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Abstract
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Translated by
Mark Bracher, Russell Grigg, Robert Samuels
... Neither crime nor criminals are objects that can be conceived outside of their sociological reference. The saying, "It's the law that makes the sin,iii" remains true outside the eschatological perspective of Grace where Saint Paul formulated it. This saying is scientifically verified by the observation that there is no society that does not include a positive law, whether traditional or written, one of custom or of right. There is also no society in which every degree of transgression that defines crime does not appear in the group. The supposed "unconscious", "forced," "intuitive" obedience by the "primitive" to the rules of the group is an ethnological conception: it is the product of an imaginary insistence that has left its mark on many other conceptions of "origins," and it is just as mythic as they are.
Every society, after all, displays crime's relation to the law by punishments whose realization, whatever form it takes, requires a subjective assent. It does not matter whether criminals actually make themselves the executor of the punishment that the law determines as the price of their crime, as in the case of the incest committed on the Trobriand Islands between matrilineal cousins (whose outcome Malinowski recounts in his essential book (Crime and Custom in Savage Societies). The psychological motives that constitute the reason for the suicide are inconsequential, as are the vindictive oscillations that the curses of one who has committed suicide can engender in the group. Nor does it matter whether the sanction provided by a penal includes a procedure requiring quite differentiated social apparatuses. Whatever the case, subjective assent is necessary for the meaning of the punishment itself. ...
Keywords: Suicide
Language: en |