Looking Daggers

Abstract

This article explores the character of our subjective investments in the practice of legal punishment, and asks whether in attending to these the possibility of an ethical relation to the other might be opened up. The medium for this reflection is an introspective reading of several visual and literary representations of imprisonment. As concerns the emotional significance of the act of punishing, the reading advanced challenges Durkheimian and Foucauldian understandings of the meaning of punishment. This renders the question as to whether contemporary penality can be described as `post-disciplinary' somewhat premature. Proceeding from this primary thesis, I go on to argue for the work of psychoanalytic reading as a valuable critical and reflexive exercise in the study of penality. Scholarship that fails to elaborate in any detail the complexities of the intrasubjective does not facilitate a reflexive approach to penality. Melanie Klein's work, however, is particularly apposite, with its unflinching pursuit of vacillations between relations to others and what Klein called `the relationship to ourselves'.