From the “punishment feast” to the “necessary joy”: Nietzsche and the invention of penal abolitionism

Abstract

The article proposes a redescription of penal knowledge from the nihilistic lens of Nietzsche’s philosophy, developing relationships between his thinking and penal abolitionism. Since the advent of the positivist paradigm, in the 19th century, criminal knowledge considerably interrupted its dialogue with philosophy, immersing itself in the discourse of science. However, since Nietzsche, philosophical knowledge has undergone profound changes that allowed the emergence of post-metaphysical philosophical projects with which criminal knowledge has not yet had the opportunity to dialogue sufficiently. The article, then, proposes the urgent need to resume the dialogue between penal knowledge and philosophy, from a post-metaphysical perspective. At first, it makes a brief mapping of the abolitionist speeches. Afterwards, it deals with nihilism and the way it manifested itself in the Western cultural tradition, then, observing Nietzsche’s criticism of criminal law (“punishment feast”) and the notions of subject, deceit and culpability. It suggests the invention of the abolitionist discourse in the nietzschean proposal of a society without a criminal law (“necessary joy”). The methodology used is genealogical and bibliographic: it promotes mining in the work of the German philosopher to extract criminal thought from there. It concludes that abolitionism can be redescribed as the consummation of nihilism operating in criminal reason and Nietzsche as the first consummate criminal abolitionist.