VILLA, Lucas. Punitive enjoyment, panoptic enjoyment and penal abolitionism: rediscovering the practice of caging human beings from philosophy and psychoanalysis. Nat. hum. []. 2018, 20, 1, pp.188-222. ISSN 1517-2430.

This article aimed to present a criminological perspective of criminal abolitionism and to relate it to the models of restorative justice. Initially, the work intents to relearn the astonishment with the curious practice of caging human beings and wonder about three fundamental questions: Who are caged? Why are caged? To which are caged? It was realized that the answer given by the criminal legal tradition to these three questions are rooted in three (false) dogmas: the dogma of the causal relationship between crime and punishment, the dogma of the inevitability of punishment and the dogma of the humanization of punishment. Thus, we proceeded to an analysis of each of these dogmas, using, for the first one, the theoretical framework of symbolic interactionism and the criminology of social reaction. For the second one, the theoretical framework was the political anthropology and to the third one the history of punishment and the history of the penal systems. Demystified these dogmas, an analysis of latent cruelty across the punitive practice was promoted, using for such the works of Nietzsche and Freud. It was concluded that the criminal law is the rationalization of cruel treatment and that the punishment exists just to allow that society enjoys suffering, making suffer, watching and being watched. Moreover, it was found in the penal abolitionism the (only) possibility to forge a new vocabulary to redescribe the old practices of cruel treatment, in order to push them to strengthen solidarity and social bonds.

: penal abolition; cruelty; punitive enjoyment; panoptic enjoyment.

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