the destroyer > text > Michael Rerick

ON THE ONTOLOGY OF CRIMINALITY

The criminal often conceives of a future without criminality, yet will perpetuate habits and cultivate a subject positionality of criminality. The act of criminality comes to define the parameters within which the criminal can conceive of a beyond criminality. It is not so much the horizon (Heidegger: containment, the limits of knowing beyond which is unknowable which cannot be known; and, the positionality from which one considers) of criminality or non-criminality that the criminal wishes to define, achieve, accept; it is rather the subjective identification of criminality against the delayed satisfaction of non-criminality that the criminal finds comforting.

The horizon challenges the criminal with criminal being, a being that defines the criminal as that which may someday not be a criminal. Yet, the criminal, defined by the horizon of criminality, is not challenged by non-criminality being. Hence, the bounds within the horizon comfort the criminal and the desire for a subjective position outside the horizon justifies a “temporary” state of criminality.

This circular act of criminality via subject positionality within the horizon of knowing fulfills an immediate need for being via criminality. The delayed satisfaction of future being is vaguely defined by non-criminality, but is not a horizon that necessarily need be inhabited since the immediate positionality of criminality has been satisfied. Like Lacan’s objet petite a, the criminal identifies as a criminal against the backdrop of the phallus, or non-criminality. Or, the satisfaction of desire (criminality) functions against the unattainable phallus (law).

Take the serialized show The Wire, for example. The show exemplifies a cycle of criminality and law through individual characters. They are defined by the horizon of their positionality to criminality or the law and though the idea of extra-law or extra-criminality affects their desires and drives, they are comforted by their positionality within the horizon of law or criminality, which has come to define them. The creators of the show make this point all the more clear at the show’s conclusion where we see no progress towards an extra-law or extra-criminality, and rather what we see is a world that perpetuates the cycle of one’s positionality within the horizon of law or criminality, which has come to define the social horizon of the show.

This all is not to say that a criminal cannot stop being a criminal. One can. This is also not to say that a non-criminal may not become a criminal. One can. Those that make these shifts, in effect, shift their horizon to consider a positionality that changes their being definition. What all this implies, however, is that once one defines one’s self within a horizon and against the antithesis, the comfort of that definition makes the cycle of a being’s positionality difficult to reconfigure. Instant satisfaction of one’s desires in criminality, in other words, is not only appealing, but is also a romantic but empty gesture against social repression. One accepts, in other words, certain constraints and justifies these constraints against other constraints that help define the constraints one is comfortable within.