A Zombie Discipline?

• In Event: New Rules of Criminological Method: Passion, Perversity and Pathology

Abstract

Born amid the politics of life and death, criminology was brought into the world between the normal, on the one side, and the pathological, on the other. As a fin-de-siècle endeavour, it appeared in the fading light of the 19th century alongside perverse sexuality, degenerate humans and an art of decadence. This paper is part of a broader project attempting to rethink the relationship between the normal and the pathological, a duality that has afflicted and continues to haunt our field, its practices and forms of knowledge. In order to interrogate how the normal/pathological relationship works, I will examine aspects of the culture in which our discipline came into the world. Such a culture found it increasingly difficult to escape the nihilistic currents of modernity in an era haunted by death wishes. Along the way I will consider such criminologically vital phenomena as the living dead, revenant corpses, and empty bodies.

Author

• Phil Carney, University of Kent