniously obfuscated from immediate understanding from the reader. His short story “In the Penal” Colony is no exception: the Traveller visits a penal colony with an unusual take on capital punishment as a sophisticated machine, built by the former commandant, inscribed unto the flesh of the criminals the law whose violation has resulted in their excruciating painful death. Our (...) proposal is that the story is a clear reference of a very commonplace Jewish ritual of laying “tefillin”, i.e. phylacteries containing certain commandments and to be affixed to one’s head and arm every morning, and that such preoccupation of ensuring the transmission of the law by physical inscription unto the mind and the flesh. (shrink)

Despite the persistence of violence inside and around prisons, and the dubious adequacy of criminal law to respond to victim–survivors, international human rights (IHR) discourse increasingly promotes the mobilisation of the state’s penal apparatus to respond to human rights violations, including violence against women (VAW). Using an anticolonial feminist approach, this article scrutinises the ontological and epistemological commitments underlying ‘human rights penality,’ by analysing features of the Western-colonial register vis-a-vis more relational worldviews. Separateness, abstraction, and transcendence broadly underpin the (...) exclusion of embodied experience, context, and material reality from the juridical field. In the second part, through discourse analysis of Inter-American and European case law, the author shows the deployment of human rights penality, the displacement of experience, and the disregard of context in IHR discourse. VAW is construed as a procedural and penal matter: it is the absence of a penal process that courts regard as failure to protect women, rather than the state’s inability/unwillingness to address structural subordination. Moreover, the ‘virtues’ attributed to the penal system justify its expansion, which facilitates the continuity of penal violence and debilitates alternative approaches to justice. Finally, the author posits penal abolition as an anticolonial praxis, pointing at examples of anti-carceral feminist work. (shrink)

The Black antislavery theorist Quobna Ottobah Cugoano (c.1757–c.1791) is increasingly recognized as a noteworthy figure in the history of philosophy. Born in present-day Ghana, Cugoano was enslaved at the age of 13 and shipped to Grenada, before being taken onwards to England, where the 1772 Somerset court ruling in effect freed him. His Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil of Slavery [1787/1791] broke new ground by demanding the immediate end of the slave-trade and of slavery itself, without any compensation to (...) slaveholders. Notwithstanding this, Cugoano endorsed the legitimacy of penal enslavement on principled grounds – like many other abolitionists writing in late eighteenth-century Britain. “Every free community might keep slaves, or criminal prisoners in bondage” – and even sell them. Amidst the growing literature exploring Cugoano’s abolitionism, his paradoxical justification of penal slavery has bewildered commentators. Far from an offhand inconsistency, I argue that this justification is deeply embedded within his moral and legal philosophy; constraining his antislavery arguments while simultaneously serving retaliatory aims. His two-pronged principle of just punishment – the lex talionis (‘eye for an eye, bondage for bondage’) as tempered by mercy – sometimes demands penally enslaving colonial slaveholders and slave-traders in turn. Throughout, I compare Cugoano’s justification of penal enslavement with those of other early modern philosophers, especially Locke and Kant. This helps me position Cugoano within the history of philosophy, thus making his views more accessible to a wider philosophical audience. It also indicates just how deeply theories of punishment shaped philosophical thinking about penal bondage in the period. (shrink)

When I first agreed to undergo chemotherapy, I found myself haunted by Franz Kafka's parable “In the Penal Colony.” The grisly short story was easy to translate into language pertinent to my ominous sense of the standard treatment of advanced ovarian cancer. About to be attached to a remarkable piece of apparatus, the condemned woman tastes fear rising off her tongue as she finds herself led forward into a maze of equipment, but is assured that the machinery should (...) go on working continuously for six hours or six days. If anything were to go wrong, it would only be a small matter that could then be set right at once by the uniformed technician. So my variation began. (shrink)

The Oyapock River has been the border between France and Brazil since the Treaty of Bern came to resolve a centuries-old dispute between the two states. Only populated by indigenous communities and a few adventurers, the two banks of the river are untouched by any lasting colonial and national settlement before the second half of the 19th century. Penal colonization is the formula adopted by the two states to fill the "void" of a border to be formalized. The criminal (...) models circulate and are reinterpreted by participating with great intensity in the making of the territory. (shrink)

This book presents an interpretive analysis of the major themes and purpose of Alexis de Tocqueville’s and Gustave de Beaumont’s first work, On the Penitentiary System, thereby offering new insights into Tocqueville as a moderate liberal statesman. The book explores Tocqueville’s thinking on penitentiaries as the best possible solution to recidivism, his approach to colonial imperialism, and his arguments on moral reformation of prisoners through a close reading of Tocqueville’s first published text. The unifying political concept of all three discussions (...) is Tocqueville’s underlying concern to pursue moderation between institutional and imaginative extremes in order to maintain liberal values. In both thinking moderately and advocating for moderate political action, Tocqueville’s On the Penitentiary System renews an emphasis on the importance of civic engagement and the balance between philosophy and praxis. (shrink)

This article asks if the incorporation of Sumak Kawsay, a concept from Andean philosophy, into the Constitution of Ecuador, has impacted the legal regulation of violence against women. It examines the trajectory of penal reform in the field of domestic violence and suggests that the decolonial shift in the Constitution has failed to significantly disrupt the dominant framework of penality in which gender violence regulation is inscribed. At the same time, feminist demands have been reframed through the formations of (...) criminal law and the dominant political discourse, resulting in provisions that reproduce a positivistic logic and a family protection rationality, with problematic consequences for women’s access to justice on the ground. If securing success in legal reform entails translating emancipatory demands into established and unchallenged penal paradigms, the potential of decolonial notions is overshadowed by the language, formalities and underlying assumptions of criminal law. (shrink)

La riche colonie française de Saint-Domingue est marquée au xviiie siècle par la peur de l’empoisonnement. Marie Kingué, esclave guérisseuse, exerce son activité auprès des blancs comme des esclaves, à la fois de soin, de sorcellerie et de divination. Son autorité morale sur la société locale, exceptionnelle, subvertit les barrières raciales et la hiérarchie de genre, puisqu’elle est, entre autres, sollicitée pour repérer les empoisonneurs, mis au supplice par leurs maîtres sur sa dénonciation. Un rapport anonyme témoigne en 1785 de (...) l’angoisse que ses agissements suscitent auprès des autorités judiciaires de la colonie. Ce document, destiné à justifier les poursuites pénales engagées contre elle, témoigne ce faisant des difficultés à l’arrêter, liées aux importants soutiens dont elle dispose. (shrink)

Bernard Stiegler's account of technology as constitutive of the human as such is without precedent. However, Stiegler's work must also be understood in terms of its explicit appropriations from the thought of Jacques Derrida. An important, yet overlooked, context for framing Stiegler's relation to Derrida is the question of nonhuman life thought in terms of différance . As I argue, Stiegler's account does not unfold the most profound implications of Derrida's understanding of nonhuman life as différance . While Stiegler describes (...) human life as prosthetic and in default of origin, there is no treatment of the way in which nonhuman life is also aporetic and constituted in terms of its relatedness to exteriority. I conclude with a reconsideration of Stiegler's work from the perspective of Derrida's richer account of nonhuman life as différance in order to bring to light an anthropocentric aspect of Stiegler's work. (shrink)

In his recent book The Open: Man and Animal, Giorgio Agamben examines the relation between the essence of the human and the living in Martin Heidegger’s thought. Focusing on the treatment of this relation in Heidegger’s 1929/30 lecture course “The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics,” Agamben argues that the dimension of the open, which is central to Heidegger’s understanding of the human essence, can be seen as implicitly dependent upon Heidegger’s account of the essence of animality. In this essay, I argue (...) that Agamben’s reading is insufficient because it has not taken full account of the specifically temporal character of the openness proper to Heidegger’s understanding of the human essence. In conclusion, I present an alternative account of the way in which Heidegger framed his descriptions of animality in the 1929/30 lecture course as articulating the openness characteristic of human being. (shrink)

Since its publication in 1989, Martin Heidegger's Contributions to Philosophy has continued to produce animated debate with regard to the radical sense of futurity which defines and structures this text. In this essay, I first draw into question the common Nietzschean framing of this futurity and argue that the temporality of this futurity should be interpreted within the context of Heidegger's often overlooked descriptions of this coming time as granted by the last god. It is this anticipated gift that can (...) be seen to constitute the hermeneutic center around which the whole of Contributions is composed. In the final section, I then offer a critique of Heidegger's account of the relation between his last god and its granted time in terms of the givenness of a gift. (shrink)

Derrida always stressed the importance of his engagement with Heidegger and often returned throughout his life to different aspects of Heidegger’s thought. With the recent publication of his 1964-65 course, Heidegger: The Question of Being and History greater insight is now possible into the exact terms of Derrida’s early engagement with Heidegger and the significance he would accord it in the major works of 1967 and beyond. With the reception of this text just beginning, many lines of interpretation are being (...) unfolded. However, one aspect not yet addressed in this early reception which will be crucial for approaching and orienting this work is the theme of auto-affection. The concept of auto-affection is important for assessing Derrida’s Heidegger course for two reasons. Firstly, Derrida understands auto-affection to be Heidegger’s most radical figuration of temporality in the period of Being and Time. Secondly, tracing Derrida’s early focus on auto-affection in Heidegger can provide an important context for understanding the initial development of what would become a prominent theme in Derrida’s own work. My argument in this paper is structured in three sections. In the first, I give a brief introduction to Derrida’s course. I then present the theme of auto-affection in this course and demonstrate its central importance. In conclusion, I show how Derrida’s treatment of this theme in the context of his early Heidegger engagement can be seen to look forward to his employment of auto-affection in Speech and Phenomena. (shrink)

It is well known that Heidegger described his Nietzsche lecture courses as confrontations with National Socialism. Traditionally, this sense of resistance was seen firstly in the fact that Heidegger read Nietzsche at the level of metaphysics and explicitly rejected those ideological appropriations which attempted to reduce Nietzsche’s philosophy to the level of biologism or mere Weltanschauung. This essay argues that the way in which Heidegger framed his interpretation of will to power in his first and second Nietzsche lecture courses can (...) be seen to contain a more explicit critique of the contemporaneous “official” Nietzschebild than has customarily been said. (shrink)

Charles Bambach’s recent book Heidegger’s Roots: Nietzsche, National Socialism, and the Greeks traces the themes of rootedness and the earthly in Heidegger’s thought. Focusing on the role of these themes in the major works of the 1930’s, Bambach offers an account of Heidegger’s relation to contemporaneous conservative and National Socialist ideologies. In this review article, I question the fundamental presupposition guiding Bambach’s approach and present specific reservations regarding his use of untranslated material from Heidegger’s Nietzsche lecture courses.

In this essay, I argue that the scope of Heidegger’s dialog with Hölderlin in Contributions to Philosophy is wider than has often been acknowledged. Traditionally, accounts of this relation have focused solely on tracing Heidegger’s appropriation of Hölderlin’s “flight and arrival of the gods.” In addition to this theme, the relation between Heidegger’s Hölderlin and the project of Contributions should also be framed in light of the specific understanding of attunement which Heidegger developed in his 1934-35 Hölderlin lecture courses. From (...) the perspective opened by this reading, I bring into question and offer an alternative to a widely accepted interpretation of Contributions’ structural composition. (shrink)

Most accounts of Heidegger’s relation to Nietzsche have traditionally focused on his famous Nietzsche lecture courses or upon his brief yet highly significant references to Nietzsche in Being and Time. However, with recent English translations of key lecture courses from Heidegger’s early Freiburg period it has become clear that during this time another distinct phase of Heidegger’s long and complex relation to Nietzsche can be identified. In this essay, I first chronicle Heidegger’s earliest references to Nietzsche in the period from (...) 1909–1916. I then turn to Heidegger’s early Freiburg lecture courses and demonstrate that the proximity between Nietzsche and Heidegger’s understanding of phenomenology in this period was much greater than has traditionally been said. In conclusion, I argue that one of the most important examples of Heidegger’s appropriation of Nietzsche in this period can be seen in the concept of destruction which played a central role in Heidegger’s account of phenomenological methodology. (shrink)

Martin Heidegger’s 1953 lecture “The Question Concerning Technology” has been one of the most influential texts in English language philosophy of technology. However, within this field Heidegger’s understanding of technology is widely seen to be a conventional essentialist account of technological phenomena. In this essay, I argue that a close reading of what Heidegger exactly demarcated as the essence of technology can be seen to limit the degree to which Heidegger’s understanding of technology should be interpreted as a traditional form (...) of technological essentialism. (shrink)

Martin Heidegger’s 1953 lecture “The Question Concerning Technology” has been one of the most influential texts in English language philosophy of technology. However, within this field Heidegger’s understanding of technology is widely seen to be a conventional essentialist account of technological phenomena. In this essay, I argue that a close reading of what Heidegger exactly demarcated as the essence of technology can be seen to limit the degree to which Heidegger’s understanding of technology should be interpreted as a traditional form (...) of technological essentialism. (shrink)

In this article, I argue that the question of divinity provides an important context for reading Heidegger’s initial two Nietzsche lecture courses (1936–37). First,I demonstrate how this often overlooked background can shed light upon the way in which Heidegger understood the meanings of will to power and eternal recurrence in this period. Second, I argue that the related themes of need (Not) and necessity (Notwendigkeit) in these lectures can be seen as an important framework for understanding the relation between Heidegger’s (...) early Nietzsche engagement and his Contributions to Philosophy (1936–38). (shrink)

The introduction maps five panoptic-shaped establishments in Australia's colonial history, as well as discusses how the convict industry in Australia developed a unique pattern, alternating out-door and in-door penal servitude. In-door confinement was modelled on a variety of influences, of which Bentham’s is one among many. The label Panopticon might appear inaccurate to describe these prisons, however it is still used today as the term is loaded with connotations with encapsulates some of the spirit of the penal (...) class='Hi'>colony. (shrink)

This takes a little-known reading of Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony” by Lyotard as the starting point for an examination of the relation between body and law. Lyotard’s late notion of the intractable serves as a frame for this examination: explicitly claimed to be an absolute condition of morals, I argue it also has political implications, which are here drawn out through the link between the intractable and the body. In Lyotard’s later writings, the body is usually associated (...) with an originary affectivity, which is sometimes equated with sexual difference but sometimes appears to come “before” and exceed this law of bodily differences. It is the latter case, I argue, that allows for a path to be opened beyond the bodily violence of the law to be found in Kafka, especially if this is framed in terms of a certain “politics of incommensurability.”. (shrink)

When we read The Trial and In the Penal Colony together, we read about the logic of law, crime, punishment, and guilt. Of course, we cannot know the law, or, as Kafka writes, we cannot enter the law. I interpret the idea in this way: the law opens a gate to the truth. Alas, no one can enter the law, or come to know the truth, as Kafka says. The consequences are devastating: one cannot know the name of (...) one’s own crime, which is to say guilt is eternal and permanent; nothing can absolve us. Only one solution exists. Josef K. in The Trial should have committed suicide like the Officer in “Penal Colony.” That is to say, perhaps, that you always are your own judge and executioner. Guilt cannot be doubted and thus, you are doomed. Both narratives are cruel and ruthless in their own way in their moral pessimism. (shrink)

One of the most common critiques of Marx is that he mistook the birth pangs of capitalism for its death throes, on the basis of which he made the completely erroneous prediction of the increasing immiseration of the working class – a critique that rather superficially reduces immiseration to a simple matter of standard of living. The goal of this essay, however, is to expose the corporeal depths of Marx's notion of immiseration, and, in so doing, to show that immiseration (...) is by no means a long-since disappeared attribute of early capitalism. To do so, I reread the chapters on surplus-value in Capital by following the corporeal leitmotifs suggested in Franz Kafka's short story, 'In the Penal Colony'. Kafka's narration of the condemned learning the meaning of his fate through the corporeal experience of wounding evokes Marx's very graphic narration in Capital of workers experiencing exploitation and immiseration on their own bodies. Raising themes found later in Kafka's narrative, Marx tells of the arranging of the entire workplace 'under the command of capital', of the design and employment of technology both to secure that command and to extract surplus-value; and he shows how capital, like Kafka's torture machine, writes its messages on the body of labour in a script not immediately decipherable by observers. The history that Marx tells in Capital is less graphic in form than Kafka's, but it is in content at least as fantastic and horrific – perhaps even more so. Their common concern with machines painfully inscribing bodies helps to highlight the corporeal dimension of Marx's concept of immiseration. (shrink)

Narrative fiction has the power to unsettle our deep-seated intuitions and expectations about what it means to live an ethically good life, and the kind of society that best facilitates this. Sometimes its disruptive power is disclosive, leading to an ethically significant shift in perception. I contend that the disruptive and disclosive powers of narrative fiction constitute a potential for ethical knowledge. I construe ethical knowledge as a learning process, oriented by a concern for truth, which involves the rational agency (...) and affective engagement of an embodied human subject. For the purposes of showing this, I engage critically with Adorno’s reading of Kafka, using Kafka's story ‘In the Penal Colony’ to challenge Adorno’s analysis. (shrink)

If European metropolises witnessed the development, throughout the 19th century, of various forms of concentrationary assistance and radical isolation through penal colonies, colonial space was the site of an even more explicit formulation and experimentation with the creation and the exclusion of of an undesirable human surplus, notably in South Asia, where the social system of castes could provide powerful ideological foundations for the colonial thinking on exclusion. This article seeks to illustrate this by examining the creation of the (...) category of « criminal tribes » in India, during the last third of the 19th century. (shrink)