From Time to Torture: The Hellish Future of the Criminal Sentence

doi:10.1017/CBO9780511581069.006

6 - From Time to Torture: The Hellish Future of the Criminal Sentence

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 September 2009

Thomas L. Dumm

Edited by

Austin Sarat and

Jennifer L. Culbert

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Austin Sarat: Affiliation:
Amherst College, Massachusetts
Jennifer L. Culbert: Affiliation:
The Johns Hopkins University

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Summary

If this God of the Christians were proved to us to exist, we should know even less how to believe in him.

– Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ

The word sentence defines both what is written here – “an expressed thought” – and the punishment meted out by a judge to someone who has committed a crime – “a pronounced judgment.” If we focus our attention on the common root of the two meanings of the word derived from its etymology – old French, from the Latin sententia, a way of thinking, opinion, sentiment (prob. for sentientia < sentiens, prp. of sentire, to feel, see sense) – and then trace the connection between the word sense and the word send – the complications multiply. Sense refers both to the five senses through which the brain receives all external stimuli and the faculty of common perception. We all, more or less, have the ability to “make sense” of experience. Any judgment entails the use of the senses and the exercise of sense. Sentencing fundamentally involves sensing, and sensing in turn involves making sense.

I begin by directing attention to these tangled roots, because the judgment that has shaped the development and employment of criminal sentences in the form of imprisonment over time is intimately connected to the shifting meaning of sense and sensibility, as framed by a history of embodiment. That history is, as Michel Foucault demonstrated, coterminous with what can be thought of as the history of bio-politics and its relationship to governmentality.

Type: Chapter
Information: States of Violence
War, Capital Punishment, and Letting Die
, pp. 150 - 168

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511581069.006 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2009

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