Eve Watson – Crime and Punishment
 
THE LETTER 31 (Summer 2004) pages 1-8
 
Nuts, sluts, perverts, prostitutes, slags, murderers, psychopaths, militants, muggers, rioters, squatters and scroungers are all social censures with the potential to mobilise the forces of law, order and moral purity against targeted sections of the population.
 
In A Theoretical Introduction to the Function of Psychoanalysis in Criminology, Lacan says we would do well to recognise that it is the law and its accompanying punishment that delineates the crime. Indeed, we can understand that a person becomes a criminal not by breaking the law, but rather when s/he is caught. Saint Paul famously agreed. He said, ‘where no law is, there is no transgression.’  Inasmuch as one cannot commit a driving infraction by speeding in the absence of a law on speeding, we recognise that punishment for transgression of the law is an anthropologic construct that requires the subjective assent of the population. Generally, the law is a social, cultural construct designed to manage a society’s population by requiring everyone to give up a portion of their individual jouissance for the benefit of the group. Most forms of unbridled individual jouissance fall into the juridical realm of “crime” and thus into the provenance of the agencies of law enforcement and the judiciary, who are empowered to capture, judge and punish respectively.