Against the Hegemony of Law: Poetic Inquiry Criminology, Anaximander’s Apeiron, and the (De)(s)placement of Criminal Justice

• In Event: Roundtable: A Criminology of Tarot: Reimagining Justice Beyond Law

Abstract

Abstract: This paper stages a confrontation between Reiner Schürmann’s theory of hegemonic displacement and the prevailing epistemologies of criminology and criminal justice. Drawing upon Anaximander’s cosmological fragment—where beings pay penalty and reparation to one another according to the order of time—the work positions the apeiron (the indefinite, the boundless) as both an ontological substrate and a poetic horizon for thinking justice beyond hegemonic law. Justice is thus recast as adikia, not as moral transgression but as imbalance, a tension between emergence and return, appearing and withdrawal. Through poetic inquiry—blending autoethnography, sound poetry, and spatial phenomenology—the analysis relocates justice from juridical abstraction to lived (s)place: carceral architectures, wounded memoryscapes, and fugitive temporalities. Schürmann’s anarchic imperative, seen through the lens of Anaximander’s primordial justice, becomes a poietic refusal of metaphysical grounding—a call to live, write, and resist in the gap between ordering principles. The prison is not merely a site of containment but a place where beings are forcibly measured, weighed, and repaid according to the hegemony of legal form. Yet within this (s)place, poetic fragments destabilize narrative certainty, evoking what law cannot contain: the cry, the silence, the spectral echo of the self in retreat.

Author

• Lucas Alan Dietsche, Adams State University