The Pleasure of Punishment (Routledge Advances in Criminology)

"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"-- Provided by publisher Cover 1 Half Title 2 Series Information 3 Title Page 4 Copyright Page 5 Table of contents 6 Acknowledgements 7 Introduction: Articulating the problematic of desire 8 References 18 1 The disappearance of pleasure? 20 The disappearance of pleasure from public view 21 Pleasure becomes problematic 26 Making pleasure disappear: historicization and conceptual irrelevance 32 References 39 2 The impossible flight from passion 43 Distinguishing punishment from vengeance 44 The dual role of anger 51 Punishment as status restoration 56 References 62 3 The ambiguous desire for recognition 66 Thumos: torn between vengeance and competition 67 The persistence of thumos 72 The dark side of recognition 77 References 84 4 The paradox of tragic pleasure 87 Attic tragedy: enacting existential dilemmas 89 Divine justice: watching hell 95 Early-modern capital punishment: theatres of recognition 101 References 107 5 Two paradigms of enjoyment 110 Between partial relief and absorbed excitement 111 Early-modern excitement: between the carnivalesque and the sublime 116 Punishment in the gap between desire and enjoyment 123 References 130 6 Ressentiment: Moral elevation through punishment 134 The build-up of tension: way of life and no way out 135 The release of tension: the late-modern prison and death penalty 140 Self-revaluation and world restoration 146 References 152 7 Obscene enjoyment: Between power and prohibition 156 Obscene enjoyment of the other 157 Nightly punishment – forging a community of spectators 162 The forward thrust of unrestrained assertion 167 References 174 Index 177 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.

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.