Abstract
This article takes a Deleuzian view toward diversity, law and justice. It makes use of the insights developed in his two books on cinema comparing an “organic regime” to a “crystalline regime.” The former will be seen as the image of thought and regime of signs of traditional criminal justice practices (due process model, crime control model, family model, actuarial justice, restorative justice); the latter, the basis of a transformative justice (social justice) and the regime of signs that are its constitutive elements. Deleuze’s views on semiotics can be fruitfully contrasted with Lacan’s. I want to indicate how Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic semiotics, on the descriptive level, quite accurately describes the connection of desire based on lack with capital logic, whereas, Deleuze provides an alternative ontology (desire based on production) and develops suggestions for privileging a becoming rather than a being. His is a call for ongoing transformations. I want to indicate how diversity, transformation and tolerance can have better developments in a Deleuzian model of the crystalline regime. This entails alternative discursive subject positions and regimes of signs within which constructions of reality by diverse peoples find wider expression. Accordingly, this is about better approximations to social justice.
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This is a revised paper presented at the Annual Meeting, International Roundtable for the Semiotics of Law, Boulogne-sur-Mer, France. May, 22, 2006. It has been inspired by my reflections working directly in the criminal justice field (e.g., counseling at a maximum security juvenile institution, teaching incarcerated inmates, working in a dormitory setting in a mental institution; and on-going work with a prison inspection team) and by my theoretical investigations.
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Milovanovic, D. Diversity, law and justice: a Deleuzian semiotic view of ‘criminal justice’. Int J Semiot Law 20, 55–79 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-006-9036-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11196-006-9036-7